The problem is most acute in places like California, where it takes forever to get permits to build either a plant to generate electricity or a power line to bring it in from outside. Thirty-five years ago the American Society of Civil Engineers stated that the cost of getting approval for a new power construction project in an urban area in California was more than the cost of construction and I doubt that the permit process is any easier now. The required lead time then was five years. So if you can’t build a power plant, you can’t bring in fuel from outside, and you can’t build powerlines to bring power in from outside you are going to have a permanent brownout and then nobody will have enough power to charge their cars.

An electric car suffers from a lot of efficiency problems. First of all, the plant that generates the electricity can get efficiency of somewhere near 25%. Figure on a loss of 2% for the step-up transformer at the generating plant. Figure another 8% for the loss in the transmission line and stepdown transformers. This means that you now have 25% minus 10% of that means 22.5%. Next consider the recharging station. You will need at least 10 kilowatts to run a vehicle in the city. If you plan on using it for an hour to work and an hour back you need 20 kilowatt hours. If you plug into your normal wall outlet at 120 volts times 15 amps this gives you 1800 watts so 20 kilowatt hours would take 11 hours if efficiency of battery and charger are 100%. If they are 50%, which is still a high estimate, it would take you 22 hours to recharge. This means that you need to use wiring similar to that for an electric stove to recharge in a reasonable time.

In summary, electric cars do nothing to help the overall energy problem, they simply move it from one place to another. If you burn fossil fuel at a generating plant you will get better efficiency than if you burn it directly in the car but you have to take the electrical losses into account. The only advantage to utilities would be that electric cars would be recharged overnight when other electric power demand is low.

Several years ago a company called Rosen Motors developed a hybrid car that used a gas turbine (only one moving part) and used a flywheel to store energy. They stated that the total pollution caused by operating their vehicle was less than the pollution caused by burning fossil fuel in an electric generating plant if you took into account the losses in the electrical distribution system and the battery. At that time efficiency in batteries was in the neighborhood of 50%. I note that none of the proponents of modern lithium batteries produce figures showing efficiency of their products. Many of them do produce figures showing kilowatt-hours per pound but they are very shy about saying how much power you can actually take out of the battery compared to the power that goes into the charging device.

For the cities a car like that is perfect. I do believe that the company has huge potential. And it is american made.
I believe in the furture of companies like this one in general but that it takes on Oil on a short term iI seriously doubt. In the future, for sure but people have to change their minds and adjust their way of thinking first before anthing significant can take place.

In Europe we already have the Government to help with developing cars with electrical power
and it is beginning to become more and more interesting. In Italy they have already around 5000 Fiat 500 running on just electrical power.

Be it as it may. There is still a long way to go.

P.S. pardon my typos, since my first language is german. Sorry again and have a pleasant day everybody

TK