> Are you comparing charging stats unironically and saying it's a dealbreaker if it's not just as good as the incumbent in this category?
Yes, I can guarantee you that the layman doesn't give two shits about electric cars. Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch. And until laymen switch, you won't get the economies of scale necessary for a vast charging network.
> assuming the chargers are well distributed.
That's a pretty big assumption. First of all, Musk said there are charging stations in several cities in California, but exactly how many are there in each city? Do you have to go to one particular location in each city for charging? Because that's DOA. There's no such thing as one convenient location for everyone.
And don't forget that right now all the testing is being done in California and Nevada, both of which are well known for their plentiful sunlight. But how much energy will the solar panels be able to contribute back to the grid when installed in a place like Seattle? Far less, I'm guessing.
The Tesla site shows the locations. They look to have one in each city, but its not as big of an issue as your make out. The only need to make them convenient for travelers. Locals can always charge at home. That's something you can't do with a gas-powered car.
> . Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch.
You keep changing your argument. It's fuckload more convient to almost never have to go to the gas station, change oil, coolant, transmission fluid. Fuckload cheaper too.
Day to day it is already more convenient, because you charge mostly at home - you never have to go to the gas station in the first place. It's pretty rare that I have to drive more than 100 miles in a day, and when I do, I'm really happy to stop for half an hour here and there to stretch my legs.
One of Musk's arguments for the supercharger was that it doesn't use non-renewable sources of energy. If you're charging at home, you're doing just that, since you're relying on the power plant for energy.
Err, not necessarily... at that point, it's decoupled, and can come from any source, which can be changed at any time. And your whole argument was about convenience, but now you seem to be darting to a tangential argument.
Once the car fleet is fuel-agnostic, it becomes much easier to shift into whatever clean power source ends up working well, or whatever mix of clean and dirty works well. In terms of dirtiness, it's not hard to make the average impact of a car on the environment better... I think even pure coal might be cleaner with these things due to efficiency gains. In any case, I don't particularly care if their solar proposal ends up panning out overall - it's more or less irrelevant to the feasibility of the plan, other than for PR and making the people who implement them look good.
> If you're charging at home, you're doing just that, since you're relying on the power plant for energy.
Not necessarily. In Seattle, where solar is less effective, the electricity comes from almost entirely hydroelectric, with a little wind and a little nuclear.
The layman is the long long term goal. This is about slowly pushing down the barriers to entry to increase the net of early adopters, and the more one chips away at these barriers, the closer you are to the whole thing bursting open.
Yes, I can guarantee you that the layman doesn't give two shits about electric cars. Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch. And until laymen switch, you won't get the economies of scale necessary for a vast charging network.
> assuming the chargers are well distributed.
That's a pretty big assumption. First of all, Musk said there are charging stations in several cities in California, but exactly how many are there in each city? Do you have to go to one particular location in each city for charging? Because that's DOA. There's no such thing as one convenient location for everyone.
And don't forget that right now all the testing is being done in California and Nevada, both of which are well known for their plentiful sunlight. But how much energy will the solar panels be able to contribute back to the grid when installed in a place like Seattle? Far less, I'm guessing.