Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

I shall address your points by paragraph:

1) Erm. There's only really two places you can get carbon - the ground, or the atmosphere. Any biofuel eventually comes from plants or algae, which get their carbon from the atmosphere. I don't really know where else you had in mind.

2) That doesn't make it inefficient. The whole point is that it's acting as storage rather than fuel. That's what makes it carbon-neutral - the carbon comes out of the atmosphere, then goes back (instead of out of the ground and into the atmosphere).

3) Not sure I buy that. Electricity distribution is hardly lossless (and what powers the power station?). Our best grid-scale storage solutions run about 75% efficient, while car-scale batteries leak charge much faster than a gasoline tank leaks gasoline. And both a gasoline car and an EV have to carry around heavy energy storage - the difference is the gasoline tank gets lighter as it empties.

4) To be fair, you have to compare the efficiency of the ICE to the combined efficiency of the motor, power station, and all intermediate storage (every time the power moves from one battery to another, you lose some, while gasoline can be stored and dispensed fairly losslessly). Transmission costs also have to compared like-for-like - grid scale distribution runs about 95% efficient, while oil tankers are 97-98% (though you have to factor in last-mile, and trucks are ten times as thirsty). I don't think the calculation is as clear-cut as you're making out.

It's also worth querying what exactly "efficiency" means. If the source is sustainable (and biofuel is), raw energy wastage is less important than gross environmental impact and safety. It's not clear to me that mining nuclear materials and dealing with the waste, or mining rare earth metals to carpet the land in solar panels, are necessarily better or more sustainable solutions that carpeting the land in fast-growing, high-energy crops and fuelling all of society that way. Perhaps it is a bad solution - it depends on how the numbers fall exactly on things like land use, (and possibly your values regarding safety decisions). If it's already been thoroughly analysed and found wanting, then I'd love to read that. But at the moment you've not really made an argument commensurate with the strength of your opinion.

I want to say straight out, I agree that range-anxiety is real. People need to be comfortable that the car will be able to go wherever they need to go, whenever they need to do there. That is, at least in America, the cultural equivocation that driving === freedom.

That said, this statement:

> The electric car adds a lot of complication, and doesn't really solve any problem right now.

leaves me obligated to point out a few things. I will reason from analogy for point:

1. I just quit smoking, it wasn't obvious that it solved a problem right now, but I hope it will eliminate some later ;).

2. It doesn't matter, at least by Tesla's conception, that electric cars solve anything. Obviously, it is a mission driven company but that mission doesn't/shouldn't matter to the end user. Electric cars should be great for their own sake, and as good or better than a comprably priced ICE.

Sounds like it wasn't profitable, at least in 2013: "The company's financial difficulties were caused by the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, about US$850 million in private capital, and a market penetration significantly lower than originally predicted..."