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We just need some standardization of battery packs and infrastructure "swapping stations". There are a few companies working on this and one has actually been doing it for a while. http://www.betterplace.com/How-it-Works/battery-switch-stations

See here:
http://viableawesomism.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/viable.html

Silicon valley solves problems. It may not solve the ones you want, but it solves many of them, and with cutthroat efficiency.
Why? because it allows people to take risks with new ideas. I'd transport you 100 years back, or maybe 700 years, and let you try acting out new ideas back then.

Some of them may be world-changing. Others may be fart apps.
But the important thing is that there are many, and there can be many, because the risk is not all worn by government or the taxpayer or some planning comittee of old farts who care more about their seat than about what they can use their power to fix. In Silicone Valley risk is worn by the people who consciously choose to take it.

I find this "war" between people who want to fix the world and people who want to make money one of the dumbest ideas ever concocted.
If you don't like east-coast MBA's being taught that money is the single important product of any business - good on you. neither do I. Money is a byproduct, albeit an important one. The real product of any organisation we build should be the awesome it creates, whatever that may be. If you agree - prove that old-school profit-over-everything MBA culture wrong. Go and DO something awesome.

And why can't you do something awesome for the world AND make a killing?
Money is important. If awesome organisations don't make money, if they don't have a built-in economic engine, it's like giving birth to a child without a heart, who will need to spend the rest of his life carrying around a life-support machine. I'd rather that life-support machine comes built in.

Our societal life support machinery (charity, government funding) is limited and finicky. You want to build organisations that will die the second someone closes a tap? go ahead. I'd rather see us create things with the resilience of Google.

You think Facebook and Google aren't awesome?
Suggest you take your head out of your ass, because you can't perceive the change these technologies made to places elsewhere in the world, outside your nice comfy American bubble. Compare Hama, Syria - 30 years ago and today. Compare India, China or Brazil back then and now. What do you think technology has done to these people? Given a lot of them more hope and dignity and prosperity than they every had in history.
Recognize you are not alone in the world - there are 7 billion of us now. And things that were possible when there were 10 times less people may no longer be possible when there's this many vying for the same amount of resources. If your idea is going back - it's a bad one. If your idea is going somewhere new - stop bagging the existing system and start being very specific about how you want to make it better.

Last, I sense a big disillusionment with "money". Money is not merely a vacation or a new plasma. It's not just a gold star. Money is power to change. Succeeding in Silicon Valley (and anywhere else in the world as an entrepreneur) is about convincing people of ideas and obtaining the resources to make what you can imagine happen. Money gives power to do that. You're not going to change anything by whinging or waxing ethical theories. You need to get off your bum, figure out a vision to do /something/ better, figure out how to connect a "power source" to that vision in the form of an economic engine so your idea isn't a public liability, and go build this organisation that does awesome.

As a society we have a list of problems as long as the eyes can see. Quit wasting people's time by ranting. Society as it hangs together today is stacks better than anything else we ever tried. If there's things you don't like about it - start fixing them, or get the fuck out of the way of those that are doing just that.

Yes, that's a dare.

Yeah, I think http://www.betterplace.com/ has the better idea. Swapping out a battery in just a few minutes is far superior to waiting 30 minutes for a charge.

Assuming you can trust the new battery you receive. It wouldn't take too many incidents of "I swapped out batteries in Fresno, and 20 minutes later my car stopped working and I had to wait for a tow truck" to lose the public on that idea.

Not saying it can't work, only that they'd better be very scrupulous in their battery QA.

I prefer Better Place's approach of using swappable battery modules. It's faster for the consumer. Batteries can be tested and replaced before they degrade.

- Jasen.

Yeah, I think http://www.betterplace.com/ has the better idea. Swapping out a battery in just a few minutes is far superior to waiting 30 minutes for a charge.

I'd love to see Tesla working with those guys. The Tesla cars with the Better Place battery swap system would be great!

