From above:

…entail some tweaks and repairs on its computer system.

With more “ordinary” cars having navigation/entertainment systems based on software and touch screen based interfaces these computer tweaks are becoming standard in vehicles of all types.

Dealers who depend on expensive repairs for profit are probably not going to be very happy when the carbon burning vehicles get replaced with electric cars. Funny how our society creates these highly kludged institutions (e.g., the car industry) where the loss of new car sale profits due to higher quality and longer lasting cars gets supplanted by expensive repair and replacement services. Then along comes the electric car industry, and all sorts of new ways of making a profit will have to be formulated.

On the other hand, a replacement or rebuild of a transmission or engine, and constant maintenance in the engine, etc, is not a factor, if you go all electric.

Your argument about where the electricity is from is invalid for several reasons. Making electricity from fossil fuels and using it to run electric motors to move a vehicle is actually inherently more efficient than making millions of tiny explosions in a car engine. Here in Minnesota, where we get a large amount of our electricity from coal (our nukes are small, virtually no hydro or gas) it is at present more efficient or almost identical to charge an electric car with coal made electrictiy than to run gas (this transition is just now underway).

Just as importantly, we can’t wait until every part of the system is in place in order to put the first part of the system in place. Over short and medium term we need to be switching to electric, with pioneer purchasers now driving lower costs so eventually there will be affordable models, and at the same time push for non-fossil carbon electricity production.

Every aspect of the manufacture of every thing involves environmental costs. You are forgetting about the environmental costs of not just burning a gallon of gas, but also, getting the gas from Kuwait to Car. Or Bakken Crude to car.

SO, no, you are totally wrong about this, but I understand where you are coming from. I had made the same assumptions you are making before I did a pile of research.

Electric cars are just a load of rubbish, of which you can’t even go on a good days drive, or you’ll never get home. You have to stay overnight to recharge.

The real problem with passenger rail isn’t the power source — everything in the Northeast corridor from Boston to Washington is basically electric (powered by fossil fuels largely, but still). The issue is just maintaining the tracks and re-opening the right of ways that still exist, and building new tracks so passenger and freight aren’t always sharing the same routes.

With exiting stock and a relatively inexpensive fix-up of tracks, (putting them BACK on the Bay Bridge) I could run trains every hour from SF to Sacto and to the trip in 4 hours or so, topping at several places on the way. The same line runs all the way across the country through Nevada and on ward to Chicago and the East.

Same thing with the run from LA through the Southwest. Add another track on the same right of way and you can run at 70 mph+ on 90 percent of it. That’s a good clip and as good or better than a car, since the speed is more consistent.

All this with no investment in new trains at all.

Now, for slightly more money, one could straighten a few routes that haven’t had a going over since 1890. You needn’t build ramrod-straight — the Swiss do it on winding tracks and they have a very good system — but you do need to blast a few more tunnels.

The trick is to treat these things as systems. The run from SF to LA could be done in six hours with current trains and tracks — if they were maintained and the connections to the old station in LA were any good i.e. links to the local transit network and the airport. Restore the connector to San Diego, and then you have something people can really use.

Brainstorms @42 is right about longrange trucking. Range between charges is important, as is the amount of time waiting to recharge. The biggest benefits for EVs/plugins/hybrids comes during the low demand portions of a drive, high speed longdistance travel isn’t the best usage for them. Where I could see a hybrid model helping, it avoiding trucks sitting for hour idling (sometime overnight). Sometimes this is bacuse of airconditioned cargo, othertimes???? But in any case trucks idling for long periods of time would seem like some low hanging energy fruit.

Note energy efficiency of longdistance trucking can be greatly enhanced by better aerodynamics (boattail like backends), and airdams to divert the flow around rather than under the vehicle. It would make more sense to harvest these gains before trying to electrify trucking fleets.