First off, let's take a moment to appreciate what we've got. Gasoline is fantastically dense in energy. Approximately 46 MJ/kg! Ethanol is about half as energy

First off, let's take a moment to appreciate what we've got. Gasoline is fantastically dense in energy. Approximately 46 MJ/kg! Ethanol is about half as energy dense, which is why it is usually mixed with petroleum gasoline. Engines must be specifically designed to operate on pure ethanol. Going from the numbers quoted on Tesla's site, their Roadster's lithium ion battery packs have an energy density of 0.456 MJ/kg. If you want to have the same range, electric vehicles have to devote over a hundred times more weight to batteries than gas-guzzlers do to their tank contents. To make matters worse, spent gasoline weighs nothing while spent batteries weigh the same as full batteries. Electric motors are mechanically simpler/lighter and innovative design can carve even more weight off of new vehicle designs, but there is a very good reason why cheap, long-range pure electric vehicles are still a ways off. Lithium ion batteries are also pretty nasty things to produce in terms of environmental impact. It's debatable if a plug-in electric vehicle run off of solar/wind/etc. power actually has less impact than a small gasoline car does at present. If the power used comes from coal then an electric car is actually a huge step in the wrong direction. Also note that the U.S. is not a major producer of Lithium, so dependency on foreign nations is not broken by switching to electric cars. If corn derived ethanol is worse for the environment than petroleum derived gasoline, the only reasons to use it are economic. If it's cheaper, people will likely use it. (Nevermind that so-called "biofuels" often command a premium because people think they're environmentally friendly!). However, if biofuels are bad for the environment, electric cars are bad for the environment, and other alternatives are not yet commercially viable, what does that leave? Well, sadly, it means stop driving so much! Use public transit. Bike. Walk. Carpool. Stop throwing irrational hissy fits about pipelines meant for safely transporting petroleum if it's the least harmful option that's currently available. Hopefully better electrical storage technologies will become available before too long. Nanomaterials do potentially offer ways to make capacitors powerful enough to eclipse current chemical battery technologies. This is years or decades off into the future unfortunately. I'm not saying all this to be a drag, but most people really think battery technology has come a lot further than it actually has. Gasoline is still pretty darned useful stuff.