I’m all for fresh oil drilling, for getting shale up and running, for converting coal to methanol and trash to ethanol that we can burn in our flex fuel vehicles. I like the idea of diesel sourced from algae and bacteria that excretes crude oil. I’d be proud to drive around fueled by used french-fry grease, and I think converting atmospheric CO2 into gasoline is a swell idea.

Those are all great ideas and I think we should pursue each and every one of them enthusiastically. But I’m starting to think that the real future of automotive transportation has little if anything to do with liquid fuel (or even natural gas.) Here’s why.

I drive one of these and I love it.

With my Impreza, I get between 22-32 MPG. With gas anywhere from $3.90 – $4.35 a gallon, let’s just round everything off and say that I’m paying about $4 for every 25 miles I drive. That doesn’t sound like such a bad deal until you consider what it ought to cost to drive something that looks like this:

Take one of these Ero trucks, load it up with freight, drive it 50 miles to its destintation and then 50 miles back home, how much would you expect to shell out? Keep in mind that such a trip will run you about $16 in my moderately fuel efficient Subaru. At least twice as much, right? Call it $30 at the barest minimum

Would you believe 10% of that? How does $3 sound for a 100-mile trip?

The’s because our “Ero truck” is really a Zero truck, an Isuzu modified to run on expensive-to-buy-but-oh-so-inexpensive-to-operate lithium batteries. Go back and read over all those fuel options I listed at the beginning of this post. Do any of them promise to deliver 100 miles of driving for three dollars?

I didn’t think so.

Electric cars are the way this thing is going to work out, folks. Yes, there are major issues to be resolved around developing more efficient batteries, extending the range these things can drive, figuring out a way to charge up quickly, etc. And of course, the biggest issue — how do we source all that electricity?

Mr. Pickens’ continent-sized wind farm is one idea. Getting serious about nuclear is another.

But it’s simple economics in the end. That 13 extra bucks I’m paying for every 100 miles of driving could be better spent on — so many things. Multiply that by the 20,000 miles I’m likely to put on my car in a year, and that’s $2600. Multiply that by the five years I’m taking to pay off my car and we’re looking at a break even point of an all-electric Subaru Impreza — with a sufficient range to get me from Highlands Ranch to Boulder and back, slightly more than the 100 miles that the Zero truck delivers — costing about $13,000 more than what I paid for mine.

Faster, please.