Would you drive an electric car ?

[TykeMerc]

Apart from that, there was a documentary I remember seeing on Discovery, Nat Geo or some such where scientists were not impressed with the electric car technology as you actually burn more fuel chaarging the damn battery than you would need to get the car the same distance on a single charge, i.e. negative entropy.

That's the classic issue with any kind of electric battery cars, the transmission losses over distance including transformers and cable resistance (even at higely stepped up voltage and minisule current) are significant and there's no such thing as a 100% (60% is optimistic) efficient energy transfer system from a battery to kinetic energy in drive terms.

For the non engineers/scientists efficiency is a measure of the amount of power out compared to that put in and it's a matter of lies, damn lies and statistics where you decide how much energy is put in in the first place. In the case of electricity generation do you just measure the power to charge the batteries, or the energy consumed at the power station to generate that electricity, or the energy required to get the fuel to the station or the energy required to build the station, the equations are complex and a matter of politics rather than science when it comes to the reporting.
The same goes for refined fuels (petrol, LPG and diesel), how much of the energy lost in the extraction, transport, refinement and sale is included in the efficiency figures is again a political matter.

There's a similar argument when it comes to pollutants, for instance the muck that's created in the creation of a catalytic converter is arguably worse than that that cleaned up by the converter in operation although that muck is obviously localised.

As Blighty Boy pointed out alternative fueled vehicles only become viable when the fuel is available and the technology is matured enough to be cost effective, performance has already been tackled and isn't an issue.