Joe said;
Gosh, I wonder if anybody has ever thought about this.

Well Joe, I can assure you that plenty have thought of that.
I can assure you that no politician has every had such a thought !

I like electric cars, especially those that use an IC or steam engine to drive a generator that supplies 100% of the vehicle's electric needs.
Final drive by electricity gets rid of a lot of transmission problems and allows selective use of the drive when a wheel starts to slip.

Loudmouth my view exactly never even thought we should make the same mistakes
We however, you never know, see in 50 years coal and oil banned world wide

Coal and oil will never be banned Belly. Their usage may change due to
rising costs. Too many are making the mistake of believing that all
this kurfuffle about electric cars is to do with CO2 reduction.
That is merely a way to suck the greenies in.

When Royal Shell Oil announced that they were doing planning for
leaving the oil industry it started a lot of people rethinking the future.
They then found BP and Mobil had similar thoughts for the longer term.
It would have been interesting to have been a fly on a few boardroom walls.
Both Shell & BP have announced every one of their service stations
worldwide will have chargers. I have only seen one mention of a Shell charger.

Whoops, I spoke too soon, here is a Shell chargers;

http://tinyurl.com/yyt97awp

Bazz,

Is it possible that the big oil companies are switching to renewables for the subsidies, and the price-gouging opportunities ? And if we switch over to electric cars, how much more electricity would be needed to charge them up each night, instead of the petrol needed now for our 17 million cars ?

So how much more subsidies would have to be offered to those companies to generate enough electricity for all our new needs, at even higher prices ?

My limited understanding about batteries for electric cars is that they need some very rare elements to operate, and which are very costly to extract, not to mention the cost in disposing of them at the end of their lives. i.e. cost in CO2 production.
So how much CO2 is required in the production of components for the batteries of, say, a single electric car ? x 17,000,000 ? Every five or ten years ?

Of course, we know that those batteries will be produced - and dismantled - overseas, mostly likely in China or India. And we know that the CO2 produced stays within the boundaries of the country where it is produced, by some strange Newtonian geographical process.

Sorry, i can't take all this seriously.

Joe