ABSOLUTELY!!! Just like he said in the post above, to any person CAPABLE OF COGENT THOUGHT the conversion of motor fuels to electric equivalent simply rules it out... PLUS, as the Valentine's week "Winter Storm Uri" (when the fvck did we start naming winter storms?? LOL:) and how it nearly crashed the Texas power grid shows, our grid (not just in Texas but nationwide) is barely able to cope with demand AS IT IS... we don't have enough generating capacity or distribution capability/infrastructure to distribute all the power required for "everybody in the neighborhood" to run and charge an electric car... all that energy that is being handled now by tanker trucks and gas stations and stored in underground tanks and pumped into vehicles as gasoline and diesel would have to be generated into electricity in power stations and then distributed via the grid to individual charging stations, be they in the home or at work or at commercial recharge stations in parking lots or whatever... The grid simply cannot deliver that much power, nor can we generate that much. It'd be like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with water from a garden hose!
If Texas was nearly laid flat by weather 30 degrees below normal for a week and the extra demand for electrically generated heat in homes, coupled with some of the power plants (like the South Texas Nuclear Generating Station STNP) being caught with their britches down and having to shut down due to frozen pipes and stuff, and of course the windmills and solar farms were all basically worthless in the cold and cloudy conditions, and the grid and remaining generating capacity was simply overtaxed due to all the "imports" moving into Texas as they try to escape the libtard nightmares of places like California (among other places) and the sudden population surge overextending our grid, particularly in bad conditions like the ice storm, well, pushing everybody to switch to electric vehicles is simply going to be a neverending man-made recipe for constant blackouts and power grid problems due to the increased demand and insufficient distribution infrastructure and inadequate generating capacity... in short every summer day and winter night will be struggle to keep up, and the grid is basically at the knife edge of what it can handle NOW... imagine what it will be with millions of EV's plugged into it by day and night.
I'm not anti-EV's, but I'm anti-STUPID... EV's have their place to be sure... commuters dealing with city traffic jams, where regenerative braking and no-idling during periods stuck sitting on a freeway would simply make good sense... local delivery drivers like for the mail and local package delivery, even local short-haul HD trucking from local distribution centers to various stores or malls or whatever short distances away, particularly in the city where regenerative braking can be used to recapture energy that would otherwise end up as waste heat from the brakes of vehicles... school buses would be particularly well suited to electric power, since they typically only drive for about an hour and a half or so each morning and evening on school bus routes, and could recharge in between and overnight. BUT, a school would STILL need to keep a few diesel buses in its fleet, simply for use on long-distance field trips, football or other sports trips, band trips, contests, one-act play, etc... we drove buses as far as a couple hundred miles on trips at times, and electrics simply don't have the range to cope with that, and for a HD vehicle with HD batteries, sitting and charging 8 hours halfway through the trip simply isn't an option. Same goes for long-haul trucking-- it is and will remain the venue of IC engines, diesel or otherwise (hear tell that manufacturers and trucking companies are having SO many issues with diesel emissions equipment and problems resulting from the designs that alternatives like propane (LPG) and methane (CNG) are being looked at seriously as replacements for over-the-road truck powerplants, despite diesel's many advantages! Electric isn't going to be taking IC's place on the farm, either... the energy density and cost of batteries simply is prohibitive, in addition to the weight. Deere and other manufacturers are tinkering with electric tractors, but basically they're simply novelty 'test beds' which are basically only good for very light work for very limited circumstances-- loader tractors used to move hay to feed cattle for instance, where the tractor will only operate at low power requirements for just a few hours at a time once or twice per day, those jobs can be handled with electric powered machines, BUT that is just a small part of the work farm tractors and equipment are required to do... for heavy tillage or or harvesting or working 16 hour days virtually nonstop at planting and harvest time, operating heavy or high-horsepower hungry implements doing heavy loads and heavy jobs, electric simply doesn't have the power density to handle that-- IOW the batteries are dead in an hour or two, and take many hours to recharge, and generate tremendous heat doing