[glenra]

Making people sit and wait for an hour whenever they need to recharge is just plain nuts. It makes the "road tripper" use case untenable. The right way to handle this for road trippers is to swap the battery packs or swap their contents. Don't make the driver wait while his battery is recharged - swap in a full pack and send him on his way. Charge the battery that was left behind slowly and at leisure, then give it to the next driver who pulls in needing a charge.

I don't care how many charging stations there are - adding multiple hours of charging time to a short trip like that is just not going to work.

Although there's one other conceivable option for a technical solution - if you could add charging circuitry to the freeway and recharge while driving, that would be a game-changer.

[rm999]

There's a company that's been working on swappable car batteries for some time now:

http://www.betterplace.com/

I agree with you that this is the only realistic mainstream future of electric vehicles as long as batteries remain in their current low-density state.

[JamisonM]

If swapping is the answer then in that case you need a non-ownership model for batteries. I am not going to swap out a brand-new battery for a 2 year old one and then be stuck with that one for the foreseeable future on my regular local car use.