The economic realities of electric car?

[iancampbell]

Supercapacitors are used by electric buses and trams that can recharge quickly and frequently at traffic stops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capa_vehicle
Autocars, drones, transporters, vecs and robots would use supercapacitors in a similar way - if they could gather electrical power frequently from their environment, they would have access to a much greater power density at any one time (compared to devices using batteries or fuel cells). On the other hand a car, drone, transporter, vec or robot that needed to store a lot of energy for a long time would be better off using fuel cells or some kind of battery.

I suspect that the design of vehicles in (say) 2050 won't be all that simple. Storage of small amounts of electricity may well be necessary on top of the main engines - for heating up the reaction cells in a fuel cell, for example. It's worth noting that a present-day non-hybrid car holds enough energy in the battery to travel a couple of hundred metres, which is occasionally useful - but the reason for the energy storage is specifically to start up the main engine.

Also, some high-performance hybrids rely mostly on their IC engines and only use the electric power boost for short surges of power; I believe that the latest hybrid BMW does that.