The problem, as EE’s have tried to explain to the “I love unicorns!” crowd for decades, is that batteries are a very inefficient energy storage device.
There is no battery technology that can compress energy into a density remotely near that of chemical fuels (eg, gasoline, much less diesel fuel). None. There’s nothing REMOTELY close to those energy densities on the horizon in battery technology.
Now, in addition to the energy density problems of batteries, there’s the additional problem that you can remove or replace energy into batteries only so fast without compromising them. If you want to see what I mean, just go get a 100 amp 12 charger (they’re used to rapidly recharge truck and tractor batteries) and put that puppy on a common car battery. You’ll find after you do this several times that the battery simply won’t hold as much power on each successive recharge. Batteries don’t like to have power rammed into them - they have definite maximum sustainable recharge rates, which when exceeded, cost you battery life.
Oh, BTW - be very careful because a car battery might explode if you try to dump 100 amps/hour into it. Want to recharge that battery safely? Recharge it overnight at 2 amps/hour - or maybe for a full day if it was really dead.
Then there’s the discharge rate issues. Batteries store energy in a chemical reaction, and as everyone knows, chemical reactions slow down in the cold. So cars like the Volt end up spending some of their energy to heat the battery in cold weather so they can get power out of it faster than natural rates would allow. Yea, that makes for really long ranges: Using battery power to heat the battery so we can discharge it faster... um, what problem were we trying to solve again?
The problems here are multiple. The electric auto advocates haven’t come close to solving even ONE of the multiple issues of: power density, discharge rates in cold weather, recharge rates, weight, etc. They’re still peddling the same ideas from 100 years ago (literally, no exaggeration) and they’ve made very scant progress in the meantime.
Now, compare that to the progress made in diesel autos, and the electric car advocates look like they’re backing the sloths in a three way race of progress between rabbits (diesels), turtles (gasoline engines) and sloths (electric vehicles).
You’re right that technology gets better over time, but the truth is that electric auto technology isn’t really getting all that much better. Sure, they’re more comfy, more stylin’, with sexier dashboards, etc. That’s true for all cars. The ONE thing that has to get better for the electric car to become viable is the battery technology, and it can’t get just a little bit better around the edges. It has to become “order-of-magnitude” better.
That simply hasn’t happened in the last 100 years. And from what I know as a EE, it ain’t on the horizon, either. If we had even one-tenth the rate of progress in battery technology we’ve had in sold state electronics (transistors and chips) in the last 50 years, you’d be able to power your car for 50 miles with a battery that is about the size of a wristwatch.
Look at it another way: Consider how much music you can now store on an iPad Nano. A huge leap forward in personal entertainment since the first portable transistor radios, right?
Batteries, relatively speaking, have progressed from a 12” LP vinyl record to the 45RPM single in the last 100 years.
You can bet that for any problem with your battery set, they will write the warranty such that the customer pays 90% of the time. Just like tire problems.