Yeah, I think http://www.betterplace.com/ has the better idea. Swapping out a battery in just a few minutes is far superior to waiting 30 minutes for a charge.

That exists. Better Place, a Shai Agassi project (ex-SAP executive), which is exactly what you describe.

I think the actual issue is that we might be thinking about what infrastructure is needed for this in the wrong way.

I don't currently own a car (lucky enough to live in a London suburb with great public transport), but if I did, then an electric vehicle would make a lot of sense for what I'd use it for - short shopping trips and the like. However, the apartment complex I live in has no charging facilities in its car-park, so even though I own a parking space there (which currently sits empty), I'd have no way of charging one. Getting charging facilities installed would be seriously expensive.

I've often wondered if the conceptual model we use for electric cars isn't the wrong one. The current assumption is that when you buy an electric car, you also buy and own the battery, and you are responsible for keeping it charged.

Now - maybe there are umpteen good reasons why this couldn't work - but has anybody ever tried a different approach? I'm talking about a model where the cars have easily-swapped batteries, which the driver leases, rather than owning. So... you buy your car and you pay an upfront deposit for the lease of a battery. When your battery runs low, you go into a gas station (or in this case, gas/charging station), the battery gets removed and replaced by a fresh one from the station's "charging room".

You pay a fee to the station covering your share of its electricity costs for charging the battery plus whatever profit margin it requires (much like paying for your gas at the moment), and you drive off a few minutes after arriving. Meanwhile, "your" old battery is charged up at the station and swapped with another customer's empty battery once it's finished recharging. This eliminates a lot of the charge-time complaints associated with electric vehicles at the moment and also means that we don't need charging points in homes or at the roadside.

I'm sure there must be good reasons why this wouldn't work, given it never seems to get consideration - but what are they?

It's a pity nobody thought about this.

Why not make the batteries replaceable? Just switch them as a gas station, simple.

Because it's a stupid idea for reasons we've covered numerous times before.

...and yet betterplace is implementing this solution with success in Europe, Israel and Japan

http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution-switch-stations

Simple in theory, incredibly complex in practice. Not to mention expensive.

But these guys are still working on it.

Designing a car is complex.
Optimizing a vehicles structures and exterior for safety, performance, existing standards compliance and
attractive is difficult to do affordably.
Forcing a battery standard size and shape might be one too many compromises.
Aside from the other concerns mentioned ready, replacing an EV's batteries today is expensive,
however 8-10 years from now the energy density (range) could be greatly improved
by that time, or the cost to get same energy density batteries will go significantly lower until,
of course, they can't be made any cheaper.
There are so many variables to designing and manufacturing EVs.
It's nice to know that they can use the same roads.

Simple in theory, incredibly complex in practice. Not to mention expensive.

But these guys are still working on it.

http://www.betterplace.com/

I like this battery switch station idea by BetterPlace: http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution-switch-stations

A battery pack that could be quickly replaced would be a better solution.

This is the model that Better Place Motors is taking. Their cars have swappable battery packs. Yes, the batteries weigh a few hundred pounds, but they get swapped out by robot at the "gas station." The discharged battery stays behind and gets charged up for the next guy.

You purchase the car; the battery is paid for by usage. Swapping batteries is a flat fee, plus an incremental fee per kWhr of energy you net. The approach they take is similar to cell phones: you own the phone and purchase minutes. You can also charge the car at home, like a typical EV, though I suspect there is still a "lease" fee in those cases.

They have demonstration-scale setups in a few places worldwide. Israel and Denmark are big backers. I would think it a perfect solution for Hawaii. Like so many alternatives to the present automobile infrastructure, it'll take a while, and huge amounts of capital, to reach a critical mass in any market.

This is the model that Better Place Motors is taking. Their cars have swappable battery packs. Yes, the batteries weigh a few hundred pounds, but they get swapped out by robot at the "gas station." The discharged battery stays behind and gets charged up for the next guy.

