“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
So, sure, right now, the energy density of gasoline makes terribly inefficient combustion engines practical. But their energy density isn't going up (while lithium batteries are improving and coming down in price), certainly gasoline isn't going to get cheaper, and as for the combustion engine, well thats pretty played out after 100 years of trying to improve it.
The strength of the battery+motor electric drivetrain is that it's modular. Come up with another energy storage method, build it into a power pack, then plug it right into existing Tesla S cars, get the over the air software update, and you're back in business. There's also all of that frunk space.
Energy density is what I meant. I found some graphs to look at. You are probably right about there being lots more room for improving energy density.
Can you elaborate on your reasoning?
Frankly, energy density is a bit of an distraction. If we go by energy density alone, we would presumably all be cruising on Uranium, which energy density is... well off the charts.
But there a plenty of good reasons we don't fuel transport with Uranium, and there are just as many good reasons why we shouldn't continue to use gasoline.
Lithium-Ion battery energy density has about doubled in the last 25 years: http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/images/2008/03/11/batt.... Even if gas technology stops improving tomorrow, it'll take 100-200 years to catch up on the energy density front.
The saying also deserves an addendum: "... if you've got the time."
From my armchair perspective, the Tesla Model S would be equally useful to any gasoline car for all but a handful of edge use cases, with only the minor change of adding a metal-air battery as a range extender for excessively long trips. And that's today, not 100 years from now.
whereas upgrading both domestic and the grid to support widespread electric charging has a lot of cost and infrastructure issues.
Also My local small petrol station can fuel say 60 cars an hour have you any idea what sort of HVAC plant is needed to store and deliver that sort of power.
You can convert IC engines to burn hydrogen and they can just slot right into existing models.
You can also use intermittent wind and solar power to create Hydrogen for use later.
Most A/C and heat, dryer, range are 240V.
An electric car can charge at night when load is low, so the power infrastructure that is engineered for high demand due to cooling in the middle of the day in summer will work just fine if everyone is charging at night. In other words, the grid is already mostly robust enough to handle this load.
Also what happens when a large number of people put their cars on charge when they come home from work.