[sliverstorm]

There's two sides to the argument. On the one hand, centralizing is big. It allows huge gains in efficiency- steam plants fueled by coal are 99% efficient, and by the time the power reaches the wheels of your car you're still probably around 60-80% (Otto cycle is 25% at absolute best, not counting drivetrain losses) It allows flexibility in source- nuclear, coal, wind, solar- and the source can be 'hot-swapped'.

At the same time, it is important to remember the energy has to come from somewhere, and this is something politicians, media, and industry has made a habit of carefully ignoring, so it does seem like a good idea to remind less inquisitive folks electric cars are not powered by free, unlimited energy. (Crazy as it may sound, folks believed that was the case for anything driven by 'renewable energy' a handful of years ago. That's what they were taught; renewable = free/unlimited)

[ugh]

It’s a good idea to say that but many people will then immediately go to the next extreme: electric cars cannot possibly be useful at all unless all our energy production is already carbon neutral†. The right way to approach this is to offer a detailed explanation, not to only say that electric cars burn coal. It’s a true statement, but it leads to misconceptions.

I will say what I always say at this point: electric cars are about enabling large scale infrastructure change. A gas powered car will burn gas now and in twenty years. An electric car burns (mostly) coal now but it doesn’t have to in twenty years. That’s what electric cars are all about.

Now, an electric car you buy now likely won’t survive until a large portion of our energy comes from carbon neutral sources. We don’t even know whether we will be able to pull that off at all. Why then buy electric cars? Why sell them? Why subsidize them? The reason for this is that changing every gas powered car to an electric car takes time and requires a lot of infrastructure and testing. We really shouldn’t start building electric cars only in forty years, we should start right now.

—

† Whether we should work towards being carbon neutral, whether that’s possible at all and makes sense is certainly controversial. For the purpose of this article I just assumed that we should.

There are other possible benefits of switching to electric cars. For one it makes us less dependent on oil. Oil is not unlimited (so is coal but it is at least less limited), being dependent only on energy and not one specific energy source makes it easier to react to changing energy source prices.

[furyg3]

A gas powered car will burn gas now and in twenty years. lectric car burns (mostly) coal now but it doesn’t have to in twenty years. That’s what electric cars are all about.

This is really the key point. Right now, if all cars were electric, in Netherlands you would be driving on natural gas, in Austria renewable energy, and in Spain Nuclear energy (http://bit.ly/m25JwE).

Each country / region has good reasons for basing their current energy supply on a particular resource, and they can adapt over time as new options become available, old ones less attractive, market incentives change, or democracy pushes for something new.