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Right, any vehicle that give you higher efficiency that you have right now it great!
I am self financed (so far) on building CarBEN EV5 -- my estimate for building the entire chassis (including the $1350 3-axis CNC machine) is about $4K.
Granted an electric drivetrain is expensive up front. But with the efficiency I am hoping for (<100-150Wh/mile) it will only cost me 0.025 CENTS (or $0.00025) per mile at the most -- and if I can put solar panels on my roof for $0 down -- I'll pay half of that! (We pay ~$0.16 / kWh here.) To drive the 300 miles I think are quite possible, that means no more than $7.20 and maybe as little as $4.80 (at <100Wh/mile).
There are about 3 solar installation companies who right now will put panels on your roof for almost no money down. And you'll pay about half of what you do now for electricity.
On the renewable energy costs, a land based wind turbine can generate $300,000 of electricity per year, and yet it will only use about 1% of a typical small farm. The corridor from the Texas panhandle up through the Dakotas could easily provide more than enough electricity for the entire lower 48 states. About 10% of Nevada could provide about half the power, as well. The potential for solar to scale down to every other rooftop, and for wind to scale up, and for the coasts to have offshore wind, wave power, and tidal power in some areas, and geothermal can be drilled, and biogas can be made from all sewage and farm waste (and this would then provide high quality natural fertilizer, too!) -- we could have SIXTEEN TIMES more power than we need, if we tried to collect the maximum from all of these.
The initial cost of transition is less than you think. We are currently spending $1.5 BILLION per day on foreign oil alone. We are spending about $100 barrel. If we pay $18 to conserve that barrel (by increasing our MPG, for example) we save the $82 per barrel.
Never mind the lowered health costs, and lowered pollution will help everything from fishing to tourism. We can minimize global climate change. In Germany, they emit 50% less carbon per person than in the USA. Costa Rica wants to be carbon neutral by 2021, and they are already very close to this.
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