On my worst day, I'm beating the 2025 targets.  Not bad.

"CAFE standards sacrifice lives for oil"
Heartland Institute

On July 10, 2001, Secretary Mineta sent a letter to Congress asking that the freeze on CAFE standards be lifted immediately so NHTSA could resume its CAFE rulemaking responsibilities. However, the freeze was not lifted until December 2001, when the FY 2002 Appropriations Act for the Department of Transportation,for the first time in six years, did not include a rider freezing CAFE standards. NHTSA immediately resumed its CAFE rulemaking responsibilities and issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for MY 2004 light truck standards on January 24, 2002.

NHTSA.gov

The Tesla Model S has the best crash-safety score ever achieved in a passenger car, and uses no oil for power.  Absolutely zero tradeoffs there.

All we need is a rule that says "Starting in 201x all cars and light trucks sold will be either EVs or PHEVs with at least 15 mile electric range".

Many car manufacturers already have EVs on the road or under development.

GM developed the Volt in only a few years. They, and now Toyota, are producing PHEVs that can be used by other companies to use as a model.

New car models go from concept to assembly line in about three years.

Oil use for personal transportation would drop at least 75%.

Good point, Bob, but it seems that there is (are) hidden force(s) that is(are) keeping auto MFG's from releasing PEV's or even HEV's in large numbers. They either make EV's real expensive, or if not, make EV's or PEV's have disadvantages that prevent them from being adopted en masse.

Perhaps the same force(s) are keeping the gov. from making more demands from auto MFG's. Perhaps petroleum must be pumped from the ground until near exhaustion before PEV's will be allowed to be released in significant quantities.
Unless, of course, that the oil and gas industry can find ways to make synthetic zero-CO2-fuels as profitable as petroleum, and the gov. can find ways to assist them in that regard!

The only hidden force keeping EV and PHEV sales low is not hidden. It's the 'in your face' purchase price.

The only hidden force keeping EVs and PHEVs expensive is that batteries are still expensive. The largest reason for that seems to be that we aren't manufacturing enough.

Manufacturers will make what the public will buy. Nissan has built new factories in which to build EVs. They will be glad to build more given adequate demand. Ford set up three assembly lines for their Focus when they started building it. Those lines can be converted from ICEV to EV production in a few days, it demand switches.

Battery prices are coming down. There are multiple batteries that seem to be emerging from the lab that offer much higher capacity.

We're about three years into this generation of EVs. It's a little early to get overly concerned about price and range. Look at how long it took personal computers to drop to the prices we now enjoy. Or cell phones. Or large screen TVs.
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If the major roadways were electrified

If the major roadways were electrified we'd be fine with 50 - 100 mile range EVs. There would be no need to haul around a liquid fuel range extender.

South Korea is testing a couple of buses on a 15 mile route that is wired for inductive charging. Somewhere between 5% and 15% of the roadway needs to be wired. Inductive coils 8" below the road surface. The buses have enough battery capacity to carry them from one charging area to the next and they charge while moving.

If we don't get high capacity, affordable batteries then on the go inductive charging is a possibility. And it would eliminate the need for charging stations and stopping for a charge while on a long trip.

I think we need to give wiring our major travel corridors a serious thought. EVs could cost a lot less if they didn't need more than 50 - 100 mile ranges.

I can't see how batteries stay more expensive than ICEs. There's so little to them. Chemicals in a plastic container.

We might never develop high capacity batteries (even though I think we're close), but cost seems to be nothing but a manufacturing scale issue.

I'd like to see someone do the math on electrifying our roads, assuming ~10% wired vs. installing range extenders. We'd need enough road wiring to cover perhaps a max of 20% all cars vs. putting an ICE in 100%.

Roger, the wind blows in the winter. Geothermal, hydro and tidal generate the year around. We can put a match to biomass whenever we need. There are even days in the winter when the Sun shines.

Have you considered the issue storing a winter's worth of hydrogen?

Will we see FCVs "take off rapidly starting in 2015-2020"?

Many things are possible. Some more likely than others. We'll have to wait and see.

Given that few car companies are even working on fuel cell vehicles but almost all are entering the EV/PHEV business I'm guessing that we're not heading toward FCVs. 2015 is close at hand.

You're free to form your own beliefs on the data and facts you have at hand.
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Cost-wise an overhead wire might be better, but we won't go there. We're not about to string large number of wires over all our roadways and into our garages.

EVs will have batteries of some size. We're certainly not going to wire 100% of where we drive. The question is whether we'll install large battery banks and rely on rapid chargers during long trips or smaller battery banks and use inductive charging while moving (if that is feasible).

With inductive charging we could "share" large batteries which would store late night wind generation and feed into highway coils when people are driving. Some additional loss in the extra storage step but that might be financially offset by the ability to use smaller battery banks in our EVs.

And we need to keep the option of battery swapping on long drives as an option. Build our EVs so that they normally carry a "100 mile" range pack but could hold an additional "200 mile" range pack which we could rent and exchange along our route.

And, yes, keep the dream of PHEVs alive. Some people think that the only answer. It's not time to declare a winner. We haven't reached the end of development for any of the potential technologies.

That sounds too good to be true, Harvey.

Your EV numbers look fine. 13,000 annual miles at 0.3 kWh/mile = 3,900 kWh.

Do you have a link for the waste -> electricity part?

Any idea about the name of the company? Perhaps where the article was published?

I'd like to see the assumptions they are making.

BW...I could not retrace the local firm/article but a Google search gave equivalent results. Please check WTERI (Waste to Energy).

WTE plants in USA produce 500 to 600 kWh per ton of waste or 600 to 720 kWh per tonne of waste.

WTE co-generation (electricity + heat) plants in Denmark do much better.

When domestic + agriculture + industrial waste is added, the per capita potential is much higher.

That's about 4 times better than our Hybrid and an excellent solution for people with charging facilities.

A PHEV with many square meters of high efficiency solar cells, integrated e-storage and a very small (10 KW or so) CNG range extender could go months between refills?

"Of the 748,918 recorded single-trip journeys recorded by the DoT 2009 National Household Travel Survey -

95 percent were under 30 miles.

98 percent were under 50 miles in length.

1 percent of were over 70 miles.

The average single-trip distance was 5.95 miles.

While rural respondents naturally traveled further on average than their urban counterparts, 95 percent of all rural-based trips were still under 50 miles.

Of the 106,681 survey participants who drove to work every day in a car -

95 percent of them traveled less than 40 miles to work, with the average commute distance being 13.6 miles.

93 percent of them drove less than 100 miles.

The average daily drive total for urban-based cars was just 36.5 miles, while rural-based cars drove an average of 48.6 miles."

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1071688_95-of-all-trips-could-be-made-in-electric-cars-says-study

1 percent of were over 70 miles. I suspect we imagine that we drive long distances more often than we actually do. Or, at least, those of us who do drive long-often are more represented in discussions.