#transportation

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.

Americans spend a great deal of money on cars, but we have developed a convenient way of not thinking about the total.

The payment comes from one account. Insurance arrives on another date. Gas disappears twenty or fifty dollars at a time. Tires show up every few years with the impeccable timing of a dental emergency. Registration is somebody else's problem until suddenly it isn't. Then one morning the transmission starts making a sound ordinarily associated with farm machinery.

Each expense seems to be its own small incident.

Wealth, unfortunately for anyone trying to measure the damage, works in the opposite direction. Small amounts of money combine. Savings earn returns. Those returns can earn returns. Time takes a few hundred dollars a month and, given enough years, does something almost indecent with it.

Which raises a question worth asking:

What would Americans be worth if cars simply cost less?

Not if everybody gave up driving. Not if the suburbs were bulldozed tomorrow morning and replaced with bicycle paths and espresso bars. And not if Americans suddenly stopped liking cars.

Just: what would happen if getting around took a smaller bite out of the household budget?

The answer may be considerably larger than the monthly savings suggest.

The almost-$1,000-a-month machine

AAA has been trying to answer a deceptively simple question for more than 70 years: what does a new car actually cost to own?