I don’t think weight is much of an issue at this point. EV Acceleration in normal driving is fine and their range keeps going up. The new Roadster for example is aiming for a 200kWh battery and still has crazy acceleration. Cost seems like a bigger deal, but economies of scale are driving that down quickly.

EV’s hit 2.5% of total sales in 2019. 2020 is likely going to be odd, but scaling production still seems to be the bottleneck.

1 gallon of gas is 33kwh. And can be 'recharged' into a vehicle in 10 seconds.

So sure the Roadster can hold what, 6 gallons? Like an econo-box. And weighs 2 1/2 - 3 tons. Much of that in battery.

Yes, weight is still the big issue.

An EC engine is a long way from 100% efficient. Model 3 Long Range is 310 mile range on a 75kWh battery. Cars are not hitting 310 miles on 2.3 gallons of fuel.

For the most extreme comparison, a Bugatti Chiron gets an EPA 11 MPG so the roadster is arguably the equivalent of a 56 gallon fuel tank where the Chiron is stuck with 26 gallons.

PS: A better comparison would be a similar ~200,000$ two seater but none of them are optimized for fuel efficiency.

> "And weighs 2 1/2 - 3 tons."

A bit of a tangent but it'll be interesting to see what effect an all electric vehicle future has on the design of roadways, bridges, etc. I imagine that many things will need to be rebuilt to handle the additional load.

They're already built for it. The '73 Pontiac Bonneville I rode around in as a kid weighed 4300 lbs. And as sibling comment mentions, anything not a car or light truck will outweigh anything with batteries. Our Sprinter-based RV weighs 10K lbs. empty, and it is a small RV.

They're already "designed" for 18-wheel trucks which weigh 15-20 times that. Even heavy EVs are nothing compared to heavy transport.

To use your own example, they're designed to handle a certain quantity of 18 wheelers but they're not designed to handle traffic that is entirely composed of 18 wheelers.

Raising the average vehicle weight from 1.5 to 3 tons will definitely have an effect.

But not as much as it would seem, since road damage is a quadratic function of weight and one truck does as much damage as 9600 1 ton cars. Doubling the weight of the car would maybe narrow that by a few percentage points, but vehicle miles for any personal vehicle at essentially any weight is a rounding error compared to one truck.

Bridges at least need to be designed for just 18 wheelers because over 50 years that’s going to happen at least once.

Roads are designed for a certain amount of "axle weight" [1] which basically means to carry a heavier load you need to add more axles to distribute the load.

I would guess electric cars are still negligible in that metric, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating