They are a wasteful use of lithium, and there isn't enough for all the cars anyway. All they do is to export pollution out of the cities. It is even worse when they cut down trees to burn to generate the electricity.
A much better solution is the use of fuel cells. You can extract the hydrogen from sea water, and generate the electricity directly to drive the motors in the cars. Refuelling only takes a few minutes, as opposed to the hour or so that it can take to recharge the batteries in the current cars.
There is no magic way of extracting Hydrogen from water without having to use energy. Also using hydrogen would mean that we would need completely new infrastructure for H stations which is more expensive and requires more resources than electric stations.
I do not agree with you that Lithium is such a wasteful thing to mine and use. We all know that that there is a good chance that TESLA will become a huge electric vehicle manufacturer and will have to use tons of Lithium to do so. It seems that there is big deposits of this stuff next to TESLAs giga factory (
https://www.ft.com/content/95f90780-7557-11e8-b6ad-3823e4384287) so the resources needed to get Lithium to TESLA will potentially be relatively small.
just electrify the roads and give us all dodgems.
Jokes aside, this is being done as we speak in Sweden (
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/worlds-first-electrified-road-opens-in-sweden) and could be genius way to charge batteries on the way especially for trucks.
2. People think that they're saving the environment, while they're not -- the precious resources that are used to make these batteries and such are depleting and you're not saving the environment at all.
The need to go from fossil fuels to alternatives to generate electricity is fundamental. If we cant accomplish the task of going away from burning stuff to generate electricity, it will not matter if we use electric cars are other type of cars. But if we are changing the electricity generation sources as we change our transportation to electric, we are doing good to our planet.
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I want to add that current technology of Lithium batteries does not mean that we will always use LIthium batteries, there is a lot of effort put in to research for better alternatives and the electric car market competition could only help this to evolve.
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