both... and heat destroys batteries! You can fill a tractor with 100+ gallons of diesel and work 15 hours straight if you want to or have to, and refilling means simply stopping long enough to pull a pickup with a bed tank and pump close enough to run a hose to the tractor tank and turn it on while you have a pee break and a stretch and maybe grab a sandwich or cup of coffee out of the thermos or ice chest in the pickup... in 10-15 minutes you're back to work for another go. Electrics will NEVER be able to handle that. The only way I could see it possible is if they invented interchangeable battery units much like HD drill drivers or electric impact wrenches use, when the battery is depleted it's swapped out for a charged one while the 'dead' one is returned to a charging station. Of course given the size and weight of the battery packs necessary for an over-the-road (OTR) semi truck or a farm tractor (several thousand pounds and about 3-4 feet square and 5-6 feet long or so) needless to say this entire process would require special equipment on the tractor/semi truck and the ground handling equipment to receive the old battery and install the new one. A rail system with self-guiding ramps or attach points (including auto-couplers for the batteries to the vehicles electrical system since it's a high amperage connection at fairly high voltages) would be required. Not an insurmountable engineering challenge, but not cheap either... and with battery packs for such equipment typically costing about $40,000 on up, not a cheap option either! Deere's prototype electric tractor has a power pack that costs about $40,000 and basically has a life expectancy of about 3-4 years with light but steady use. A similar diesel tractor could operate easily for 5,000-10,000 hours between major overhauls of its diesel engine, which would be far cheaper than replacing a $40,000 battery. Typical in-frame overhauls of diesels, depending on what is replaced, runs from about $5,000 on the low end to about $10,000-15,000 average, to maybe $20,000 on the high end if the engine is really shot and you're doing it in a dealer shop (which nobody in their right mind does). Depending on the use tractors could typically run 5-10 years before accumulating the hours to necessitate a rebuild, even on a busy farm with large acreage, and in similar conditions that's still a 2:1 to 3:1 advantage for the diesel over the electric in terms of battery replacement, just time-wise not even figuring in costs of replacement which are basically 25% of the cost of battery replacement. Deere is basically saying by the time the tractor needs a new battery it'll be cheaper to junk the tractor than get a new battery for it.
SO the internal combustion engine has a long life ahead of it... the energy density of batteries and recharge times simply rule it out for many jobs like farms and OTR trucking, railroads, etc. Rail is actually THE most efficient form of transportation in terms of energy units consumed per ton-mile, because steel wheels rolling on steel rails simply have the lowest friction of any form of transport (including trucks-- it's surprising how much heat is generated and wasted by semi-truck tires... those suckers get HOT hauling at high speed under load! All that heat energy comes ultimately from the fuel burned in the engine, produced to overcome rolling resistance and ultimately shed to the atmosphere as the tires cool). While railroad locomotives have used electric motors to turn their wheels for decades, they're powered by DIESEL engines turning alternators or generators on-board the train locomotive itself. DC power was standard but doesn't do well at low speeds and tends to overheat, so AC power is the current "state of the art". Batteries are only capable of producing DC power, which is NOT good for low-speed, high torque, long duration jobs like OTR trucking, operating heavy farm equipment under heavy loads, etc. Conversion of DC power to AC power is wasteful and expensive. Plus, again, the energy density simply isn't there... SO unless railroads are going to install coast-to-coast catenary lines for overhead electric AC power supply to electric locomotives (which is unfeasible due to cost) or drag locomotive-size battery tenders behind them like the old steam engines with their coal or oil bunker tenders behind them, rail will never turn electric.
Course, never say never, but basically it'll require 'Star Trek' technology to make it happen-- some "magic" battery technology (like the "sarium krellide" self-regenerating power packs in Star Trek hand phasers or some huge breakthrough in cheap/easy fusion power generation making small local fusion plants suddenly realistic (and how many times have we heard promises like that?? I remember going to the nuke plant "visitors day" employee picnic in the late 70's or early 80's, talking about "electricity too cheap to meter" delivered by clean, safe, abundant nuclear power... and we all know how that turned out!) SO I'll believe in cheap abundant easy fusion power when I have my hoverboard and flying Delorean in the carport...
Later! OL J R