I saw a post on an EV battery forum, asking: "What is the biggest barrier to EVs."
My opinion may not be popular, however, I believe that it's founded on excellent logic.
I believe the biggest barrier for EVs is usefulness. When EVs are better than gasoline cars in enough ways to benefit the person paying the bill for them, they will outsell them. Some scenarios are that lithium battery cost mile drops by 75%, or gasoline cost quadruples, then the range and recharge time will be overshadowed by pure cost incentive despite the inconvenience. People choose a mode of transportation primarily based on:
1. Speed from point to point.
2. Convenience to schedule, and
3. Convenience to carry goods and to keep them secure when not on one's person.
4. If using a car or motorcycle, then ease of parking becomes an issue
A major investment in a car, except in extremely dense cities like New York, meets these objectives best. However, when making such a large investment, it goes without saying that one would want to be able to use it, at least occasionally, for long-distance trips. This one item is a huge deterrent for pure electric vehicles. Companies that are promoting pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids seem to ignore, that as far as we can tell, battery replacement and electricity combined cost at least as much as gasoline on a cost per mile basis.
However, there is an immediate solution. It's the Tango. As 90% of all trips fall within its range, the Tango is the only car in the world, to my knowledge, that does a better job for commuters and errand goers than any other car in history, despite the fact that it's pure electric. It is the only car that can lanesplit and park like a motorcycle, giving 200% to 300% speed advantage in heavy traffic in California, Europe, and Asia, where lanesplitting is legal. When there are enough of them, along with motorcycles, they can increase lane capacity from 2,000 vehicles per hour to 4,400 vehicles per hour, according to a UC Berkeley/Booz-Allen-Hamilton study. Using a full sized car for commuting is like using a sledge hammer to drive finish nails. It's the wrong tool for the job, yet, 106-million single-occupant drivers out of the 140-million workers in the U.S. do just that. By the same token, a long haul electric semi truck would be like using a claw hammer to drive railroad spikes—also the wrong tool for the job.
Just as transistors could not possibly have replaced vacuum tubes in TVs in the 50s, batteries cannot replace gasoline and diesel now. However, just as transistors did the job perfectly in transistor radios and hearing aids in the 50s, so batteries do the job perfectly in a Tango today. People didn't buy transistor radios in the 50s because they had transistors in them. They bought them because of the job that the radio did. Today, the mass market will not buy cars because they are electric, but rather for the job that they can do. The Tango is faster, safer, more convenient, and more fun to drive in any urban situation, where most driver's have the most frustration. If a manufacturer really wants to sell a lot of EVs over the next 30 years, they should be talking to me, as I have world-wide patents on the only practical mass-market-appealing EV in existence—in my humble opinion of course. :^)
