Don’t forget also being the number one lithium producer in the world, but completely unwilling to do anything with it but export it.

Well i’m glad to see that locusts and aphids are on the list of insects that benefit, since otherwise our efforts to inflict biblical plagues on ourselves might have struggled for the full set.

I mean you are pretty explicitly expecting people to buy a car just to go to work and groceries.

More to the point NEVs in NA and quadracycles in Europe are already available, and indeed represented the majority of the EV market about fifteen to twenty years ago.

They didn’t really find a market in the US and most of the companies that made them failed, but have remained semi-successful in Europe where their low cost and less strict licensing requirements made them popular with teenagers and seniors.

Nevertheless, it was only with 250mi plus ranges that EVs actually stated to push gas cars off the road in any number.

Generally, on the internet, it is helpful to at least lampshade when you are proposing an idea that is very far off and/or disconnected from both the context of the conversation and the way you think the world actually does work, especially when in a community that regularly discusses legislative and technical details and changes of the clean energy transition.

When the conversation started from a news story about how a ok method of reducing emissions in the US is achieving more than technically better method because it’s seen slower adoption, passerby’s are going to assume given that context that you are talking about changes to be made in the few short years and decades we have to stop the destruction of civilization as we know it into account.

Firstly, you are the one who started from the premise you need to own a car to commute, and indeed that one should own a car capable only of commuting and other very short often bikeable trips.

Secondly, while I do heavily support urban density, in the english speaking world we are generally woefully short of having enough urban housing for even the people who live there right now, much less relocate everyone who doesn’t.

Because these places are so desirable, people can and demonstrably do pay a large premium to live in these areas, pricing out a large number of people from the start.

Moreover, in a country where a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state can spend a decade and an obscene amount of money to try and so far fail to put in a bus lane, mass transit, as much as I love be it and want more of it, simply isn’t going to be built out to the point where it serves every house and farm in anything like the next ten years, which is already a painfully long time from a climate prospective.

It is also completely disconnected from a country where some large cities have gone so far as to outright ban rasing taxes to fund mass transit, and a continent where Doug Ford is literally ripping out well used bike lanes to signal how much he loves cars. The people and places who elected him still need to decarbonize, and an easy drop in change like electrifying the the current system while expanding transit.

To note the obvious, back before cars, trains, planes etc… when we walked, people still had horses and ships. It just meant that unless you were rich most people lived and died in the same small village as their family lived and died in, and is a rather silly goal for a world in which people talk and make friends with others on the far side of the planet, and where a day trip with nearby friends means less than 500mi and people regularly travel hundreds for work.

We live in a vastly more connected world where inter-city travel is a routine thing, and a country where we have spent the lasr half century desolving and selling off every intercity rail line we could, a network which took nearly a century to build.

Even in places like Swisserland or the Netherlands, places built before cars and with extremely prolific bike and rail infrastructure, about half the population own cars, they just don’t get used for short trips as often.

This is a great achievement that represents a hopeful vision of the future that is worth working for, and one that took entire generations of advocacy. To suggest we are going to go so much further beyond it in a few short years in a far larger and more spread out nation with a hostile federal government is outright absurd.

Because you can’t fly everywhere, renting for a routine trip is an expensive, time consuming, and logistically difficult process, and if you’re going to spend so much to own a car it might as well be useful for all your trips instead of just some of them?

Moreover, someone’s commute is often nowhere near the longest trip they make on a regular basis, as often one might need to drive several places, go into town multiple times in a day, travel to a neighboring city to meet with friends, etc… all of which can require several times the (hopefully short) work and back distance.

This is ignoring that battery degradation is a direct consequence of the charge and discharge current, and as such a larger battery will degrade at a significantly slower rate.

All this means you’re going to face an uphill battle trying to get people to sacrifice a bunch of capability for a few percent reduction in weight and cost.

Their is almost certainly a market for short range city cars, but that’s likely to be eventually more than filled by the used market, where a decades old 200mi range car is still going to be more capable than a 50 to 100mi range car.

To answer the question, because a lot of people don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a second car just for when they need to drive longer than their daily commute.

I agree that you could go smaller than the average of 300mi, but the minimum necessary range for say interstate travel around here is 150 to 200mi.

The answer is to focus on the smaller sedans and such we lived with for generations instead of just the largest and highest markup suv or pickup out there. While EVs are heavier on average, it’s worth noting this difference is a lot smaller than the difference in weight between say a sedan and a crossover, or a crossover and a SUV.

Counterpoint, Alberta exists and low costs benefit the consumer, not the company. I am fully confident that the profit made by oil and gas is significantly more than the tight profit margins in renewables, which means far less money to throw at politicians. Oil and gas can therefore throw much more money at Trump and still be in the black on their ‘investment’, even if you ignore that Trump has deep ideological and political opposition to renewables.