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EVs are about cheaper motoring, not being green. Less carbon intensive to burn petrol than burn coal in a power station!

Economies of scale for lead acid batteries are already huge. Of course they are never going to get us there. It remains to be seen what battery technology will win on the EV front but it's clear that they won't use lead acid. The economies of scale for the others are only just starting...

Same bucket as solar power though - huge capex, never get it back on opex. Even wind is cheaper.

Don't know where you get this from? The reality is that electricity is a lot cheaper than petrol for this purpose... regardless of where you live in Australia.

EVs are interesting. Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) have the massive advantage of huge economies of scale. If you tried to build a modern ICE today from scratch without those scale economies the cost would be horrendous. Far more than EVs in fact. EVs are far simpler and easier to build...

Hi Ausprop It will be awhile... I can't think of a more biased source than the Better Place website for information on EVs. I suggest turning your attentions further afield. And don't hold your breath waiting - an efficient new car will be beating any and all EVs for some time to come...

Hi Bill Of course not. Oil is nowhere near $500 / barrel. If it was over $300 / barrel the pace of change would take your breath away. There is no way you can expect change when oil is so cheap. Both companies and govts would run out of money well before their investment was in the money...

Hi BC - so do you know whether Ford (and others - I'm not sure?) take advantage of all this when they sell their 100% LPG cars? They should run much better than a dual fuel equivalent?

Good luck with that - hope you can make it profitable where CFCL couldn't... Sorry BC, have to pull you up on that one. Any form of natural gas is caused by the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter - nothing to do with magma. It is essentially "fossilised" plants and other organics...

Yes my reminders about the cost of electricity were based on the assumption that no "step change" in battery technology will be forthcoming... while progress on the combination of storage volume and power output has been made it has been painfully slow and at the cost of the batteries getting...

Correct, it's small - that's why coal is so cheap! But the cost of coal is still set by just the cost of extraction - what else is there? The price of coal of course is made up of extraction costs plus profits for coal companies which are going pretty well I hear... Coal price is set by...

Let us not forget that the price of electricity moves with the oil price after a (fairly long) time lag. The price is set by the marginal generator (ie gas at the moment in Australia) which has shot up internationally (and in WA even before the shortage) along with oil due to its easy...

To all those who hope the new technology gods will save us, please note the technology that drives your cars (unless you have a hybrid!) is over 100 years old and has barely been changed in that time (aka the internal combustion engine). Also note that the main technologies for power generation...