If someone buys a Mercedes for $50,000, are you going to ask them when they will break-even?
People who invest in electric vehicles do so to help us live a better life, to do away with foreign oil, to stop global warming, to stop foreign wars over oil, to stop global pollution, to enhance national security and to enhance our economic future.
If you don’t invest in the future, you don’t have a future.

As for not using petroleum, not using it at all is one approach. I prefer using it more efficiently to make it last longer, keep the price down, keep pressure on OPEC, reduce funding terrorism, by increasing the fuel tax and refunding it on income tax (revenue neutral). Hydocarbons are great fuels! Then don’t subsidize ANY kind of car. A few people driving EV’s is like spitting in a bucket, but a fuel tax increase would produce results we could see.

A tax shift to fuels is where we should be taking action. All this other stuff is “feel good” action that costs you and I (through the government) more than the benefit. A sustainable environment is important, but we can’t afford it without a sustainable economy and government.

Shines, we’ll have to agree to disagree on part of this. I don’t think Toyota would make a conventional Prius, even though it would make sense for consumers.

The Prius is their “image car.” Their very charge from management was to “change the automotive landscape” with technology. If there were a “conventional Prius,” it would undermine this by being close enough to the fuel economy of the actual Prius to make the extra thousands of dollars of batteries, motors, and electronics not worth while. It wouldn’t even have to be very close. By usual standards, Toyota should charge at least twice their cost for the extra hardware, which would add at least $10,000 more for the consumer.

The “conventional Prius” would also be hundreds of pounds lighter, and it could have more luggage space (or passenger room, depending). With the drag coefficient of the Prius, its highway number would be great. It’s city number would suffer more, but dropping the mass of the batteries and motors would help there. It would be great for me, since I don’t drive that much in the city.

Also, think about this: how much better is the hybrid Camry than the conventional one? Do people pay the extra money? No. Every hybrid Toyota makes that is also available with a conventional powertrain is a failure. The extra cost of the hybrid technology can’t stand on its own.

But hybrids are one thing. Electric cars are much more difficult than the Prius, which is all-steel. Every pure-electric car I know of is either very small, made of aluminum, and/or has two seats. The amount of weight and room needed for batteries means either expensive lightweight construction or lack of room.

And if you live in an area where you run the heater, it doesn’t come from “waste heat” from an IC engine, it comes right out of the battery (with electricity, the waste heat goes up the smoke stack at the powerplant-not doing you much good). Also, the energy in the batteries drops with temperature. The may be good in sunny California, but not in Michigan, and for sure not Minnesota. I wouldn’t even want one in iowa.

But, Shines, I do see your point about the 5% hybrid market share – most people are not even biting on hybrids at this point, with cheap gas. But they are convinced that the hybrid technology is something to be amazed at, even though its incremental improvements come at great cost. Toyota gets quite a halo from it for how much sense it makes.

I think that “image cars” are fine in high performance, but for the environment, I think it’s an insult. To really help the environment, it takes a lot more. Everyone needs to reduce fuel usage, not just a few.

Don’t you think Toyota would have made a Prius sized vehicle thats gets 50 mpg without the hybrid technology if they could? You can buy a Non-hybrid Ford Fusion – it averages somewhere around14 mpg less than the hybrid version (and can cost 10 grand less). VW Jetta TDI is the best conventional compact and its city mileage doesn’t compare to the hybrids’. If the “American public” was convinced, there would be more than 5% of hybrids on the roads.
Besides there are more people who choose conventional over hybrid as it is. And I don’t think the fuel economy picture is screwed up. At least not yet.

So the conventionally-powered car hasn’t reached its potential either. If GM’s EV1, whose body was extremely light, would have replaced the electric drive with a small turbo diesel, it would have gotten about 60 MPG (but there was no market for that, at the cost). If you replaced the batteries’ volume with diesel fuel tanks (about 50 gallons worth), it would have had a 3,000 mile range, vs. 80 for the EV1. That’s almost a 40:1 ratio (it would be interesting to do the same calculation for the Tesla). Even by improving the batteries by a factor of 5 (from the lead-acid batteries), you’re still in the hole by a factor of 8 on range. This is no small technical challenge.

The problem is that the American public has been convinced that the only way to be efficient is to buy a hybrid or to go electric. This makes it impossible to market a gas vehicle that is super-efficient, and automakers don’t want to show up their flashy (and much more expensive) hybrids with a conventional vehicle with nearly the same mileage.

So I’d say it is people who have screwed up the entire fuel economy picture, but I don’t think it is anyone associated with the conventional powertrain. I don’t think the physics is there for EV’s. The successful companies you mention didn’t have nearly as big a technical challenge to overcome as Tesla, Aptera, Miles, Bright, or Fisker.

1) Fuel taxes
2) CAFE
3) Emissions limits.

These should already give EV’s an advantage. However, the remaining technical disadvantages are very difficult, and that is the true reason EV’s didn’t win out 100 years ago, when they were actually favored for a while (there never was and there is not a vast right-wing conspiracy or anything like that).

EV’s need a bigger “artificial advantage” to tilt things in their favor. Hybrids may be getting by right now without subsidies, but you can still travel as far as you want on gasoline if you have to. If you do decide to travel to Iowa in an EV, it will cost you a lot more in time and hotels while you charge it. That issue will not be solved quickly or cheaply, and I doubt it will be in the next 40 years.

The fact is that petroleum fuels are a very convenient, cheap, and plentiful source of energy that is easy to use and store in a small, light space in the vehicle (so you don’t use much fuel to move the fuel), that works well in almost any weather/temperature conditions (try using an EV in the northern US). This combination is hard to beat, and no amount of entrenepreurship will change this.

Unless the US government PERMANENTLY tilts the playing field in favor of EV’s, they will never win out.