Mike
This is not a religion to me nor do I have strong feeling either way just skepticism to battery powered cars being the future.
You make good points as I knew someone would but lets use your same reasoning only on 'Electric" cars.
First you scrape the earth (Coal) or poke deep holes in the earth (Oil/shale etc) to find energy products.
Then you build the underground pipelines to get the fossil fuel to your power generation device in which you then use Coal/Fossil fuel in order to CHARGE your Car battery.
THEN you drive---What is wrong with this picture.
At the end of the Battery's useful life you need to dispose of it somehow without polluting the very earth you are trying to "save"
In fact GM was shipping their old batteries to Ontario Canada for burial because of US's stricter pollution laws.
So if electric cars were 50% of the mix rather than the 1 to 3% currently battery disposable storage would be a much larger problem.
IF you are using infrastructure and fossil fuel to charge your battery why not just remove one step and just use the fossil fuel to drive the car?
if I turn out to be wrong well that's fine with me but I just don't see the advantage.

Nuclear power to charge millions of batteries would be one solution but you are still stuck with millions of old batteries at their life's end.
Nuclear power to make steam to operate your car would be even better for that matter other 'problems' aside (terrorists and your normal number of other idiots inc politicians)
Using 'Gas' and the already in place infrastructure seems to be the clear cut winner as least to me,however your opinion may differ

The Prius is a good car but your battery will fail. Think of it as a an engines TBO the closer you get to TBO the lower the resale price.

Funny looks are from Taxis with 4X the miles you have. When asked about the battery they looked at me either with a "what battery" or a "what do you think I'm made of money" look!!
The other response is they lease it and have no idea.

When you can get close to the MPG with a conventional car why bother?

Electricity can be generated by other means than fossil fuels. Presently, only 40% of US electricity comes from coal and oil.

The rest comes from natural gas (27%), nuclear (19%), hydro (7%), wind (4%), and misc other sources less than 1% each. The fact wind is now more than half of hydro surprised me given the size of the dams we have. It seems inevitable that wind will surpass hydro.

EV batteries make an excellent place to store renewable energy, a problem with many of them that are intermittent.

Someday, there will be no coal or oil to burn.

The EV will be a long slow process, probably taking 30 years to go from novelty as it is now to a mainstream technology.

Mike C.

Electricity can be generated by other means than fossil fuels. Presently, only 40% of US electricity comes from coal and oil.

The rest comes from natural gas (27%), nuclear (19%), hydro (7%), wind (4%), and misc other sources less than 1% each. The fact wind is now more than half of hydro surprised me given the size of the dams we have. It seems inevitable that wind will surpass hydro.

EV batteries make an excellent place to store renewable energy, a problem with many of them that are intermittent.

Someday, there will be no coal or oil to burn.

The EV will be a long slow process, probably taking 30 years to go from novelty as it is now to a mainstream technology.

Mike C.

That is my point. If you drive 10k miles per year gas in a car the size of a Leaf is $750 per year. You can buy a new Chevy Cruze loaded for $20k with a 100k warranty. It is bigger than a Leaf as well. A better comparison is probably a Chevy Spark for $15k brand new that will cost you $500/yr in gas and has the same 100k warranty. A leaf is $22k after all subsidies. I will take the car that I do not need to plug in every night. That electricity is not free either.

Someday the electric car will make sense. Right now it makes no sense to me.

But not nearly as cool.

Leaf = kinda stylish

Chevy Cruz = I don't know what that is but probably parked at Walmart etc.

Some estimates are much higher, over 1000 years of coal, depending on extraction technology.

There are several billion years of Sun left. Coal is nothing more than sunlight stored, so perhaps we figure out how to bypass that long process and use it directly. Hydro, wind, photovoltaic, and direct solar do that.

Mike C.

I'm all for solar use. I think it is a great power source. As the price comes down and the efficiency up it will make even more sense. Where I live it makes no sense. Down in FL it makes a lot of sense if it can withstand an occasional hurricane.

But not nearly as cool.

Leaf = kinda stylish

Chevy Cruz = I don't know what that is but probably parked at Walmart etc.

I'm not talking about "looks". I'm talking about "cool factor".

OK, what is cool about a car that goes 80 miles between charges, costs more than a better gasoline car, and looks like a modern AMC Pacer? I see nothing "cool" about this car.

OK, what is cool about a car that goes 80 miles between charges, costs more than a better gasoline car, and looks like a modern AMC Pacer? I see nothing "cool" about this car.

OK, what is cool about a car that goes 80 miles between charges, costs more than a better gasoline car, and looks like a modern AMC Pacer? I see nothing "cool" about this car.

A Cruze is not cool, but a Leaf is not either.

Now THIS is what I was always afraid of when I drove the Prius! I'm not a tree-hugger. I'm all for being responsible and all, but I liked the Prius because of the tech. It was fun to game it and see what kind of mileage I could get. It was early with the bluetooth and had cool screens.

It crossed my mind more than once that I was getting 50+ MPG on the way to the airport to burn 45 gallons of gas to go eat BBQ.