I agree with this. The other question that always comes to my mind though is this. What do we do with all these dead li ion batteries down the road? While everyone hopes on the EV is great it's clean bandwagon no wants to listen or discuss the dirty little secrets. It takes more energy to make these batteries which is done by fossil fuel burning plants. The batteries are un recyclable and basically landfall material . Which translates to massive amounts of ground waste.
Stick your head in the sand it's true.
A better way to go would be to do what Mazda is doing with ICE. A better way to would be Hydrogen fuel cells which only put out water vapor for exhaust. Ya Honda and Toyota are looking into this.
I am sorry but while the Bolt is a cool little car do not fool yourself it's far from the answer as are Tesla's.
Hadn't thought about that, but yeah, no stick, no buy. Automatic transmissions automatically have problems; more especially if you're rude with the accelerator.
To draw on a historical parallel, natural gas was and perhaps still is more expensive than coal. (ignoring all the mining and transport costs) But one of the key benefits is in emissions.
We've had a small battery recycling facility at the bottom of the hill around here for many decades (starting with lead-acid and Ni-Cads) and they've updated to accept all the small batteries from modern devices. I assume they're able to get some use out of them; whether it's just recycling the raw materials or other, don't know.
It's true that there are material costs for production and post use or end of life disposal challenges. But it's all relative. Locating, mining, storing, transporting, storing, refining, storing, transporting, storing then finally pumping gasoline/diesel into your vehicle's storage for maybe a week or two, has it's costs as well. All of those storage tanks and local pipelines have to be maintained and periodically replaced as well. Does it all wash out in the end? This would be a good question to answer.
Relative to the combustion engine, electric motors are far, far, far less wasteful in converting stored energy into kinetic energy. The trick would be to figure out a less wasteful method for converting crude oil, into kinetic energy, than the modern combustion engine affords.
Another thing to consider, energy can be created by means of the electric motor in reverse...
https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/types-hydropower-plants
One thing that concerns me, are the inefficiencies, as well as the material costs of inductive charging. It's such a large convenience not to have to plug in, it will probably permeate the EV and plug-in hybrid markets at some point; adding to the preexisting energy losses that are already inherent to the battery charging/storing/discharging processes.