Just a short time ago “experts” were confidently writing and being paid to give speeches that the earth was at “peak oil” production.

It is probably worthwhile to keep this in mind when reading today’s headlines.

Auto reviewer Dan Neil of the WSJ writes this Saturday on page D6 that anyone who buys a vehicle with an Internal Combustion engine is making an idiot mistake.

Dan Neil claims he wants to buy a 750 hp 4wd pickup with 400 miles of battery range.

4 years from now how will that statement look?

I wouldn't be surprised if that goal is technically achievable. That being said, the internal combustion engine is far from its deathbed, and will still be around for some time.
The biggest issue I see with electric vehicles is the infrastructure needed to support them. As it is, if there are a few Teslas or Leafs in a neighborhood, no issue. But if every house has one or two, big problem. Our power grid doesn't even begin to have the capability to support millions of cars being plugged in to recharge every evening!
Some companies have put a few charging station spaces in their lots for electric car owning employees, some stores and municipal lots have done the same, but who has the budget to equip their entire lots that way, or pay the electric bill if they did?
Nor do we have much in the way to support the needs of millions of vehicles on the highway needing to recharge every 300 or 400 miles. I know for over the highway trucks, there is talk that truck stops would be equipped to quickly swap out batteries rather than try to have them park at "supercharger stations" recharging.
But what would it cost to equip tens of thousands of truck stops to be able to charge big banks of batteries and swap fully charged ones into semis that pull in for "fuel" stops?
And once again, what kind of power grid will be required to have the capacity to handle that?
I'll be an idiot and stick with internal combustion until these issues are worked out!

The average passenger car EV uses ~350watt-hours/mile. (Note that this is actually a high estimate, the Model 3 uses 250-300wh/m) Assuming 50 miles a day, charged every night, that's 17kwh/night (or $2.04 @ 12c/kwh).

Looking at California right now, they have a 8GW spread between night time low and daytime high. With another 10GW of available capacity over the daytime high.

(kind of neat charts here: http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html)

Someone please check my math, but 8GW of capacity divided by 17kw is 470 thousand cars.

This assumes that each of those 470k cars plugs in at 3am and charges at 17kw for one hour. So the load on the grid spikes to the daytime high for one hour, then goes back down to the normal night time load.

Of course, that isn't realistic.

Let's assume that 17kw is drawn over 5 hours, for an average of 3.4kw/hour. Now the grid can support 2.3 million EVs overnight (8GW/3.4kw). Still leaving the extra 10GW of reserve capacity over the daytime peak.

The Tesla semi is expected to have no bigger than a 1MWh battery (but probably a bit lower). Assuming a 5 hour charge time, that's 200kw over 5 hours. Or, 40,000 trucks that each drove the full 500 miles the previous day.

Or, they can charge during the day and soak up cheap solar power.

Thanks for making me crunch the numbers. I have no doubt that the current grid, tonight, can handle as many cars as we can throw at it, especially if we incentivize it with Time Of Use charging.