Perhaps the author could have discussed the price difference of the essential EV battery, it's life cycle, and vehicle endurance with conventional vehicles.
The rosy costs per mile then change a bit. More than a bit actually.
When we see battery operated suburban trains, we will know EVs have matured.

Craig m - look, for heaven sake sit down and think.. your amortisation is depreciation which is a cost.. you count the cost of that .. so its fuel cost plus write off/ depreciation/amortisation cost on on car. You and I are talking about the same thing, you're just trying to exclude it or pretend it isn't a cost. It most certainly is. You look at whole of life costs, not just fuel costs. I, too, know about fleet costs.

I don't have time or patience to fully debunk your views on OPEC, but they are at least less widely eccentric than your previous contention that the car market is being propped up by governments.

As for the chicken-egg.. my point was that even if they do have recharging points there would seem to be consumer reluctant to adopt electric. Maybe some day. But they still don't save carbon.

Anyway, enough of this.

Bazz - while I appreciate the price in Aus is just too great, my recollection of the US sales figures is that they are still very small.. tiny even by Aus standards let alone the US..

Amortisation isn't depreciation per se, it's the spreading of a cost of a capital asset over a period, eventually reducing to zero. At that point the asset still has value, but is fully paid for, so the capital cost does not have to be defrayed as part of the cost of goods sold.

That's why the price declines.

OPEC has repeatedly manipulated the oil price, both up and down. In recent times it's been down, to drive out competition from shale oil producers for the last few years of an oil-based vehicular economy. There are of course lots of othert costs of oil which aren't factored into prices. For example, what is the cost of the Gulf Wars, which were fought entirely to protect strategic oil interests? What is the cost of cleaning up former oil fields, fuel stations, etc? What does it cost to do emissions abatement? The list goes on and on.

The car industry in this country and elsewhere, has enjoyed the status of a protected industry for decades, for several reasons that most people presumably are aware of to some extent.

Seriously Mark, if subsidy of renewables is bad, why is subsidy of other forms of energy OK?

With respect to your comment to Bazz and Col's questions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicle

should answer some questions.

As of Dec 2014 around 300,000 EVs had been sold and the rate of sales is increasing exponentially, nostly due to battery-supplied vehicles.

I'm not sure what's driving the FUD being generated around this topic, perhaps Mark might know more about that.

An analysis of the cost of owning and operating the family car will show that for most people, fuel is a smaller cost than the annual depreciation. Hard to understand why the cost of the car is not important for some people.

Even if you look at the cost of long haul road train truck, where consumption might be close to 1 litre per km, the cost of fuel is important, but considerably less than half O&O costs.

Most private owners value the flexibility of personal transport. The vehicle choice is often influenced by recreational activities; a 4x4 for touring outback, big enough to tow the caravan, big enough to carry the dogs down to the beach, able to drive 300km without a stop and being able to fuel up in ten minutes. Not everyone lives in the inner city, spends their life on their iphone and flies overseas for their recreation (in a battery powered aircraft of course). We could force everyone to adopt the organic inner city lifestyle, but that might require the suspension of representative government …

Some questions
What is the energy density of the most advanced batteries in GJ per tonne and GJ per cubic metre? How does this compare to the same values for diesel and aviation fuel?

From this, at what point will we see battery powered long haul road transport able to travel continuously (with a few stops of less than 15 minutes) for at least 12 hours per day and still have room and mass capacity to carry a 50 tonne payload?

Trains able to cross Australia? What would be the transmission losses for an electricity grid to span the country to charge the trains, or, what would be the cost of solar arrays and more importantly the battery storage that could recharge a train quickly enough to make this competitive with diesel synthesised from sustainably grown cellulose? (Please don’t give me the USA corn ethanol figures, we all know that’s an agricultural subsidy at its core).

Air transport, the military? of course we could always abolish the latter and live in peace.

We can produce as much hydrocarbon as we need when the price of oil stays above $100/bbl by going direct from plant material to the liquid fuel without the fossil step in the middle. The carbon emitted during combustion is captured by the plants grown and harvested in the same geological era; no fossil stage required to make things so complicated.

Investors invest in anything that will show a return short term. In itself, this does not validate the fundamental physical principles
of the activity they invest in.