Personally I don't see battery swap cars catching on. The few people who could put up with the limited range and inconvenience should probably take the bus instead. Unlike Europe and the US Australia has decades of natural gas and I think we should use CNG. That offers the option of home refuelling with a $3000 compressor. So instead of crawling around with a low battery looking for a swap station you drive all day (say 500km) on a single tank then take it home for an overnight refill. As more trucks convert to CNG as a diesel substitute service stations will offer CNG bowsers. Therefore you should be able to drive Sydney-Melbourne on one or two stops for CNG as opposed a dozen or more stops for battery swaps.

A variation on this is of course the CNG-battery hybrid with more efficient electric drive but that won't leave a lot of space for luggage and pets. I suggest that governments now offering bailout money to car companies don't try to pick the winner in advance but let things sort themselves out.

I'm pleased to see an innovative approach in this area. However, the bottom line is still whether an electric car would be the best-value solution to meet my needs - that seems a long way off even with a carbon tax, from the article it would cost me a lot more and not cover all my journeys. It's a lot easier to provide a widespread, dense network in a small country than it would be in Australia, and having an electric car for metropolitan use will not be a cheap option for those who make long car journeys regularly.

I'm sure the technical limitations of electric cars, range, performance etc, can be overcome, given a little time, this is not the main problem.

The real problem is, where is the electricity, to charge the batteries going to come from? While the arguments about coal, nuclear, & renewable power generation rage between left, & right, in many countries, no new generation capacity is getting built. In countries like the UK, If the rubbish doesn't stop soon, & power station building start, it is a matter of can they keep the lights on, not can they charge the car battery.

This scheme, to take over our transport needs would require at least a 30% increase on power generation. The current crop of renewables a have no chance of doing this.

What a delicious irony. Which do the greens hate most? The petrol powered car, or the coal fired power station?

Missing from all the discussion is battery technology. As pointed out the current crop of batteries will only last about 100 miles before a recharge is required which plainly will not work outside the boundaries of our larger cities.
The only solution currently on offer is an ancillary petrol powered engine to generate more electricity to charge the batteries - this is still a petrol powered vehicle with the added encumbrance of weight and electricity transference inefficiencies of batteries and electric drive motors.

The ideal would be a battery that is light weight, recharges in minutes and discharges over several hundred miles with a life time comparable to the rest of the car. This battery would also need the capacity to offer fast acceleration.

This is a research project at MIT in Boston - too bad our government and car manufactures here in Aus are not willing or able to step up to this obvious technology need. It seems they would rather dig for coal or more oil.

The move to fully electric private and light commercial vehicles is happening much faster than anyone predicted 5 years ago...(it may slow down while oil prices remain low). But Hasbeen is right - the biggest problem is going to be what stationary power source will be used. Petrol is bad. Coal is bad. Government actually has a chance to get ahead of the curve on this one by ensuring that the recharge infrastructure that will be needed is sourced from renewables.

Natural gas can be done - cng or lpg - but this is temporary fix and is clearly not the direction that global automobile companies are taking...

The recent Rudd-Holden announcement is a bit bewildering in this regard - it appears to be about 10 years behind the rest of the world and determined not to catch up.

Appreciating that many need a longer range vehicle in Australia, many also do not, and could hire one on the rare occasions when they do. The small electric runabouts are much more efficient than petrol driven equivalents so the greenies probably won't worry about the extra but now very efficient and clean coal stations.

My specific concern is how long the batteries last. How many years? How long did the Lithium polymer battery in your iPod last? How much to replace? Can they be cheaply reconditioned? Can they be cheaply or safely recycled? Is there even a plant to do so? What is the impact and wastes of battery production?

I would be fine with a runabout with 100km range, but not if I have to replace $15,000 of batteries every 5 years.

Does anybody have figures?

Rusty.