"David Cantrell" wrote in message
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[snip] Cars are competitive with trains in terms of journey time for
short journeys of up to roughly 70 miles outside major cities. So at
minimum an electric car needs to be able to go 140 miles (for a return
journey), plus, say, another 20 miles just for a safe margin, at
current speeds without recharging. Otherwise people won't buy them.

Indeed, which is why manufacturers like BMW have been very cautious
about putting cars like the MINI E on sale in the UK.

It seems like pure electric cars have a usable range of less than 100
miles, which means a radius of not much more than 40 miles. Because of
the long recharging times, this is also effectively the daily limit
until there's a dense infrastructure of high power recharging points
(not just a few token recharging points in central London).

It also means that even if someone's typical journeys are within this
range, they will be deterred from buying if they need to do the
occasional longer trip for which public transport isn't a reasonable
option. But with such low mileages, the fixed battery leasing cost will
be far more than any saving achieved by using low-taxed electric power
compared to high-taxed petrol or diesel, and the (probably temporarily)
saving on road tax and congestion charges.

So, the electric car will cost more to use, have a very impractical
range, be tedious to re-charge compared to the occasional trip to a
filling station for a quick fill-up, and less fun to drive, thanks to
the heavy batteries. And that's before we ponder the fire risk from a
quarter of a tonne of Li-ion batteries under the floor -- see this
staged reconstruction of what happens when a far smaller laptop battery
explodes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeWq6rWzChw