I have been reading about this for a few months. Just saw it finally reported on useless CNBC, charging those wonderful people who bought electric cars and such for using the roads. ROFL, save the environment, and we will give you a tax break, except we now realize you are cutting our income, so we have to charge you so we don't have to take a paycut. Oh Lord I am laughing.
STUDY: ELECTRIC CARS NO GREENER THAN GASOLINE VEHICLES BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) -- Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life cycle, from its construction through its operation and on to its eventual retirement at the junkyard." Political priorities and corporate influence have created a flawed impression that electric cars significantly reduce transportation impacts, he said. "Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another," Zehner, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, said. Zehner, once an electric car enthusiast who has since changed his position and become an activist looking at a number of so-called green initiatives, is the author of the book "Green Illusions."
Here's what is going to happen: D.C., realizing that they are getting less tax revenue to repair roads due to less gas being consumed will institute a mileage tax on your vehicle. This will be used to replace the gas tax. But wait, the gas tax won't be repealed, it will stay on the books - Washington hates repealing taxes. Now all you F150 owners get f'd twice.
And to top it all off they will probably leave the electric car subsidy in place, while they add all these new taxes....... big circle jerk
I wonder how much of this newfound knowledge about electric cars is from research funded by GM, Ford, etc? That Tesla S1 is just one bitchin' car. CG == Corvette, 0-60 very quick, no transmission at all, maximum torque at zero rpm, great styling, very quiet, traction control.. Detroit has NOTHING to match it, just nothing at all. Politics is their next best tactic.
The two things that have to happen for the electric car are: 1. A solar cell breakthrough. We all need to be able to get off the grid most of the time by generating much denser power from solar. And 2. Battery storage. We need a 10 fold increase in energy storage to weight/volume in order to make electric cars competitive. Also, a breakthrough in fusion reactors would be an end all for power but we may be almost a century away from that being practical.