Life using mass transit is easy if you live, and spend almost all of your time, in densely populated urban areas. Especially if you don’t have small children or physically challenged adults to move from place to place.

But many of us are not urban singles.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangkok and, there, public transportation works and makes sense. Where I live most of my life, the last time a bus came by my house was….

The bus has never come by my house.

Some years back there was a weekly van to town, but that was down at the highway, a 3.5 mile walk. Not a half block from apartment building to subway station.

I just checked NewEgg. I can get a TB for $0.09/gig.

That’s about a three million x drop.

Can you imagine what would happen if EV batteries were to drop to below the price of an internal combustion engine and capacity doubled to 200 miles?

Bye-bye gas pumps….

Figure that it will cost more than thousand dollars a year less to drive than a 40MPG gas Focus and the math isn’t looking bad for some. Maybe a five year break-even between the EV and an nicely outfitted gas Focus.

In Colorado there’s a $6k rebate which would make it $26,495. Other states also have rebate programs.

That said, is will be nice when manufacturers can get battery prices down and subsidies can be eliminated.

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I was just thinking earlier this evening about how I paid a bit over $8,000 (2011 dollars) in 1983 for a 30 MB (yes, mega) hard drive. That’s $266,667 per gig (if I didn’t screw the math.)

Now I can buy a 1TB drive for $130. That’s $0.13 per gig. And the drive will be much faster and much more reliable.

There’s no appreciable difference in what was used to manufacture the two drives. No pounds of “unobtainium” in the 30 MB drive. Just years of learning how to make the product more efficiently.

Something similar should happen with EV batteries. Perhaps not a 2,000,000x cost drop, but even a 4x – 6x drop would make EVs very affordable.