You purchase the car; the battery is paid for by usage. Swapping batteries is a flat fee, plus an incremental fee per kWhr of energy you net. The approach they take is similar to cell phones: you own the phone and purchase minutes. You can also charge the car at home, like a typical EV, though I suspect there is still a "lease" fee in those cases.

They have demonstration-scale setups in a few places worldwide. Israel and Denmark are big backers. I would think it a perfect solution for Hawaii. Like so many alternatives to the present automobile infrastructure, it'll take a while, and huge amounts of capital, to reach a critical mass in any market.

How about zero guys and ~5 minutes?

Problems... Expensive charging stations and you don't really own the battery.

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Someone is working on that.

That's what a Smart Grid does -- people think it will let them pay spot prices for electricity, no no no, it's about the power company collecting Google-style metrics of power consumption on an appliance-by-appliance, outlet-by-outlet basis, and then giving you 10% off your bill if you consent to having a remote power cutoff installed on your washing machine, air conditioner, and car charger.

I'm not aware of there being a definition for what is a "smart grid". It's still evolving, and many people have different ideas about what "smart" grid should be.

All TFA says is that it's easily possible to build a dynamic system that's unstable. Duh. In aviation, the attribute that you are looking for is called "positive dynamic stability" - which simply means that when things get interrupted or jarred, that the system actively works to mitigate the change and stabilize over time.

This is also something I achieve with a self-healing load-balanced computing cluster. Things happen, loads spike, etc. The system should gradually self-stabilize.

This is a problem as old as the presence dynamic systems.

Better Place says they've had their battery swap system do changes in under 40 seconds. The video on their site shows it happening in just over 1 minute. Not bad for the first gen (wow, that robot moves slow), but they're stuck in that place where they have the idea, and have invested in the technology, but need to get all the players on board or they'll get nowhere. Unless car manufacturers get on board, it won't matter how many swap stations they build. Unless they have swap stations, no car manufacturers want to join. Right now, they've opened one in Israel, but only some demo vehicles can use it so far, since the Renault Fluence Z.E that is supposed to be the flagship battery swap electric vehicle isn't on sale yet (or wasn't in March when that was written). It will be interesting to see what happens. I like the idea of charging my car's battery at home most of the time, but having the option to swap it at a road-side station if I want to go on a long trip. We're a lot of infrastructure away from that day, though.

I'm happy to see some Space investment, but - until we've gone to 100% Electric Vehicles (EV's),
I'd prefer to see that kind of $$$ spend here on the 1st habitable planet AFAWK, eg, building some
battery swap stations (as proposed by Shai Agassi, for his EV's; cf http://betterplace.com/ or his
several competitors), so we're reducing our carbon footprint here.

My 2 cents...

A claim whose figure was from Tesla's staff. Should be interesting court.

Top Gear was spot on about the real world implications - refueling time is one area electrics need to improve to be viable replacements, as opposed to short trip around town, vehicles.

Which is why ideas like Better place have come about. They suggest you have battery swap stations instead.

Unfortunately that requires a lot of new stations and standardised batteries. Tesla would no doubt always require high performance batteries, which may never be available at all these stations...

http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution-switch-stations

In trial phase in select cities around the world.
=Smidge=

How about Better Place? The creator had a prominent TED speech. Fills up faster than a regular car, and cheaper to own. The only issue is that they plan on charging by the mile, but insist it's still cheaper than your gas guzzler.

I could probably quote myself from the comment I made about 6-12 months ago when someone posted an article about the US wanting to buy more green power. But I wont bother to search for the article, so I'll just say:

THIS IS the problem with the currently renewable energy sources. We do not have control over their output. When they produce too little we need to augment, when they procude too much, we need to siphon the excess. The higher the percentage of renewable energy is being used, the more these extremes will vary.
So putting out an economic incetive (like the energy credit in the article), means that societys requirements and needs will be countered by politics (however well intended) when they're told they're overperforming, because the energy shouldn't go to waste.

