“Thanks” won’t be the first thing that the “Where’s my electric car?” crowd says when they get it. It’ll be, “Where’s my air conditioning?”

One of the biggest problems with electric cars is electricity. It's bad enough that EVs have to lug around their own batteries and/or gen-sets (at least until those magnetic highways are built). The electricity required just to tell you how fast you're going, to indicate how little range you've got left (half it), and to power your nav system is significant, and it isn't getting you any closer to the plug.

Aside from the drudgery of transferring (charging) and storing (batteries) electricity, just moving it around the vehicle itself and balancing the on-board demand for traveling range and basic safety and comfort poses a huge challenge to what constitutes an acceptable level of safety and comfort.

The big effort today is to reduce the number of electrical components and reduce the wire-distance that the electricity need to travel. The point is to both preserve electricity and reduce weight (electrical components are pretty heavy). So engineers are wracking their brains to consolidate and isolate electrical functions.

The power draws of such necessities as ABS brakes and instrumentation are huge – we won’t even get into air-conditioning and whumpa-whumpa sound. So until we can decisively make fools of Newton, Franklin, Ohm, Watt, Faraday, Edison and the rest of those old cranks (oh, happy day!), we’re going to have to get a lot better at husbanding the juice.

Engineers have done a great job of increasing the safety, performance, comfort and convenience of automobiles in the last couple of decades, thanks mainly to the explosion of electronics. Controllers, servo-motors, sensors, and awesome tunes operate at the flick of a button (not even that in most cases), quietly sipping their little bit of juice out of the electrical system, and routes it through its extensive galaxy of microprocessor intersections and wires. It’s all good when you have an on-board hi-amp generator, like an alternator driven by an internal combustion engine. But when the vehicle itself is relying on stored or generated electricity to locomote its own avoirdupuis, suddenly those electrons become a pretty valuable commodity. Right now to answer to the petulants is, "bring a fan."