Not everything is a straight cost/benefit calculation based on price.  If you expect rationing or outright shortages, the battery would be the difference between moving and not moving.

Misssing the point.
I was in Scotland on contract during the refinery shutdown.
At gas station after gas station on the highway one time driving between Edinburgh and Glasgow I was unable to get diesel.
When I finally was able to find a gas station with fuel, I was limited to ten LITERS!

That barely got me back to the hotel and for the rest of the week I had to take transit.

Don't assume gasoline will be AVAILABLE!

So now it burns coal instead of petrol? Big deal.

Randall,

It's nice to know that the cost of eliminating Peak Oil in one's daily life is only roughly $13K (before tax credits, and eventual price reductions without experience). Clearly, a plug-in is much cheaper than selling one's house and moving to a city condo.

It's worth noting that there are cheaper competitors, and that the price is certain to fall. Heck, what are you getting for your base $7K without batteries: mostly paying off their R&D?

Also, I'm fascinated by the Colorado $6K credit. There are a lot of Priuses there: they can convert for almost free. I wonder if there might be arbitrage, in which people convert them and then take them to other states to sell.

It's nice to see a confirmation of a $500/KWH battery price.

Finally, there are a lot of drivers that could get a faster payoff: taxi companies could use a faster recharge, and use it for two shifts. 365 days a year, for 730 charge cycles a year.

I looked at the wikipedia article - it doesn't provide a source for the 8.8 usable KWH figure.

I'm pretty confident that it's 8 KWH, for 200WH/mile. The 8.0KWH figure is what I've seen discussed many times by GM staff.

Also, GM says that with charging losses, the Volt will use .25KWH/mile wall-to-wheel.

Apparently everyone here seems to think the electricity in your home outlet appears by magic.
Protip: Driving an electric car does not eliminate or even reduce your fossil fuel consumption. It merely shifts it to another location.

Sgt. Fox - that's true.

However, I'll also note that the EPA officials I've talked with agree that preventing/controlling emissions from a single power plant is much easier and more economical than preventing/controlling emissions from 50,000 roaming sources in an area.

My question is what affect the batteries themselves will have on the environment as they are decommissioned. I expect it will still be less, but it is something that should be considered up front.

Lyle,

There's nothing in the world that is recycled at a higher rate than conventional car batteries - roughly 99%. Li-ion car batteries will be larger, more expensive and very easy to track, control and recycle. I don't think you need to worry.

Sgt Fox,

we need to eliminate oil consumption, and night-time battery charging is perfectly suited for wind-power and nuclear.

Sgt. Fox, We hit Peak Oil sooner than Peak Natural Gas or Peak Coal. So shifting away from oil helps a lot. Certainly helps in the next 10 years.

Nick G, One problem with the Prius conversion route is that there are only 750,000 Priuses to convert. So a converted Prius is not a solution for the masses. Conversion of other cars will cost more.

I'm curious on this point: What does an electric motor cost? Suppose you just pull the drive train out of a Ford Focus and put in an electric motor and batteries. What's it going to cost to do that sort of conversion? That's the sort of conversion that would have big scaling potential if the cost was low enough.

E-P, I only expect rationing if the government imposes price controls.

What I want to know about post-peak:

A) How fast will global oil exports drop?

B) Will governments run inflationary policies or will deflation become widespread as economies contract?

C) Will governments impose rationing?

It's fascinating how the talking point shifts from oil dependency to "if all electricity came from coal" (when natural gas is rapidly displacing coal in the USA).  It's like there are people desperate to defend petroleum by maligning any serious competitor.

At least in the USA, the most available sources of electric power over the long term have roughly zero carbon footprint and no need for imports (wind, nuclear).  Absent a collapse of industrial civilization, that's where we're going.  Wind energy in the USA is growing at hundreds of times the rate of electric consumption of vehicles, and wind is growing on such a curve that it would keep pace with new vehicle production even if all new vehicles were plug-ins of some kind.  Nuclear's 10-year construction schedule has about 6 years to run for the next generation of plants.  We're not there yet, and it's not even a foregone conclusion, but it's not something we CAN'T do.

Randall,

At the moment, there's no shortage of Priuses. I'm surprised sales haven't grown a bit faster than they have, but that's the current situation. It might change with an oil price spike, or some other thing that changes people's perceptions of the real costs of oil (and their willingness to do something about them), but...not yet.

EV conversions appear to be fairly cheap - IIRC, in the range of $3-$6K. Really, I think it's the labor that's the problem. There are a lot of EV conversions, but they're mostly by hobbyists who put in a lot of labor, and don't account for it.

Regarding rationing: on the one hand, there is an official rationing plan ready for big oil shocks. OTOH, I think there's very wide recognition that rationing in the 70's was counter-productive, and so I think it would require a very big supply shock to induce a rationing response. On the 3rd hand, much of the public really isn't comfortable with sudden price rises to allocate scarce supplies - they call it "gouging", and there's a lot of social/political pressure to prevent such price increases. The effect, of course, is shortages.

Regarding exports: I'm not worried for the US. US imports are likely to fall faster than overall world exports.

Regarding inflation/deflation: I wouldn't grant the premise that economies are likely to contract. Even if real wealth falls due premature capital obsolescence, economic activity as measured by GDP is likely to be stable or increase. Think of post-hurricane rebuilding: the hurricane destroyed wealth, but rebuilding increases GDP. There's no question that PO will create an economic headwind: R&D will go to energy, instead of other productive uses; income will transfer to exporting countries, requiring compensatory sovereign borrowing; transitional "churn" between legacy and new industries will slow the rate at which new investments can be made productive; fear/anxiety/uncertainty could slow down necessary investment (that, of course, is unpredictable - nobody predicted our recent bank panic). Nevertheless, I don't think these costs are large enough to actually reduce GDP, though they could reduce growth by, say, 2% per year for several years.

There's certainly very little risk of an absolute shortage of BTU's to fuel our economies, as long as markets are allowed to work with something like the right level of regulation: free enough to properly make the vast series of complex adjustments needed, but regulated enough to send us in very roughly the right direction.

E-P,

I agree.