Dave,
You've always got to know better, haven't you, despite not even living in the US or being at all qualified to critique these scientists, or perhaps you do have such qualifications and have neglected to tell us. The methodology employed in this study as reported suggests to me that the rather short life previously predicted for EV batteries probably has had a lot to do with the general low uptake of this technology, and seems to have taken pretty firm root in your thinking, too. Myself I prefer to listen to the scientists.

The problem is that people are not rational and the advertising industry exists to increase this irrationality.
If you can do 85-90 % of your journeys in an EV, they will focus on the 10-15% you cannot do.

For these, you need access to another car, probably some kind of ICE. [You could hop along from charger to charger, but after the first time, it would probably get a bit stale.]

Thus IMO, the EV companies and governments need to make it as easy as possible to swap to a long ranged ICE (or HEV) when you occasionally need it.

The simplest thing would be to be able to drive to a rental office and switch cars and use your own insurance on the car you rent (to keep the cost down). The insurance details could be worked out in advance for a couple of rental companies so the switch becomes very quick.

Or you could have an informal "car swap/lend" club with both EV and ICE cars in it, but that might end in tears if you get a difficult person in it.

Of course, if you have a second car, you are OK. Perhaps "they" could make it cheap to tax and insure a "backup" ICE if you have an EV already.

There are lots of "administrative" solutions to the EV range problem, you do not need to wait for a technological one.

BTW Peter:
Your advanced scientific training seems to have skipped some of the details, like how the scientific method works.

Evidently to your disappointment, it does not involve comparing qualifications and positions.
I think you are getting it confused with being an archbishop, or something.

It is simply a case of addressing the argument made, which you have not done.

All you need to do to prove me in error is to show that:

The study's range estimates were in respect of low temperature use.

Or:
Range is not affected by low temperatures, and all the stuff about their losing range in the cold is ill informed FUD

Good luck with either of those.

Perhaps you should have a look into what scientific debate consists of, or ask for a refund on whatever you paid for your qualifications, as you do not seem to have grasped the basics.

DaveMart makes a couple of valid points.

DM>Range has to have a pretty good reserve for non-average days to be adequate.

Here's where daily practical experience will trump number crunching. I do a lot of spreadsheet analysis on battery capacity and range for stories I publish but have frequently found that the number on the dashboard at night and in the cold look oddly different than they did when I was in the warmth and comfort of my study.

DM>Of course, countering that the next generation of bog-standard BEVs will probably have somewhere around 40-50kwh of energy, and those really will be useful down to low capacity.

Absolutely. This problem pretty much goes away when you have more than 200 miles to start. Then the only trips that might be impacted are those long range out of town trips for which you are likely planning both route and time more carefully (and perhaps have more flexibility in time).

Having adequate range to complete a daily commute is a good start. But for EVs to be widely adopted, more of those edge cases need to be satisfied. And that means bigger buffers. It's less irrational than you might imagine. Call it intuitive worst case scenario planning.

3 BEVs in the family. One ICE that hasn't been driven in two years except to move it out of the way, smog and register it. It's for sale.

@DaveR:
I have nothing against BEV users getting as much use out of their cars as they possibly can, and certainly they will continue to suit some, perhaps even in cold climates, until they reach very low capacity.
For instance some older people may only want to use them for a once a week trip to the shops, and so a cheap s/h BEV with very low maintenance would be ideal.

I would also suggest that there might be a modest trade, modest because the value of the product would be low by that time, in selling used Leaf cars from cold areas in warmer places where the remaining range would not be so hard hit by the winter, and where you ain't going to freeze if it does run out.

I was primarily simply pointing out two things though, that the cold is going to have a big effect on how useful an old BEV still is, and that simple averages don't tell enough of the story.

You always have to have a margin, as 50% of distances driven may end up being above average! ;-)

What Davemart said. As a transportation appliance, a car needs to get you where you are going *every* time. The average driver expects to be able to get in his/her car at the drop of a hat and go wherever without planning ahead or worrying about getting stuck. That is what our existing liquid-fuelled car/road/filling station infrastructure allows, and that is the standard of convenience and functionality that EVs need to achieve for mass adoption.

