Bad news, b_b. I'm stuck in a boring webinar on Facebook which means this is going to be even longer than it should be. And since I spent a year designing and building electric cars back when the GM EV-1 was king, I'm in a position to say lots of things.

Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Efficiency. Chemistry and physics dictates this comparison. The efficiency of any internal combustion engine is governed by the temperature differential between the exhaust and intake strokes. This is a big reason why Diesel engines are used for everything big; they run hotter. It's another reason why the Great White Hope back in the oil crisis was turbine engines. An ideal internal combustion engine intakes at absolute zero and exhausts at plasmid temperatures but dinosaur blood pretty much limits gas engines to about 18% efficiency.

Now check this shit out. Electric motors are so dominant from an efficiency standard that the IEA banned transpo-sized electric motors under 90% efficiency back in '92. And sure - maybe you've got to burn coal in order to power the motor. But that coal plant is twice as efficient as your 4 stroke gas motor and the emissions controls are hella better, too. 30% x 90% is still 27% - your worst-case electric car is 50% more efficient than your best-case gas car.

Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Durability. A gas motor is a bunch of high-temperature reciprocating mass grinding around itself in subservience to thousands of petrochemical explosions per minute. A piston has to go up and down twice in order to contribute 18% of the energy of a combustion cycle to the crank shaft. Poppet valves have to go up and down once. This lateral motion is converted to rotary motion through force; there's a piece of heat-treated steel about two inches in diameter keeping things spinning about. That then interfaces with a fluid clutch system and a bunch of planetary gears all whirring and whooshing amongst fluid the rough consistency of Aunt Jemima. This rotating mass weighs somewhere between 300 and 1500 lbs, depending on where you define it, and none of it is contributing to getting you down the road other than as a system of constraint, turning explosions into rotational motion.

An electric motor, on the other hand, has one moving part. It makes peak torque at zero RPM and since it has exactly zero reciprocating mass, can be spun up to hundreds of thousands of RPM (if that's what you choose to do with it). I've built three electric cars; all of them had transmissions, but none of them were ever used for more than "forward" and "reverse." Outside of the "hybrid" paradigm that we're using at the moment, the ideal electric car has a motor in each wheel and a controller. That motor is a brake, too - reverse current through it and you can absorb a percentage of your forward motion back into the batteries through power generation (although efficient motors do not make efficient generators).

An electric car gets to ditch the radiator, the oil, the oil cooler, the transmission, the differential and the driveshaft. That's pretty goddamn disruptive.

Otto Cycle vs. Electric: Sustainability. Back when I was studying vehicle design, we were fond of pointing out that the energy density of gasoline was such that if it were discovered today, it would be banned. Here's a scary chart: gasoline has a higher energy density than TNT. It has double the energy of LPG and quadruple the energy of hydrogen. It's a stone-cold bitch, pound per pound, to match gasoline.

But it's not "recyclable" either. You burn it up and it's gone. The win gasoline has is effectively "rapid charging" - I can pour 120 miles into my Benelli in about 30 seconds. But hey - right now, a Tesla Supercharger will dump 170 miles into your Tesla in an hour. Long-haul trucking? No, not really. But the benefits of electrics are such in around-town driving that I see more Teslas than I see Astons & Maseratis combined... and they're priced about the same. I know three people with those little electric Fiats. They're selling like hotcakes around here. By the way, recyclability has gotten way better. Tesla recycles 60% of their packs by weight, and 1% of the weight of a lithium-ion battery pack isn't recyclable and environmentally friendly. Best guess, that's 10 pounds of waste for the entire thousand-pound battery pack.

GM's electric cars didn't flop. They were artificially limited. They had a waiting list. GM killed them right about the time they introduced the Hummer H1 because margins on sport utility vehicles are ridiculous. An electric car, on the other hand, is an electronic device, which means it's tied into Moore's Law. The controllers really do double in power every eighteen months.

We used to say that one gallon of gas held the same energy as a thousand pounds of batteries. That was 20 years ago and we said it would take a moon shot to make it any better. Now? Now a gallon of gas has about the same energy as about 200 pounds of batteries. Our moon shot was cell phones, and they're still going.

A Tesla Model S right now is basically a luxury car with a five gallon gas tank. For 95% of the driving most people do, that's more than enough. The problem with electric cars at the moment is that 95% of the market thinks they're that last 5% and they're not willing to pay one-percenter money for that 5% limitation. That won't last. Tesla and Panasonic are operating the Gigafactory jointly and Panasonic is the largest supplier of EV batteries by far. Their whole brand strategy has been exotic to high-end to mid-market to budget and they're dominant from a high-end standpoint. This ran just this morning.

In short, you are disregarding a number of important factors that put your sentiments in dispute, to put it mildly. Electric cars are a big fuckin' deal already and they're only going to get bigger.