Honestly, electric cars are never going to be completely practical for people with a daily commute beyond 150 miles or so.

But if you're commuting 3 hours a day total, you have bigger issues with your life, to be honest. Move closer to where you commute!

I think people don't understand how disruptive electric cars will be, when combined with autonomous cars.

When all you do is pull out your cellphone, select a route and a car picks you up in 5 minutes, takes you to your destination, and leaves... you don't worry about range and electricity and recharge.

You just use it, and the system can intelligently maintain battery levels and recharging across the fleet, ensuring efficiency.

Heck, such a system could provide gasoline or hybrid cars for trips that required them.

Never? You're telling me that in a thousand years, we won't have electric cars able to sustain a 300 mile daily commute?

This isn't a discussion of if. It's a discussion of when.

No no, I'm saying a three hour commute. Regardless of the distance there's still going to be 24 hours in a day. Spending 12% of your day commuting is bonkers.

With 1,000 years, feel free to think bigger: teleportation!

Beware the telefrag.

I think he is saying even a thousand years from now 300 mile daily commute even though possible is not practical on the part of the person traveling.

I hope that in a thousand years we don't commute at all.

I'd say a 150+ mile daily commute isn't practical :)

Miles aren't really the deal breaker - it's the time.

I had a 130 mile commute in the 90s in Arkansas that took me.. 130ish minutes. Now I have a 32 mile commute that takes around 2 hours and is 15 miles driving, BART for 35ish minutes, and walking for 20 minutes.

Frankly, if I can't get there in less than 1/2 an hour on my bicycle, I don't think I'm interested.

Try doing that in the midwest. Finding jobs gets hard and apartments are rare and low quality, so it's not uncommon to have to settle on a 20 minute (or much more) commute by car on the freeway. There are also no bike lanes. Commuting long distances isn't great, but moving more people into the city isn't always the best option either. We learned that in the 1900's

Moving more people into an _early 1900s_ city wasn't the best option, unless you wanted a non-farm job. And then the GI bill (given predominately to white veterans over black veterans) jumpstarted white flight and the beginnings of suburbia.

I guess one should move out of the midwest then, where moving people into cities works better?

I'm doing 86 miles (43 one way) a day if I don't go into town (then its and extra 13 one way). Housing shortages will do that to you.

My commute here takes less time than my 30 mile (15 one way) commute in the Twin Cities.

Maybe with the hyperloop even 150 miles will be "nearby" someday. See http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-hyper-loop-2012-9

Depends on the speed with which you can travel. During rush hour, even 1.5 miles is unbearable.

Just walk. Or take a bike.

Right, and iron horses will never replace real ones in farming because they are too heavy and use up too much coal.

Take a look into graphene-based supercapacitors. It _is_ possible to charge an electric car in a few minutes. It's just a matter of time. [and no, we're not talking EEStor. We're talking multiple research universities actively looking into the technology. Angstron Materials is one.]

I read about this charging issue being addressed in Israel with a company called Better Place that does battery swapping. The reasoning was Israel is small enough to roll out something like this on a large scale. Battery swapping sounds great because they were saying it'd only take a few minutes, which is comparable to fueling up with gas.

The Tesla has ~180 mile range on a 30 minute charge. 150 miles one way with a charger at the office sounds quite practical based on that. It'd actually be less disruptive than a gasoline vehicle.

30 minutes is already a vast improvement over the old technology which took hours, maybe 6 hours if you weren't on the fast connection, or I heard days if you were stuck using a normal outlet.