Laptop industry.

That doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Laptops are getting longer battery life due to improved component efficiency, such as speed-scaling, not due to better batteries.

Really? Then how did I read about those battery technologies being researched, partially fueled by the laptop industry...?
Yeah, ok, it's the proc for the immediate present.

How about another thing. Lets take a boat for example. Lets say I take my old 14 ft aluminum river boat, load it up to capacity with batteries and one person with an electric trolling motar. Then take my large 18ft Lund with a 115 HP engine (which is way underpowered for that boat), and I would be that 115 would out do that little electric boat. Heck, I'll up the ante a little bit, I will bet that the 9.9 HP engine on the back of that thing could do better than the electric.

Ok, the definite differences between electric and gas I see so far:
-Range
-Refuel/Recharge time
-Noise
-Efficiency
-Amount pollution produced
-DIY/Pre-made

Indefinite differences:
-Power (Most are 20-45hp max, there exist motors that can hit 123hp max. Less efficient at max hp.)
-Usability (I'm thinking of stick shift; personal preference)
-Price (Too many variables)
Practicality derives from those, overall worth derives from those.

He's right. Battery progress has stagnated, partly due to stuff like the oil companies buying controlling shares in the companies developing improved technologies and supressing said technology.

*wrong. There haven't been any significant (eg, an order of magnitude) improvements to batteries over the last 20 years. Its still just acid and metal, even though there *is* still research in the area. A major improvement is potentially on the way, however, as someone at MIT was researching using carbon nano-tubes to drastically increase the surface area in a capacitor, and then using that as a battery, which would be an ideal solution. Charges in minutes (even seconds) and won't "expire"

Hence why I said "Battery progress has stagnated". Anyway, that capacitative technology sounds promising - got a link on that?

Way underpowered!? My 16ft Fisher can plane out with a 50... (And that's with the livewell full! )

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:MIT_Nanotube_Super_Capacitor

hmm... I read the article and that would make electric vehicles a *lot* more practical. You could easily recharge as fast as you could refill your gas tank

when it is rated for a 175 HP moter, and I said underpowered, it still gets up on plane, just takes a little while. The problem is when we get in waves, we don't have the moter to do the stuff in the most effective manner.

And so my friends, you can see that nobody killed the electric car. The technology simply has not reached the point of feasability (sp, lazy). There is no conspiracy, morons.

Not true, if you've seen the movie. Even within this thread so far, we've confirmed that consumers (e.g., you guys) are part of the problem - many of you reject even the idea of an electric car over gas power.

...Because I reject the idea of having to wait 3 hours to charge up my car. Like jpez said, this isn't a conspiracy. Just because it was in a movie doesn't make it true (heck, look at the 9/11 "loose change" videos - its 1 hr 45 min of unchecked, completely false, and intentionally misleading "information")

How do the collective & uncoordinated actions of self-interested consumers amount to a conspiracy? Isn't that what we could call the free market?

I never said anything about a conspiracy. You're the one who brought up the term or concept of a conspiracy in the first place. I'm merely trying to figure out and confirm which factor or factors led to the downfall of the seemingly utopian electric car. The collective force of free-market consumerism indicates, if anything, media bias and miseducation to me.

Yes you did, in your very first post, and later on throughout the thread. You repeatedly blame the oil companies (and the government to an extent in the first post, even though other countries don't have EVs either), even for stuff they have no interest in or interest in seeing improvements, such as with batteries - everyone wants better batteries

Since when does placing blame on an issue make it a conspiracy? If I accidentally throw a baseball through your window, it's my fault, and the blame lies on me, but it doesn't mean that I'm conspiring against you. Because we have the technology and they don't. Seriously, you should just watch the film. The battery companies like Duracell and Energizer don't want you to have better batteries - they sell more if the batteries run out faster. They just need to find the balance between long-enough lasting batteries and making a profit. The oil companies and energy companies don't really want you to have better batteries either, so you have to recharge more often.

Not really. Europe has all the same tech we got, and there are other countries with more advanced tech than us already in the market. You can't blame it on that, try again