Don't plan on hauling anything heavy in 25 years.

Well I did say "required". As in the "requirement" that all vehicles sold in California after 2035 will have to be EV's.
I also find it interesting that the author of the book you quoted is named Marx.

 

That is one thing i could never understand.
If the maximum speed limit posted in any state is 85mph, why are the auto companies allowed to produce and sell a vehicle that can obtain a speed of 90mph or greater? Is it to ensure a steady flow of income to the state and local municipalities?

 

Customer demand......

And that is one reason the "safety" people want connected cars so they can speed limit the cars based on the road they are currently traveling. Kinda like your GPS may know the local speed limit, But have it connected to the ECM to govern the vehicle. They need "connected vehicles" to make it work for areas with Variable speed limits.

 

Take the following with a grain of salt 'cause I'm probably talking out of my hat.

746w = 1 hp. Therefore it would require 447,600 watts to equal 600 horsepower. So at full power for 1 hour would that not be 447.6 Kwh? Assuming household electricity rate of about $0.065/Kwh, that'd be a cost of about $29/hour in electricity. Put in a full 12 hours on the road in a day would run about $350 in electricity. Of course that's assuming the electric motors are demanding 600 hp at all times. Doesn't seem too bad. A diesel engine running 500 miles at 6 mpg would burn more than $300 in fuel.

Now that's not counting the inevitable road taxes the overlords will tack on to the electricity rates. You're not getting off that easy.

 

Going by those numbers they're not going to be any cheaper to run than a 600 horse Cat is now running 70 mph and grossing 90k pounds. Not to mention that those numbers are a few times what I was figuring they'd use for electricity.
From what I've seen thrown around, which admittedly is a bunch of assumptions in their articles, a charge is going to be a megawatt of electricity and they're thinking they'll get 500 miles out of it before needing a recharge. From what I've found on google, a megawatt is 1,000 kwhs. Again according to Google, the average household uses around 10k kwhs in a year in the US. That's one house worth of electricity every 10 days, assume 360 days a year of operation is 36 houses per truck per year. 4.5 million total trucks, that number is just a guess I came up with, which is probably a little high I'll admit. Multiply your 4.5 million trucks by 36 and let me know what number you come up with, I came up with about 360 nuclear plants worth of electricity, just to run trucks, never going to feasible with current technology or funds.
If anybody can improve on this and come up with a more accurate number than this admitted mathematical moron can, by all means please do.

 

I don't know what they'd use for power once they're at speed and moving. Definitely not the full 600 hp worth of energy though. Still, that's a lot of power needed.

 

What I come up with for 4.5 million trucks running 360 days a year is 1.6 trillion kilowatt-hours, I'm not entirely sure on my math accuracy. I've run it through the calculator on my phone about 5 times and come up with same number every time but something has to be wrong somewhere in there, that's a lot of juice.

 

First, it's an article.

Second the guy's last name has nothing to do with his sociopolitical ideology.

In the 1890's, New York, London, and other major cities took steps to deal with the manure crisis. Horses were the main mode of transportation, and the byproduct of horse transportation is poop. The supply of horse dung had far outstripped the demand for manure. City governments mandated that horse owners stable their horses, which coupled with rising land costs made new technology such electric street cars and internal combustion engines.

The decisions that rail and air executives made about equipment purchases were based off of many factors. Discounting governmental impact on those factors is disingenuous and dangerous. "The Invisible Hand of the Market" is mentioned only once by Adam Smith, but he repeatedly discusses situations where "natural liberty" does not work.

The vast amount of money the government spent with GM during the war vastly shortened the transition to diesel locomotives. It is entirely possible that without that investment we still would have steam engines well into the 1970s. Or the switch to diesel may have been interrupted by electric or some other new technology.

 

The electric motor, ironically, killed the electric car. Once internal combustion engines became easy to start they gained popularity.

What Killed Electric Cars? The Electric Motor, 100 Years Ago

 

Sarcasm on/

Monorails like in Disney land?

Sarcasm off/

Where some of the money is flowing ATM.....
Humans Have Taken Their First Trip Inside a Hyperloop