Besides, electricity for the things has to be generated from something, and that something usually involves means that involve at least as much CO2 being released into the atmosphere as there is in auto exhaust. Just because it’s done at a few removes from the car itself doesn’t lessen its reality or impact — the fact that your grandfather gave your father $100 to give you doesn’t negate the fact that it had to come out of somebody’s pocket somewhere.

Be all that as it may, yes, there is probably a niche for electric cars in densely-populated areas, where somebody just wants a vehicle to run to the grocery store and back, drop the kids off at school, football practice and birthday parties, zip over to a friend’s house, drive to the movies and Best Buy, go to church, the golf course and the like. Short jaunts, not over 100 miles round-trip. That’s the sweet spot as far as marketing electric cars is concerned.

Because according to a recent piece in New Scientist, the major stumbling block for consumers is “range anxiety,” the fear that there you’ll be, tooling down the road, when bzzzz… your battery dies, and all you can do is sit there and wait for either the Energizer Bunny or a gasoline-powered tow truck to come get you.

Let’s Deal With Your Road Range.

Get rid of range anxiety, and people who don’t mind topping out at 50 miles per hour have a lot more reason to give electric cars and their sweet styling another look. As New Scientist says, range anxiety might be solvable, if a recent claim by IBM of having solved “a fundamental problem” is true.

Basically, Big Blue says that they think it’s possible — nay, probable — that they can create a battery with a 500-mile range. That would, as they say, finally position electric cars as a competitive option to gasoline engines for the first time.

The problem so far has been that electric cars are forced to use lithium-ion (Li-ion, but let’s call them “Lion”) batteries, which as New Scientist sniffs, “are bulky and rarely provide 100 miles of driving before they run down.”

Fine if your automotive needs are fully satisfied within a 25-mile radius in a major city where you can recharge, such as, oh, Florence, but hardly a mass interest item in the United States. They look good, though. They look real good.

… chemical instabilities which limit their lifespan when recharging, New Scientist notes. Which means that you can’t really use them in cars yet. Which means that, well, they’re not exactly the silver bullet answer for electric cars, which are, after all is said and done, cars.

But the good news in all this is that IBM physicist Winfried Wilcke, who works at the company’s Almaden laboratories in San Jose, discovered recently that in such batteries, “oxygen is reacting not just with the carbon electrode, as it was known to, but also with the electrolytic solvent — the conducting solution that carries the lithium ions between the electrodes.”

What Wilcke and his team — Battery 500 is an IBM-led coalition involving four US national laboratories and commercial partners — found is that “if the electrolyte reacts with the oxygen when the car is in use it will eventually be depleted.” So in collaboration with colleagues in Switzerland, Wilcke and the team used a Blue Gene supercomputer to run what New Scientist described as “extremely detailed models of the reactions to look for alternative electrolytes.”

We Could Have The Answer — In 2020.

And bingo — Wilcke found a material he called “promising,” which he won’t disclose, naturally. He assures the journal that “several research prototypes have already been demonstrated,” and said they hope to have a full-scale prototype ready by 2013. The earliest they’re looking at putting a working 500-mile battery in a car is 2020, so don’t junk your gas guzzler quite yet.

Because there are still a few kinks to be worked out. According to Zhang, T. et al. (2010), “A novel high energy density rechargeable lithium/air battery,” in the journal Chemical Communications, current cell designs require that the charge overpotential is much higher than the discharge overpotential, so “the presence of a significant charge overpotential indicates secondary reactions, besides recharging, are occurring. As a result, the electrical efficiency is only around 65 percent.”

Efficiency is a persistent problem when trying to find something other than the good ol’ gas-powered internal combustion engine to power a car.

But that’s not the only catch the Battery 500 team is working on. “Long term battery operation requires chemical stability of all the components of the cell,” and “current cell designs show poor resistance to oxidation by the reaction products and intermediates,” according to Kraytsberg A, Ein-Eli Y (2011), “Review on Lit-air batteries – Opportunities, limitations and perspective” in Journal of Power Sources.

And one of the biggest problems is simply finding the right environmental interface. As the Kraytsberg article suggests, atmospheric oxygen is needed for cell operation, “but the cell must be shielded from the environment, as water vapor can rapidly degrade the system.”

But still, it’s an intriguing possibility. And those cars sure do look great.

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