Most new cars will be electric in 10 years. Then instead of oil, coal or nuclear (power plants) will be the primary power source and ethanol for automobile fuel will be a minor issue.
And don't forget infrastructure. We have a very well developed one for gasoline and diesel, we'd have to spend massively to enhance the electric grids to accommodate this new usage, right down to neighborhood transformers, which are sized to heat up in summer days and cool down at night.
California is already dealing with this problem, where the addition of as little as 2 electric cars in a neighborhood could cause the transformer feeding it to blow.
And right now the anti-coal jihad is focusing our new power plant creation on replacing coal fired plants with natural gas ones quickly enough so that we don't suffer brownouts and blackouts. The really serious net increases in power generation would take some time to accomplish ... might be possible in "10 years", but I think it'll be demand driven vs. proactive for something that might never happen, so again I think that timetable is wildly optimistic.
I agree with you, but battery technology has some pretty serious problems for cars that can't be ignored.
How do you deal with the replacement cost and lemon risk (battery leasing and warranties).
For me, cars are for road trips. How is that usage addressed (open question, aside from putting superchargers everywhere usable for all electric cars).
How do you deal with the power grid costs? Power mains aren't build to handle the kind of scale that rapidly charging electric cars needs (???).
Your other into aside, which certainly are important questions;
>> for me, cars are for road trips...
It's probable that many people have taken a road-trip holiday at some point in their lives. Some percentage of people do it regularly.
However anecdotally I would suggest most people have not. Outside the US conditions for the road-trip holiday are not as prevalent. In high-density Europe for instance there are easier ways to travel (train for example). In Asia "most" people don't own a car and driving for fun is almost unheard of.
The perfect conditions for a road-trip exist in large countries with lots of open spaces, good roads, good places to stay interesting places to get to and so on. USA, Australia, South Africa and so on.
A motoring holiday in the UK is brilliant, but the short distances would work fine with simple recharge points. It's hard to drive for 4 days solid in the UK without just going around in circles.
Of course the idea of the road trip is more fun than the road trip itself, and we end up doing a trip maybe once every few years. I use my car every day to commute.
It's the idea that I could do a road trip that seems to be the logic against electric, but in practice I don't actually do one all that often. (some people do, but they're a tiny minority)
Heres my point. Do the math. Simply hire a petrol car when you want to do a road-trip. For most people that will be never, for others it might be every few years - for a tiny fraction it will be often. The tiny fraction can continue to drive petrol. The price of oil isn't coming down, so that will be more and more expensive.
On the up side every road-tripper should lobby for electric cars all day long. Using petrol for commuting is a terrible waste, and when it runs out its the road tripper who will be hurt.
Frankly electric cars today have more than enough range for daily use for 360+ days in the year. As the price of oil rises over the next 10 years the economics for electric make a lot more sense.
Do you have any citations for that? I do a trip once a year or so of about 1000 miles and it never really surprises anyone when I tell them that so it must not be that uncommon.
For road trips, rent a suitable car. The idea that you should modify your purchase of a daily driver to accommodate an activity you do once or twice a year is common, but strange.
I intentionally dismissed them because renewable energy is still a minor percentage of the total power produced in the world. Not counting biomass it is 6% according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy
Don't forget the "growing rapidly" part. Sure, if we decide not to use renewables, we won't use renewables. But if we do, we will. We're talking about future plans here (in your words, what will power cars in 10 years).