Electric Future?

In the early 2000s, I was pretty interested in EVs. I was reading articles about the daily breakthroughs in super-capacitors and batteries and reading about the simplicity of the cars, and the potential for reduced cost, more reliable transportation. It seemed like a good deal.

It did not really work out the way it was sold, of course. The batteries are better, but still kind of suck, and the cars have as many, or maybe more problems than their liquid fuel powered counterparts, which is pretty surprising. Even though they don't have moving parts, they have components that are still failure prone like any electronic gizmo.

In theory they could be cheaper to mass produce and operate, if the industry standardizes components, but they haven't and probably won't. Maybe some country will suck it up and back their EV industry to mass produce an appliance car and basically drive all the profit margin out of that business.

The materials needed to mass produce the cars are scarce and expensive, though. Plus the materials needed for the grid updates for charging infrastructure, even though they're "cheap", are needed in vast quantities. Hardly anyone has an EV, yet, and the charging infrastructure is sparse, so in some places the wait time is absurd. If you search for videos of "lines of teslas waiting to charge" you'll find a couple like this:

Who has time to wait for that?

It's a pretty good question if the world has the resources to replace the transportation infrastructure with an electric one, and then it's an even better question if there's any advantage to be had.