Oh, and a couple more points:
I have better hope in seeing synthesized hydrocarbons to get our vehicles to net zero carbon emissions than any improvement on the chemical storage battery.
Synfuels are in-use today to some extent, and they can be carbon neutral (if you source the carbon from the atmosphere, which is a big, expensive, and inefficient "if"), but they suffer from nearly all the same disadvantages of petroleum fuels (pollution, distribution, 60% energy loss from heat-engine inefficiencies etc), and add a major new problem: cost.
You need lots of hydrogen (electrolysis is roughly 75% energy efficient) as well as a source of carbon, then you spend more energy to combine them into a synfuel - creating 250 gallons of synfuel takes over 10 MWh of energy, depending on your sources. Then you have to spend yet more energy to distribute it, only to throw away a further 60% of your energy as heat when combusting it. Synfuels might be viable for expensive niche needs (Formula 1 is interested), and possibly even some air travel, but the energy costs of manufacture put it well out of reach for most uses. It makes hydrogen fuel cells look great in comparison, though both pale next to BEVs' overall efficiency of 85%.
I expect that a similar combination of diesel engine and electric motor will be scaled down to fit into a common automobile to improve upon fuel efficiency.
Not sure how you missed this, but hybrid cars have been a thing for decades now. They're very popular, though they still suffer from burning petroleum, and the extra complexity of two power trains doesn't help with reliability.