I had a friend when I was a kid with a go-kart his enterprising father had converted to battery power. It was fast, he changed the gearing as the kid got older, and the instant on torque was brutal if you could get traction. Had jack crap in the way of personality though. The go-kart, not the kid.
I'm all for electric cars, I figure if enough of them get in general use it'll get the smog monkeys off the real car enthusiasts backs when we become a minority polluters(which we are already). Plus more gas for us. I'm also eagerly awaiting some viable, affordable battery solutions for converting older vehicles to electric power. You'd think they were brand new but there have been electric cars for ages. Most of the big US manufacturers either toyed with them or had some decent sized outfits retrofitting them right off the line back in the early 80's, I can't count how many moldering 80-81 Escort EV's and Rabbits and Chevettes and such I've come across sitting around, needing batteries lol.. It was always the damn batteries.
GM had this thing in the mid 90's that everyone thinks they killed because it worked too well(within the bounds of available batt-tech)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
People have been converting VW Rabbits for decades, there was a guy with the "EV Pusher" years ago that had the front end of a Rabbit set up as a trailer pushing his car, I can't remember if the car was electric and the supplemental pusher was diesel or vice versa. It was a unique setup. Laptops and cellphones have probably done more to foward EV than anything else.
