Problems with electric vehicles
"an electric motor will give you far more power to weight than an equivalent internal combustion engine these days, with a much better response curve"
No it doesn't. The motor itself is lighter, but instead of 100 pounds of gas (I have a 16 gallon tank in my car). The Prius has about a 100 pound battery pack, and that'll move it like 2 or 3 miles.
So the big issues I see with pure electric vehicles:
1) Weight of the batteries. For real, if anyone makes a car light enough to be reasonable with all those batteries in it, they could drop a gas (or diesel) engine in the same vehicle and get crazy MPGs. If batteries come out with much better power density than present types, I won't be surprised if the tide isn't turned in the electric vehicle's favor. However....
2) Infrastructure. Overlooking the fact that most power now is generated via coal, gas, etc., the fact of the matter is that there's nowhere near enough of a power grid to transport all that extra power electrically, not enough generating plants to generate the power, and so far the charging times are unreasonable. I mean, the pipe dream "wouldn't the electrical plug melt?" claims are like 15-30 minutes. I know on a road trip, I wouldn't want to wait that long at the gas station!
That said I'm all for hybrids. I waste all sorts of potential energy having to slow down down hills to stay within the (artificially low) speed limits here in town, have to stop almost every single block due to a love of stop signs and stop lights (which are mistimed so usually it's normal to get at least 5 or 6 red lights in a row.). For me, enough to do 35MPH-0-35MPH would cover it, I'm sure I'd get a huge increase in mileage. (Probably capturing from 55MPH would be better, to cover cities with better speed limits than we're blessed with here.)