What I can't understand is where is the economy, either personal or to society as a whole, of an electric car. Instead of burning fossil fuel, you are running your car off batteries. You recharge your batteries when you return home by plugging your car into an outlet, where it consumes current generated by a power plant miles away---from burning fossil fuel. You can't even break even because the inevitable thermodynamic inefficiencies of converting chemical to mechanical to electrical to mechanical energy again have got to be less than just converting chemical to mechanical once and for all, in your car engine. And we're not even considering battery, transmission line and transformer losses.

A fuel-electric hybrid vehicle may work more economically because the engine is designed to work at its most efficient regime to create electricity, and because some energy can be recovered from the braking process, but it takes a certain amount of Joules to push each Kilogram of car at a certain speed. The only way to get around this, after you removed all the obvious inefficiencies, is lighter cars traveling at slower speeds for shorter distances. Buy a Moped and move closer to work.