Because car batteries are unlikely to get much better energy density, we will probably have to accept that electric cars will typically only have a range of about an hour, since batteries will be too expensive otherwise. I believe that people would actually accept this provided there is a wide net of charging stations available that allow you to charge the battery within five minutes. There are however two problems that would need to be overcome:
- Along the motorways, we would need to have either charging while driving, or enough stations to handle the 10000 cars/h we can have during the holidays. Assuming 120km/h speed and 5m per hour recharge, that would amount to stations with 70 fast chargers every 10km.
- To drive for an hour at a reasonable speed, you need around 25kWh. Assuming a loss of 5% during charging and five minutes, this amounts to 15kW heat that must be removed.
It shows that for electrical cars to take over, a lot of infrastructure will need to be adjusted.