I might be missing something, but electric car uses electricity, which is made from coal/nuclear, both of who the environmentalist does not like, so neither solves our problems

I doubt that cars, of any kind, have any long term future. Some trucks maybe. The rest - goodbye.

dovif1: "electric car uses electricity, which is made from coal/nuclear".

What you are missing dovif1 is green power is ideal for cars. The downsides of green power are its expensive and unreliable. Green electricity is expensive compared to fossil fuels electricity, but compared to petrol its dirt cheap: its costs the equivalent of around 70c per litre for mass produced power (eg wind farms). The fact the green power can't be guaranteed at any particular time of day is irrelevant for cars. You are only using it to charge a battery, and that can happen whenever.

More remarkably its even cost effective when you do it yourself. A solar power system that generates the power to drive a car 50Km per day from your roof (ie 10KWh per day, or 3.7MWh per year) will cost you around $23,000. At 10% interest that is $2,300 / year. I took those figures from here:

http://www.actewagl.com.au/faqs/DomesticSolarGeneration.aspx

Driving 50Km per day equates to 18250Km per year. To drive that far using petrol, assuming $1.50 per litre and 10Km per litre, would cost you $2,800 per year. So this makes the most expensive way you can generate renewable electricity (home generated solar power) less expensive than petrol, at todays prices.

There are other considerations of course - the batteries are dammed expensive, electric motors are cheap (compared to petrol motors) and so on. These considerations make the real comparison more complex. In reality, without the recent commercialisation of LiFePO4 batteries electric cars wouldn't be workable. But since LiFePO4 is entering the mainstream now we can expect to see plugin hybrids available in 2010, and pure electric cars in 2012. If the price of petrol keeps going up they will be a bargain.

The article isn't really an advocacy piece for electric cars. Its more of an informative piece - telling you what the future will be like. You won't have much choice in the matter, assuming the price of fossil fuels keep rising. That applies to all fossil fuels bar coal, as they are interchangeable and their price reflects it.

It all sounds very positive Klaas. But how do electric cars compare with gas-powered cars?

We have enormous natural gas reserves in Australia. Would it be quicker, cheaper and more sensible to convert our transport systems to gas power?

I think that the need to get ourselves off of our oil dependency is very urgent indeed. There is scant little room left for fuel prices to rise without really starting to affect our everyday economics, employment, inflation and the very coherence of our society.

Greenhouse gas emissions is quite frankly a distant background issue. Preventing a massive recession and societal upheaval is what really matters right now. The relative costs of alternative energy sources for transport and the speed with which we can make the conversion are the essential elements of this.

Yup they are, the potential is enormous!

http://www.teslamotors.com/index.php

shows what can be done, right now. Fact is that virtually every
MV manufacturer is rushing towards manufacturing their version,
as all can see the tremendous potential.

A huge investment is already going on to improve batteries, which
is the key. Battery scientists at MIT seem to have some real
breakthroughs on their research desks, so stay tuned.

The thing is, our present power stations already waste power in
the middle of the night, so that power can be used to charge batteries,
whilst people sleep. Then wind, solar etc, are all
suitable. In other countries, nuclear and hydropower can all
play a role too.

The thing is, electric plug-ins are not "the" answer, but "one"
answer to the problem. Certainly a major one.

I would say that they are the long term future, but as pointed out above the generation of electricity produces far more CO2 than petrol.

The short term should focus on more efficient cars. This could be done with a tax on petrol. If the cost of fuel went to $5 a litre, there would be a whole lot more interest.