The push for electric cars seems to be gathering pace with Japan's Mitsubishi and France's Peugeot-Citroen signing a contract to develop and market electric cars next year. Meanwhile, Hyundai has announced its plans to reveal its all-electric car at the Frankfurt motor show this month. Powered by a 16 kilowatt-hour lithium ion polymer battery, Hyundai claims the car will have a range of 100 miles on a full charge and a top speed of 80mph. It will take five hours to recharge.

Still, the electric car industry has a long way to go. As the Daily Green blog points out, there simply isn't enough venture capital out there in this economic climate to fund electric cars. No one is investing, and no one is buying.

It certainly doesn't help when Audi of America president Johan de Nysschen calls the Chevy Volt a "car for idiots". "No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a (Toyota) Corolla...They're for the intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are...so there are not enough idiots who will buy it," he says.

These cars will be expensive because of the high cost of batteries and redesign. The only way for the electric car industry to take off is with Government intervention and policies. As The Economist says, imposing a carbon tax would make owning a gas guzzler more prohibitive, regulations penalizing emissions, road pricing schemes and installing street level charging points would make an enormous difference.

Of course, that might create a few other problems. Big and politically powerful oil companies could suddenly discover they're in the wrong business. Maybe that explains why one of the only countries that has embraced electric cars is Israel, a country desperate for oil independence.

As one of its entrepreneurs Shai Agassi told the Knowledge@Wharton series, the industry will grow and the technology will get better, pretty much in the same way that mobile phone technology took off in just a few years (remember those bricks?). "We will have a billion electric cars on the road sometime around 2025 because we will have a billion people [driving] and there's no way they can be [driving] gasoline cars. Between now and 2025, a billion new cars need to be added and there will not be any industry that will be more exciting than this one. If you think of an industry that will make a billion of something, [with an average price of] $20,000, you're looking at a $20 trillion industry rising up from nothing today within the span of 10 to 15 years."

But it will only happen with Government backing to drive the investment.