Politics aside, Tesla is not the future either. At least not with their current models or anything derivable. Sure, they're doing a great job building battery powered electric cars but personally I don't see how they can work for everyone in the same way that fossil fuel powered cars do today.
I'm driving a diesel (being european this isn't too odd) and I'm driving a lot of long distances. The beauty about the fossil fuel powered car is, that I can drive some 800km on a tank, stop for fuel which takes me about 5 minutes and then carry on. Tesla claims a 3-3.5h charge time. Even if the range was the same, which it isn't, this just isn't gonna work for anyone who drives across a country rather than through cities. To this day I haven't heard of any battery powered car that is charging in acceptable time compared to filling up a fuel tank.
Don't get me wrong, in a way I like electric motors. The torque they produce is amazing! What bothers me is the use of batteries. The technology I personally saw most potential in was the use of hydrogen fuel cells. The tank is filled with hydrogen, the fuel cell powers the electric motor. I'm not for a second suggesting hydrogen is a good "fuel" in the sense that we can just dig it up somewhere and get additional energy. What hydrogen is good at though, is storing energy and because filling a tank with it happens in a matter of minutes it's a whole lot better than carrying thousands of laptop batteries in your car.
I'd wager that most automobile use day-to-day doesn't come close to 800km stretches. Would it not be interesting enough if electric cars managed to replace all the fossil-fueled, city-driving cars?
Even with that point aside, I don't think one can write off Tesla based on a snapshot of charging infrastructure at this instant. There are already concepts like Better Place that involve swapping out batteries instead of waiting to charge the one in your vehicle. A little less ambitiously, DC Fast charging stations (already installed in places like Los Angeles, Wash. state and Oregon) charge EVs up to roughly 80% of capacity in around 30 minutes. My point isn't that the system is perfect, or that these concepts completely solve the range issue with EVs. Comparing charging options now to even one or two years ago shows a substantial difference in potential (heh), so it seems a little myopic to say "I can't do this right now perfectly so it will never happen".
Good point on the city cars and yes you're right, predicting the future has never gone well and I can't predict how the infrastructure is going to look like in a decade or so. However, the hydrogen fuel cell technology is here now and it works well yet there's very little hype around it. Hybrids and EVs on the other hand are hyped to hell and back while (for the time being) they are just not good enough. Hybrids, yes, obviously. But they don't solve the problem. Additionally those batteries weigh quite a bit. Unnecessary weight == wasted energy.
Thanks for the insight; I had heard about hydrogen fuel cells as far back as 2002, but only in a very theoretical sense (plus I was in middle school back then...). They definitely do look promising; my guess regarding why there hasn't been much hype around them is that (per Wikipedia) they've been prohibitively expensive until rather recently (in 2002, hydrogen fuel cell cars were estimated to cost $1mn, $300k in 2009, etc)[1]. That being said, it does like it's approaching cost-effectiveness in the near future.
BetterPlace has come up with a way to solve that problem (rapidly interchangeable batteries), and now they just have to execute on their vision.
If you switch every gas station in the country for a place that swaps and charges batteries, electric cars are completely workable. The only question is how we get there from here.
I'm driving a diesel (being european this isn't too odd) and I'm driving a lot of long distances. The beauty about the fossil fuel powered car is, that I can drive some 800km on a tank, stop for fuel which takes me about 5 minutes and then carry on. Tesla claims a 3-3.5h charge time. Even if the range was the same, which it isn't, this just isn't gonna work for anyone who drives across a country rather than through cities. To this day I haven't heard of any battery powered car that is charging in acceptable time compared to filling up a fuel tank.
Don't get me wrong, in a way I like electric motors. The torque they produce is amazing! What bothers me is the use of batteries. The technology I personally saw most potential in was the use of hydrogen fuel cells. The tank is filled with hydrogen, the fuel cell powers the electric motor. I'm not for a second suggesting hydrogen is a good "fuel" in the sense that we can just dig it up somewhere and get additional energy. What hydrogen is good at though, is storing energy and because filling a tank with it happens in a matter of minutes it's a whole lot better than carrying thousands of laptop batteries in your car.