I think it's interesting that the whole electric vehicle debate has shifted in the last year away from the issue of how to store a reasonable amount of power in a vehicle.
What I hear now is "but it takes 8/12/x hours to recharge!".
This issue does not seem to be down to the battery technology available today, rather it is due the fact that you simply cannot pull enough power out of a standard domestic circuit to recharge these vehicles in a reasonable time.
This isn't hard to see: If you have a 50KWh power pack in your vehicle and you want to charge it in 6 minutes then you need a 1/2 Megawatt supply. A standard 50Amp/240 V supply will deliver about 12KW (or 0.012MW). Go figure.
Megawatt rated power supplies are not rocket science (most electric trains operate at this level) However the cost of installing such a supply at home is likely to be prohibitive for most users (especially if you only need it for a few minutes a week).
I predict that we will shortly see the rise of the "electric filling station" equipped with the kind of power infrastructure that can be optimised to deliver Megawatt-level loads into electric cars.
