No Improvement In Electric Car Range In Last 100 Years

From "The status quo of electric cars: better batteries, same range" by Gail the Actuary (Gail E. Tverberg) on the Oil Drum Blog:

Electric motors and batteries have improved substantially over the past one hundred years, but today's much hyped electric cars have a range that is - at best - comparable to that of their predecessors at the beginning of the 20th century. Weight, comfort, speed and performance have eaten up any real progress. We don't need better batteries, we need better cars.

From about 1895 to the mid-1920s, and following the bicycle craze of the 1890s, electric cars shared the road with petrol and steam powered cars. EV's were comparatively slow, heavy, and had a smaller range than their alternatives. During the very early years, however, electric automobiles were the most popular option for a short time, mainly because of two reasons.

Firstly, they were easy to start, while a gasoline car had to be cranked up and a steam powered car required a long firing-up time (not unlike a wood gas car). Secondly, there were few paved roads outside the city at the turn of the 20th century, which made the limited range of EV's not that problematic. The production of electric vehicles peaked in 1912: during that time there were 30,000 EV's on the road in the United States, two-thirds of these were used as private passenger cars. Europe had around 4,000 electric vehicles.