Vipros
has hit the nail on the head.

I can fill my car with diesel, drive it for 600-odd miles, then refuel it and drive another 600-odd miles. Repeat indefinitely.

OK, I wouldn't actually do that, but I do quite often drive a lot of miles in less than the time it would take to recharge a battery car. If a battery car had a range of say 500 miles, then it would be OK. Or if it had a range of 200 miles, but only took 3 minutes to recharge, then that would also be fine.

But as it happens, it has a range of 200 miles and takes hours to recharge fully. That's no use.

And worse still, current Li ion batteries lose capacity over time. So while a new car has a range of 200 miles, by the time it's a year old that will have fallen to about 160 miles.

We need to crack the nuclear fusion problem (unlikely in the next 20 years, I'll admit) and use it to produce methanol from atmospheric CO₂ and water. Then we can still have internal combustion engines running on relatively safe liquid fuel.

Edit - looks like PJM and I think alike!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 23 Dec 2008, 10:50, Reply)