THE LETDOWN

Second, what little energy a battery does hold, it can neither accept nor release very quickly: Its power density, as well as its energy density, is low.

To which add that today's batteries don't last long under EV driving conditions: They cannot usually take more than 1,000 full charges and discharges.

The third point is merely economic; but even if you had as much money as the Natural Resources Defense Coucil, you could not drive more than 20 to 40 miles before stopping to recharge the batteries, and even if you had as much time as an EPAcrat approving waste disposal, you would still miss the acceleration of a conventional car: Regular EV's take 10 to 20 seconds from 0 to 30 mph, and most of them do not go faster than 45 mph. (True, there are EV's that have gone more than 150 miles on a single charge, but they were driven at constant, low speeds, and are not typical of what is on the market.)

Hence there are no more than 3,000 EV's on US roads, almost all of them in experimental programs, in particular, in the test program run by the US Postal Service. In Britain, the leader of EV development, there are some 40,000 EV's on the road to take care of house-to-house deliveries, and in Britain that means not only the mail, but also the milk and other dairy products. In some places, EV's have been delivering the milk almost since the proverbial British milkhorse left the scene.