Agreed. Electric cars need the high performance Li-Ion batteries, the 3 minutes charge = 3 hour play kind that you get in MP3 players. I mean, if they merely got it to the point where you could go to a fuel station, plug it in to charge and go in to grab a coke and by the time you get to the cashier your car is charged.
I mean, combine this with regenative braking and thin-film solar cells (so as not to add unnecessary weight and lower mileage), you could greatly improve over most current full-electric cars.
What I'm hearing from them is that the critical feature that is holding electric cars back is the power system. This field is pretty experimental but someone who could come up with the magic battery that charges in 5 minutes would probably have a valuable system on their hands.
Another angle would be to have cars that run on batteries that can be swapped out at gas stations as needed. There are a bunch of issues that need to be considered for this approach but it's still a neat idea.
Yeah I've seen the Tesla Roadster, and all electric cars need to be manufactured like that. I have a Li-Ion drill, it takes 30 minutes to get a full charge yet it takes me over 4 hours to run it down with constant use, so I don't get how some electric cars can barely get you around town and take 8 hours to charge on a night.
I'd accept 2 hour charge time for in city driving, but most of my driving with work isn't in a city, and thus electrics are useless until they're as fast to charge as a petrol is to fill.
I mean, combine this with regenative braking and thin-film solar cells (so as not to add unnecessary weight and lower mileage), you could greatly improve over most current full-electric cars.