@EP:
Perhaps because I have never lived anywhere where it gets really, seriously cold I may have an undue respect for conditions where it does.
OTOH I am a belt and braces guy, and I have done a little sailing etc where it pays to have respect for the elements.

So whilst the AER might take a hammering in very cold weather and it might cost me more in petrol, I would be insouciant about using a PHEV in any conditions even if the battery capacity was not what it was.

Not so a BEV if it might strand me in the cold.

I like having warm feet, and a beating heart for that matter.

Ref: 6) should read ......cabin heating......

I should add that I have not seen the degradation curves for the Leaf battery, but if it follows the normal pattern then it will slow down a heck of a lot after it hits 70% or so, and take absolutely ages to drop to around 40%.

In my view 24kwh is too small to make that very generally useful, but if you buy a BEV in around 2017 it seems likely that its perhaps 50kwh pack which is anyway likely to be based on a tougher chemistry is going to allow useful for many range pretty much forever, or at least for the life of the vehicle.

Low maintenance means that should provide a great option as spare car etc, and in my view the likeliest cause of their eventual scrapage, accidents aside, will be the cost of insurance, as in the post 2030 or so world insurance companies are likely to frown on those who want to drive non-robotic cars on the public highway.

So the car would be obsolete rather than the battery not having fairly decent range.

@DaveR:

Yeah, more away from home chargers may help, depending on who pays for them, as where they are not subsidised the costs per kilowatt hour or per mile are sometimes very steep.

There is no point economising by not buying a new car if that sticks you with routine expensive charging.

I still don't think running the present generation of 24kwh cars forever is too practical for most, the next generation will be a different matter.

@EP:
I have not run the numbers in any detail, and they are going to vary quite a lot from country to country and even region, as some pretty substantial part of them is going to be the cost of the property, rates etc, especially where they are most useful such as in high transit city areas etc.

The other big factor is utilisation rates.
BEV owners constantly assure us that charging away from home is a rare event, and the abysmally low utilisation rates of some of the chargers installed at public expense sure bear that one out.

In the absence of doing some work investigating it extensively, which I am allergic to, the primary reason I say it is expensive is because that is what they are charging wherever there is no subsidy.

Now maybe that is because they are capitalist criminals, but that is capitalism for you, and I assume that the likely future rate in unsubsidised locations, will be in the same ball park as at present.

The Leaf's 24-kWh battery pack may do fine as a commuter vehicle with twice-daily charging, both at home and at work, even when the battery capacity will be reduced to below 70%.

Solar-car-port charging should be encouraged at work to increase use of RE for transportation, because it is not possible to do solar charging at night at home.

With promise of much lower price of solid oxide fuel cell in the near future, the work place will have solar panels backed-up by fuel cell running on natural gas to provide both power and heating. With increasing use of ultra-efficient LED lighting, there will be excess of electricity power vs heat if the fuel cells will be run to provide heat. What to do? Either using heat pump to absorb some of this excess power, or allow for at-work charging of PEV's even during winters, while heating the building at the same time. Far into the future, use Hydrogen to replace the NG.

Likewise, homes that are equipped with FC's can also use NG for both power to charge EV's at night as well as heat to keep the house warm. Far into the future, use the hydrogen to replace the NG.

The vehicles of the future will most likely be FC-PEV to be able to take advantage of direct RE charging whenever RE will be available, and take advantage of "waste electricity" whenever the NG or H2 FC will be used to provide heat, and only use the FC on the board the vehicle to provide heat in the winter or for long trips. In this way, the round-trip efficiency of utilization of future H2 will be very high and can rival the efficiency of Li-ion battery, while the excessive consumption of materials and energy during the construction of a large battery pack for long-range BEV can be avoided when FC-PEV's will use much smaller battery packs of 10-15 kWh instead of 60-100-kWh packs for long-range BEV's.