AN ELECTRIC CAR IN YOUR FUTURE?

Author’s note: Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible to write in a style which is comfortable for me. 

My Dear Trill,

My answer to your question in an unequivical NO. You should not buy an electric car, although you can well afford it. But for you it does not "pencil out,” as they say, for a number of reasons, including cost, but a main one being that your electrical power comes from a coal fired power plant, which would effectively make your electric car a coal burner. 
Granted, electric cars are nice, they run quietly ( be aware that quiet cars are a hazard to pedestrians)  and smoothly and have much improved  acceleration and response over gasoline engine powered cars, but that does not get at the heart of the problem they are reputed to solve -  reducing emissions to help abatement of climate change. Electric cars are at best a regional solution, working nicely where grid power is renewable, such as in Washington State and Western New York and countries like Norway where hydro power is the main source,  and regions where solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear are the main sources.
In this field, greed, ignorance and corporate perfidy converge  to encourage a gullible public that electric cars are the next wave in personal transportation. That may be so, but if ever a new, broadly accepted product presented a case for  systems engineering, covering study and evaluation of resources, infrastructure, short and log term consequences, tradeoffs, and preferable design approaches, this would be it. Such a study should be within the purview of the Department of Transportation, but at present, it doesn’t consider it their responsibility to provide  design guidance to the auto industry, despite the fact that responding  to market forces alone can result in aggravating, instead of  abating the climate change problem.
The reason? Approximately two thirds of electrical power supplied to the grid comes from power plants that are coal fired or natural gas fired. That would imply that two thirds of electric cars would be fossil fuel burners.  A sharp rise in electrical power consumption due to the demand of electric car batteries would mean construction of new power plants. Because they are the lowest cost and can be rapidly built and placed on line, new power plants would  doubtless be fossil fuel burners. 
Thermal efficiencies of such plants range from around thirty per cent for coal plants to around thirty eight percent for natural gas. Electric car efficiencies are around eighty-five per cent, taking into account electric motor and drive train losses..... which would mean an overall electric car thermal efficiency in the mid twenties. In contrast, modern gasoline powered motor cars deliver thermal efficiencies  close to forty per cent. 
Naturally, an electric car salesman will include in his pitch that you will be doing your part to abate global warming. He will point to the rear  of the car and exclaim: “Look, no tail pipe. No emissions.” The truth is that the tailpipe is now the  smokestack adjoining the new fossil fuel burning power plant a few miles down the pike.
A systems engineering study of the entire paradigm shift in transportation would take into account on-board power generation as well as the grid as sources of power, always with the objective of projecting the smallest carbon footprint. Fuel cells fed by natural gas or hydrogen would be candidates. But these are risky, problematic ideas due to the likelihood of springing leaks from road vibration, pot holes, impacts etc. Eventually this will occur. You wouldn’t want to park your car in the garage if there were a hydrogen gas leak and you weren’t aware of it. 
Inevitably, a systems engineering study would examine a technology that has been around for nearly a hundred years -  the Diesel electric locomotive. Apply this technology to the electric car and find ways to produce biodiesel as the fuel of the future, and a near zero carbon footprint electric car will be availabe everywhere. Moreover, it will run dependably when the grid is down for days at a time due to storms. Biodiesel is not a far-fetched idea. California, home to half the electric cars in the U.S., already has about twenty biodiesel stations.
Trill, I hope this gets you thinking further about purchasing an electric car. I would like to buy one too, but a suitable one has not yet arrived upon the scene.