Well Hasbeen, it is horses for courses. As I have mention here previously
a friend has a Mitsubishi ieMev which he drives to work each day and
for weekend running around. His work commute cost is $1-50 a week.
Also zero maintenance costs.
He has another car he uses for long trips to the Snow and to country
radio dos. His wife uses that car for her short work traveling.

Thats not to say that anything you said is incorrect but they are very
practical vehicles and the very popular take up that is occurring
in other countries shows that.
Kia, Mazda and another are rumored to introduce their cars later this year.
That "might" fix the price problem.

Can't agree Bazz. Without huge subsidies the electric things are ridiculously expensive to buy. As I mentioned I go shopping in a 16 year old car, which cost pennies, & in 20,000 has cost just 11 litres of oil to maintain. If it was electric it would be on it's 3Rd set of $7000 batteries.

My pleasure car is 38 years old. Since I put it back on the road in 1993 after a $5600 restoration it has done 70,000 kilometres & cost about $4000 in maintenance, including 3 sets of tyres, replaced because of age, a little oil & about $9000 of petrol. An electric car would have saved nothing but the petrol, but would be on it's 3Rd set of $7000 batteries. So far my 1980 Triumph is about $12000 in front on running costs, without counting that $1.5 a week.

The average new car uses no oil, so maintenance costs, apart from 4 litres of oil every 15,000 kilometres are for inspection of equipment for safety & dealer profit. Electric cars will require more safety inspection particularly with the dangerous Lipo batteries. I use them in my planes & know how dangerous they are.

On the other side of the coin is that industry provides refuelling points for petroleum cars. Somehow it is expected that government [that is us the tax payer] should provide thousands of refuelling stations for electric cars. Firstly I do not want government too easily able to shut down my access to fuel, & secondly why the hell should I pay for your mates fuelling station?

Well Hasbeen the government has not paid for any of the few present public chargers.
Shell has announced that they will be installing,
gradually, chargers in every service station worldwide.

I had a conversation just last weekend with my friend about his cars
battery. He has now had the car five years and he is very technically
competent. He has been logging and watching closely the condition and
capacity of the battery and it still has the same capacity as when he
purchased the car.
Re danger of the battery, I have only heard of one fire of an electric
car. It had been in a major accident and had been stored upside down
in a scrap yard.
There may have been other occasions of course but if so I have not heard about them.

While SA is going broke and wasting money on paltry back up batteries (4 minutes, what a joke) my daughter came back to NSW (from SA). She releasing herself from hospital in Adelaide because of the (substantiated) fear that the Hospitals are too poor to operate properly.

McCrakie, the battery is not intended to be a backup battery.
It is there for smoothing the output of the wind farm where it is
installed, ie for when clouds go over etc.
Part of its capacity, 29 Mw/hr. is reserved for grid stabilisation.

Their backup is a fleet of diesel generators that were used in
Tasmania when the cross Bass Strait UHV cable failed. Hmmm