Tesla Motors of San Carlos, California, advertises a Roadster with a top speed of 125 miles per hour and a range of 220 miles. But Linda Nicholes, president of electric car pressure group "Plug in America," is still awaiting delivery two years after ordering hers at a price of $100,000.
"We've been waiting eagerly ever since. I've been told September (2008)," said Nicholes, who is nonetheless still excited. "It's sleek, snazzy. All will be forgiven."
For those who can't wait, Monaco's privately held Venturi is marketing a 297,000 euros (235,000 pounds) electric car with a top speed of 160 kilometres per hour (100 mph), called 'Fetish'.
"It's the pleasure to drive which will make it someone's favourite object," a spokeswoman said, explaining the name and adding it had sold five models on an expected 25-unit run.
Meanwhile, specialist car producer Think, based in Oslo, plans a run of 8,000 full electric cars in 2009 at 20,000 euros each.
And a Renault-Nissan alliance plans to start deploying full electric cars from 2010.
Electric car developments hinge on batteries which are light but pack enough power to travel more than 100 miles. Aggressive conversion of the global fleet to electric alternatives may take 30 years, said Charles Gassenheimer, chairman of lithium-ion battery supplier Ener1, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Alternatively, you can keep your car but switch the fuel, up to a point. Sugar-based biofuels are making serious headway against gasoline in Brazil, where nearly 90 percent of new cars have flex-fuel engines, which burn any combination of the two.
In the United States, tax breaks help biofuels made from corn supply about 2 percent of the domestic fuel mix.
But biofuels made from crops such as corn aren't the near-term replacement for gasoline, either. A finite supply of farm land has pitted them against food, inflating grain prices.
A tank of standard, U.S. corn biofuel blend, called E10, contains enough calories to sustain an adult man for 11 days. That underlines the problem of using food to make car fuel while 850 million people in the world are hungry.
Limited scope for global crop yields improvements will limit such "first generation" biofuels. Further off, sustainable biofuels which come from algae or woodchips and don't compete with food, may reach 10 percent of U.S. road fuel by 2022.
While some experts say that cars fuelled by hydrogen fuel cells, which rely on the conversion of hydrogen and oxygen into water and which don't have harmful emissions, are promising, the technology is still in its infancy.
Honda Motor, began production on June 16 of a new fuel-cell car, the FCX Clarity, but has plans to sell only 200 in the United States and Japan in the next three years. The biggest hurdles for proliferation of hydrogen cell vehicles are a lack of fuelling stations and the high cost of development.