The exact same thing happens here (where we can't rely on solar during the day, due to heavy clouding during wintertime where powerconsumption is highest), the windmills overproduce heavily at night, where the cost of energy can actually drop to NEGATIVE (yes, you get paid to buy power at certain times of the night on rare occasions in northern Europe). One of the ways to counter this, is actually by tailoring consumption. So if you have a smart house, and an electric car. NOW is the time your batteries will start charging. This is also the idea behind the "better place" http://www.betterplace.com/ Weather you store in a chemical or natural battery (like a lake on the other side of a dam), or you turn down other sources of power, we WILL need a way to regulate that doesn't involve cutting production of the cleanest powersources.

I admit, there WILL be a cost to the energy infrastructure in the future (or as the article suggest, NOW). And as the energy market goes global, we're not just talking sales from state to state. But that investment should have been obvious from the initial planning of the site. If you can procude 400MW, it's no good if the infrastructure is only made to handle a third of that. That'd be like building a 1 lane freeway.

In Denmark they plan to introduce battery switch stations, where you replace your depleted battery recharged one. The batteries are owned by the recharging company, and they are charged at night when electricity is cheap. I believe that an electric car can drive aroung 60 kilometers on a battery, so a day will require a series of battery switches. http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution

You'd need to design the cars, and the stations, to use standard packs,

Yes, and better place has already done that and has taxis driving around in Tokio.

It makes more sense to trickle charge from 120-240V plugs whenever possible;

Yes, but a plug doesn't help you fix the range problem, a swap station does. That's why you use both.

IIRC fast charging stations are supposed to be able to give you 30-40 miles more range in 10-15 minutes,

A swap station gives you full charge in 2 minutes.

You'd need to design the cars, and the stations, to use standard packs,

Yes, and better place has already done that and has taxis driving around in Tokio.

It makes more sense to trickle charge from 120-240V plugs whenever possible;

Yes, but a plug doesn't help you fix the range problem, a swap station does. That's why you use both.

IIRC fast charging stations are supposed to be able to give you 30-40 miles more range in 10-15 minutes,

A swap station gives you full charge in 2 minutes.

Anyone who knows anything about batteries knows that even testing them thoroughly is very difficult.

In a battery-swap system you would lease the battery, not own it. So you wouldn't need to worry about a bad battery, as its not yours either way. If the worst case happens, you just drive to the next swap station and swap it out.

The whole swap process is also a solved issue, takes less then two minutes and is fully automatic, watch this little demo video.

It replaces the problem of your battery capacity shrinking after several years, with the problem of your battery capacity being replaced by a defective unit 6 hours after you buy the thing,

The chance of a swapped out battery failing is just as high as your personal battery failing. There really is no added risk.

How would leasing the battery change the cost of replacement 10 years later?

If you want to make resale easier, spreading the cost is pretty much all you need. Its quite a different thing to sell a used car and require a $30 month contract or multiple thousand dollar for a new battery.

And for other advantages that leasing brings, see betterplace.com.

So is gasoline, thats why you don't lift it with your manly arms, but with a pump. If only somebody would come up with a solution for swapping batteries, oh wait .

Better Place, the initiative started by former SAP exec Shai Agassi, is leaning towards leasing the batteries and have a recently launched taxi service in Tokyo that have quick-swap facilities.
But, convenient as battery swapping would be, it will be a nightmare without standardization.

http://blog.betterplace.com/2010/04/better-place-launches-switchable-battery-electric-taxis-in-tokyo-today/

Here's something from an imaginary place called Tokyo.

http://blog.betterplace.com/2010/04/better-place-launches-switchable-battery-electric-taxis-in-tokyo-today/

Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.

However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.

This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.

Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.

They sell you the car, but they own the battery.

Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).

