> Another consideration,  and one that I don't often see addressed 
 > with regard to electric vehicles,  is the power grid.  I can't 
 > remember where it was exactly,  but somewhere in my collection of 
 > Analog magazines there's an article that looked at that issue and 
 > came to the conclusion that in order to move to electric vehicles in 
 > this country we'd need to *double* the power grid,  in order to 
 > support current levels of usage.
That is something that's not often addressed by the electric car evangelists. 
The [daytime] charging stations could have flywheels or huge batteries so 
they'd draw most of their power during off-peak times, and home chargers 
could have timers, but you can only go so far.
Most folks don't think about how much energy can be easily stored/transported 
in a single tank of petroleum-based fuel. :-)
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