You forgot to ask….where are those batteries going to be recharged. Plug it into you home outlet and watch your power bill spin out of control….stuck on a highway….what do you do….plug into a tree? If you live in the country it would take you forever to get to the city and home again if you live an hour out of the city….are those electric cars going to be able to handle deep snow to plow through when it is necessary….something to think about before jumping on the electric car bandwagon

A typical McGuinty problem. Don’t think about reality. It is not necessary.

My God, you’re right! Companies have spent tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars developing electric powered cars and they’ve never thought of that before!

Not a single one of them took into account that they would have to create a financially viable battery powerful and long-lasting enough to actually power the car and all of it’s components.

To answer Richard’s somewhat more sensible questions: powering an electric car costs equivalent of about 25 cent/liter gasoline (60 US cents per gallon is the figure I’ve seen cited most often), such car would be marketed to commuters who drive less than 160 kilomters a day which is over 90% of driving requirements and they can be quite powerful as electric motors are far more efficient than internally combustion engines. The main challenge behind the development of electric cars is building a cost effective battery that can either make cars with limited range commercially viable or make it commercially viable to add plug-in hybrid batteries to internal combustion cars so they use battery power 90% of the time and the engine only kicks in when the battery runs out.

One of the car companies (I think Volvo) has a neat concept car that has not one but four electric engines–one attached to each wheel. All that’s under the hood is a diesel generater to power them–still leaves the problem of heat though…

I believe the Chevy Volt is also based on the battery/generator rather than the battery/engine model.

I think this idea is quite promising. If such cars were built in a standardized way, it could open the door to allowing customers to customize their vehicle for their needs.

Only need to go a max of 160km/day? Great, buy the “no generator” package. Need unlimited range? Buys the “super generator” version that allows you to operator on cheap plug-in battery power 90% of the time but will work just fine for that trip to Florida too. Somewhere in the middle? Buy the “half-power” model that allows you to manually switch on the generator when to leave the house and extend the range to 320km/day (or 480km/day) when you need to. Could be very interesting stuff.

Still leaves the problem of getting heat in the winter and cool in the summer though…

[...] We don’t have $10B for a nuclear plant, yet we can waste $3.5B on handouts to people who don’t need it to buy unproven technology. Technology that is not any better for the environment than your ordinary coal-burning power plant. Does McGuinty know what to do with all those discarded heavy-metal containing dead batteries five to eight years from now? Does he know where to get the power to charge up all these vehicles? And, I’ll ask again: what are you going to do in the winter? [...]