The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com

Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.

Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.

However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.

Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.

"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."

However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips

BetterPlace (seriously, that's a company name) plans to do exactly this: http://www.betterplace.com/solution/charging/

They're planning to install battery swapping stations in Israel first.

Do you realise that once upon a time there weren't "fueling stations located strategically throughout the city".
In the early days of motoring, fuel stations were rare and cars had to buy and carry fuel in cans.
My point is that until we start buying electric cars, the infrastructure won't get built. It's a bit chicken-and-egg, and companies like better place are trying to fix it.
Perhaps these efforts will fail, perhaps we will instead opt for swappable battery packs.
The point is if we do nothing because the alternative to what we are doing now has disadvantages, then we will never make progress.

Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.

However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.

This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.

Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.

They sell you the car, but they own the battery.

Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).

The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com

Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.

Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.

However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.

Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.

"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."

However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips (less than 5%)."

Chapter 5:21-22

My favourite piece ever to explore how quickly we could retrofit suburbia around walking distance plans is Worldchanging: My Other Car is a Bri

Better Place are rolling out here in Australia in two years.

I can and do maintain one fast car as part of my family's fleet of two (the other is a bush-going family-packing trip-ready diesel 4WD - A Patrol ST - and considering its required dimensions and weight electric is absolutely irrelevant for it for years to come).

Burning-stuff-wise, my choice for a fast-car/daily-driver is a Mini Cooper S. Handles remarkably and is solid German sports car in disguise.

But I really really really want to go electric for my daily driver.

I want the 'I run on the wind' sticker, the instant torque, the 4-year plan that helps subsudise the car. Those I will probably be able to get with any PHEV from Better Place, even if the car is not QuickDrop compatible.

But I also want quickdrop capability and not to own the bloody battery or ever have to worry about battery wear, replacing it, or its diminishing lifecycle. It's a hassle, a worry I don't need.

If BMW do what Tesla, Renault and Nissan are doing, withdraw head from rear orifice and make themselves compatible with Better Place batteries and infrastructure, I'll buy a Mini E the day it hits the dealership floor.

Otherwise I'll hang a Mini E poster on my wall but will be driving a Fluence ZE to work.

As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.

As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit ;))

When the infrastructure gets rolled out, Better Place will have battery swapping stations that will change your electric car's battery in 2 minutes. If you need to go farther than the average 40 mile commute each day, you'll never use it. If you need the range extension, get you battery swapped. There's your less than 10 minutes.

When the infrastructure gets rolled out, Better Place will have battery swapping stations that will change your electric car's battery in 2 minutes. If you need to go farther than the average 40 mile commute each day, you'll never use it. If you need the range extension, get you battery swapped. There's your less than 10 minutes.

The exodus is already here.

Which is essentially what Better Place has planned.

The Better Place project They are developing the entire EV stack, the car, the charging stations, battery pack swapout, etc. Nissan/Renault are building the cars. They are talking that in some circumstances, the upfront costs will be less, as they are going to follow something like a cellphone plan,get the ride for cheaper up front, then pay them for the juice to run it. Private charging stations for at home, then at various places out on the road for fast charging or battery swapout, so you can do trips as well. It is a *very* ambitious project, but several nations and states and some cities inside the US have signed into the deal so far.

  With that said, same as every other electric gadget out there, my bet would be some Chinese manufacturers will be the first to get really cheap/affordable electric cars on the mass market. Chery and BYD seem to be the ones to watch.

It doesn't take long for markets to change, or for the big names to fall. I remember when seeing a Japanese car was not happening at all, to then it got to ultra rare and guys said they would never catch on to now they have superior marques and cred and have a huge international market. So who knows, the transportation sector is going through more changes than ever today. And we ARE going to be getting quite a bit more choice than what we had previously, prices, drivetrains, fuel source, all of it.

Here's an interesting new electric truck that is soon to hit the market the IDEA. A city delivery truck.

