Likely never (if you look at Tesla's luxury vehicles almost at 400 miles of range [S and X with Raven drivetrains] and their Supercharger charge rates [0-80% SOC in ~15-20 minutes]). Battery capacity per kg and charge rates are likely to improve faster than coordinating the deployment of nationwide rail or overhead wire electrical infrastructure on interstates (a Supercharger station only takes about two weeks to install, and costs ~$150k-200k).
I'm still hoping that Teslas on AP will eventually begin to coordinate and drive very close together or even attach bumper-to-bumper in order to save energy on highways due to lower air resistance. Ad hoc highway trains more or less...
For all practical purposes they have that now. The CD on tesla cars is very low, and even AP1 cars will follow other vehicles on the highway for hundreds of miles without a hitch.
The AP follow distance setting can be set from 1 to 7, and setting it to 1 just ends up with more abrupt braking when traffic encounters a slowdown. A spaced out setting of 4 is a much more comfortable setting.
If the cars were able to push and pull each other, engines/batteries could be used optimally. Cars with nearly empty batteries would recuperate and recharge if absolutely needed, cars with full batteries would pull the rest. AP would put the most suitable car in front to minimize the total air resistance... Lots of possibilities.
Might be worth designing a new type of car for this kind of use though.
Yes, but energy density is terrible. You are having to move 3x the weight not to mention the huge effincicy hit . You arent taking reality into account.
I dont think the comparison is to ICE but to a car on a rail/line that doesnt need to carry its energy at all (or only a small battery for the last 30 miles.)
The economics do not make sense. There are massive capital and operational expenditures to build power rails/overhead wires everywhere.
If you want to longbets.org this I will have someone put down $1000 this will not happen in any city of over 10k people in the United States in the next 20 years.
https://supercharge.info/map