On top of all that there are a few bad design decisions. First is they keep trying to put too big a battery in the cars; this is just stupid until batteries get cheaper and better. Just meet the average commuter's needs for a round trip with margin and you will sell them a car. The next design disaster is when they try to simulate a real gas car by putting a piston engine in as in the volt. The best solution would be to have a low power gas turbine (5-10hp) that can charge the car's battery slowly. This way you eliminate range anxiety by allowing the person to realize that they don't have enough juice to complete the journey so they kick in the turbine (or automatically when they set a destination that is beyond the battery's range) which will buy more range. If the turbine doesn't provide enough immediate range the driver could pull over and get a coffee while the turbine adds a mile of range every minute or two.
Gas turbines have been tried in cars, but the problem is that a large mass spinning at extremely high speeds doesn't work out well in a car environment. The sudden changes in direction (both turns and especially bumps) are horrible for large turbine bearings. Something the size of a turbocharger can handle it, but the equivalent of an even a small aircraft APU is a different beast.
Lastly there are all kinds of engineering gaps in these cars. One interesting one is heating in colder climates. In the winter around here a smaller battery would be eaten just keeping me warm, especially if I am waiting in the car. One simple solution would be to have an alcohol heater which would be simple and single purposed for keeping me warm. This would be great if you could turn it on 10 minutes before you get into the car and it would warm up the car and maybe even the batteries.
Note that resistance heaters have given way to far-more-efficient heat pumps, so it's no worse a range hit than using air conditioning in summer. The HVAC on even a Leaf can be remotely fired up while still hooked to the charger.
Then the last and most important bit which is battery life. That is how many years will these batteries run the car. We all have laptops where the batteries have cacked after a year or two; often fairly suddenly, one moment we had a battery life and then the battery is complaining seconds after unplugging the laptop. So the car companies need to either warranty the batteries and maybe even set an eventual replacement price in stone.
Setting the price in stone might be a bit of a problem, but they are putting warranties on batteries. The Leaf's battery warranty is 5 years/60,000 miles, Tesla's 60 kWh pack is 8 years/125,000 miles, and their 85 kWh pack is 8 years, unlimited mileage.
Even with all that, an electric still isn't workable for my own use case, though it comes close. It's still the whole road trip issue for me. A Leaf would fit 90% of my driving, but it's that last 10% that's the deal-breaker. Sure, I could rent something for the long trips, but that can get expensive.
