Electric car journey by the BBC - reality check

I was stuck behind one for a while in a massive traffic jam, and couldn't help wondering how long its charge would last.

It's pretty cool, and definitely worth the time developing, as nearly 50 pound to fill up a 1.2 is getting a tad silly now.

...And on top of that, daily congestion charge to park in a side-street that doesn't actually go anywhere, and is just off Tower Bridge Road which is NOT in the zone.

I feel this thread is becoming a rant..best stop now

See what you've started, Steve.

Me and Clive were having a good yarn about this yesterday, and not being electrical engineers, and knowing nothing about electric cars, are a bit baffled by some of the problems.

The electric milkfloat has been around since the 1960's, with its huge bank of batteries.

The weight, size and charge life (and prob cost) of the batteries were the thing holding back development, but surely they must have it cracked by now?

If something like a medium size saloon had 2 batteries, and 1 charged the other up as it drove along by means of a dynamo/airpowered whatever, couldn't it in theory then keep going??

Then when you park up and plug it in, both batteries get charged up. Clive took it a step further, and if the batteries were removable, couldn't you pull into a major filling station that had banks of these on charge, and say for

I bet they didn't use duracell!
Hehe, no but really the amount of electric needed to power a vehicle is seriously high, all I could think of would be spend lots of money on optimising the technology that the car batteries are based on.
simply making them Bigger or adding more isn't a good way to go.
As for a 4x4 Steve I don't know how long they would last on electric! Maybe too the end of the street and back:P

so no electric eddie stobart wagons for a while then...

There's a thought, silent 38 tonners whizzing up the M6!

yeah.. whizzing! at about 25mph lol. I highly doubt that, there has to be another way, cleaner/totally clean fuels, I know i've heard about cars that run on air! that's a good idea, there's lots of that and they don't pollute to make it harder for the rest.