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Walker said:
Technically true. But I think my point still stands that today's technology will continue to improve quickly over the next 10-20 years.
except it hasn't
I am not sure what you consider an "improvement" or "quickly" but thus far the gains have been very small and incremental at best. Electric motors, batteries, controlling the charge cycle, etc etc are all long term mature technologies and have been for quite some time. Simple evolutionary gains aren't going to even barely make a dent in what is needed in order for electric to replace gasoline and the math bears this out. Today's Nissan Leaf goes only slightly farther than a 100 year old electric car. It goes faster, brakes better, handles better, looks better, crashes safer, but when it comes to actual range and usability the gains have been pretty minimal. The physics involved and trade offs needed to make a viable car place some pretty hard limits on what can be done. Technology does not and cannot alter physics and there is an enormous difference tween a revolutionary step and an evolutionary one. The wheel is a revolutionary invention, better wheels are evolutionary. Revolutionary inventions are very very rare and getting scarcer as we move along, this too is to be expected, nature of the game. The 3 biggest problems of designing efficient cars haven't seen much in the way of gains in 100 years and its likely they won't.
Mindset is also killing us just as much as anything else. Today's gasoline cars do no better efficiency wise than those designed 40 years ago. We have taken all the incremental advances and wasted them on bigger, heavier, more powerful cars yielding a net decrease in fleet mileage.At the same time had these advances been applied towards efficiency the gain has only been around 15-20% at best, this is over 40 years. At this stage now vehicle miles traveled and gasoline usage is dropping as people are being forced right out of the happy motoring lifestyle this country takes for granted. Given present trends and resource limits now coming into view it is starting to become safe to say that for the average person what happens technology wise to cars in the next 10-20 years isn't gonna matter, they probably won't be driving much, they won't be able to afford it. Kinda makes much of this ado about replacing gas cars kinda moot doesn't it? Mindset and where we are is everything. There's an enormous and growing gap between what we want and what we can actually have, that is something new in the US especially when it comes to our lifestyle and motoring world.
There are some truisms that simply never go away. Like with bikes and this applies to cars too. Light, strong, cheap---pick two cause you literally can't have all 3.
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