The main problem with electric vehicles is the long charging times. Many electric cars have a range of 300km or more, which is perfectly acceptable (and quite common) for petrol cars. When my petrol tank comes close to empty, I can stop at the nearest petrol station, refill and go. Except for extreme cases, petrol stations are much more frequent than 300km.

But electric cars have two problems.

First, the charging points are still not as frequent as petrol stations. With electric cars becoming more common, this is going to change so it is not such a big problem in the long run.

The second problem is that whilst it takes less than 5 minutes to refill my petrol tank, it takes hours to recharge the electric battery. This is the crucial point and the main hindrance to the world dominance of electric vehicles.

Solutions?

• Standardize the batteries. Like the pony express of old, you could simply swap your empty battery for a fresh one. The empty one would stay at the station, be recharged and swapped again by the next customer.
  Problems with that:
  1) batteries are heavy, swapping will have to be mechanized or the batteries segmented;
  2) manufactures would have to agree;
  3) a system would have to be designed to diagnose and deal with bad batteries (what to do with them? who will pay for it?)
• Improve the battery technology to make the charging faster. Much faster. Not 8 hours, not 2 hours, not even 30 minutes. 5 minutes max. Achievable? I doubt it. Charging a typical 6Ah Prius battery in 5 minutes would require a 72A current. Charging 5 such cars at the same station at the same time would require a massive infrastructure upgrade. And the battery itself would have to cope with such big charging currents.
• Switch to a different battery technology altogether, where "charging" would involve simply replacing the electrolyte. The discharged electrolyte could be collected, recharged and reused by the next customer, pony express style. As far as I know, such technology does not exists yet but it might in the future.
• As above, but without recycling the electrolyte. The "electrolyte" could be called "fuel", spent completely on producing the electricity and simply refilled when needed. This is how hydrogen fuel cells work. Apparently they have not been the great success they promised to be.
• Any other ideas?

Hmm, I can see why the widespread adaptation may take a while. Nobody wants to spend too much money on picking the wrong technology.