Tell ya the one I would want, a mild hybrid, diesel electric, extended cab, 4wd work truck. For short range around the farm, electric only, need to go further, the diesel kicks the generator on. Stationary it would be a whole house electric backup system/job site generator. Haven't seen any proposed yet, but if someone builds one, I bet they would sell, there's a lot of guys out there who want/need trucks, just would be nicer if they had better mileage and that diesel genny option built in would be *sweet*. With some plugin battery capacity, even if it is just say 10 miles, pure gravy. Being a truck, they could even make that an option, say 10 came standard, then you could pay more for each additional battery pack to give ten more miles on the charge up to some reasonable limit, say 50 miles maybe (you wouldn't want to lose all your cargo capacity in other words, but have options to suit each guy's needs).

The other idea I really like is a pure electric ride, then an attachable generator trailer for long trips. Best of both worlds that way, the electric modular hybrid. You wouldn't even need to buy the generator trailer unless you wanted to, the dealers (or whomever...) could have them for rent for the times you need to travel long distance, and that could be for both cars and trucks.

I see...

I guess IF other non-electrical energy sources could be converted to electricity, then this could work. Pretty close to impossible, but some people are trying.

Of course, "Better Place" have this technology in mind for their fast battery swap system. It's kind of like driving into a car wash but much faster, 40 seconds max. The secret? WW2 bomber bay clips that inspired the quick-release capability of a large heavy battery canister. Coming to Israel real soon. http://www.betterplace.com/

With the Better Place system, you pay for the miles you drive, not the battery. Batteries are all owned by Better Place and the car tracks how many miles you drive on their battery. This way the capacity of the battery doesn't matter because you only pay for the amount of capacity that you use. It is the cell phone business model, give away the phone(car/battery) and charge for the minutes(miles).

Better Place Business Model

You mean something like http://www.betterplace.com/our-bold-plan/how-it-works/battery-exchange-stations ? As mentioned at http://www.newsweek.com/id/178851 .

Ya, the supercars are cool if you are a bailed out banker with some buckets of cash sitting around, the three wheelers are...interesting.... looking, Detroit has the usual plethora of concept cars they are fooling around with like they always do, but the one to watch will be the Better Place organization because they are building the whole EV stack, they have a name brand big OEM behind them (nissan/renault to build the vehicles which will be normal looking, plus they are developing a standard charger plus fast battery pack swap outs), and have national governments and some US states behind them. These will be the electric cars that really get the show on the road for the "masses" guy.

every one of these technologies degrades over time, as well as when heated.

And your proof of this assertion is...what, exactly?

Their power production curves are mostly the "fall to near-zero instantly" type, with very little warning that they're running out of juice.

And your proof of this assertion is...what, exactly?

They tool along, thinking they are doing fine, only 218 miles... 219.... THUNK. Car stops or drops to a crawl, barely enough power to operate the new "energy saving" drive-by-wire steering (if that much) to pull off the road.

Or, the engineers that designed the car had half a brain, and built in a reserve with a governor. Once the main cells are depleted, a reserve set of cells kicks in, with a governor that limits speed to, say, 25mph. This would be sufficient to keep the car moving (e.g., breakdown lane) to get it to a safe spot. The governor also pretty much blocks the behavior of the folk you so eloquently refer to as "boobs", since the reserve doesn't give the same performance as the regular batteries.

So now where are we? We have a dead car on the side of the road. Motorist assistance drops by, they're out of juice. Whoops, can't just give them a gallon or so of gas and point them down the road to the gas station 8 miles down... nope, have to get a hauler out there and have them towed.

Or, the engineers that designed the car built it so the battery packs are replaceable on the fly. Like, say, Better Place is calling for. So long as there are decent standards (and for Better Place to fly, there'd have to be such standards), all you need is a motorist service vehicle with spare cells to swap in, enough to get you to a regular charging or battery replacement depot.