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I think plug in hybrids are a transitional alternative that just seem to have been skipped over and would have been a very good option in Australia for a couple of generations of the storage.
Take a Nissan Leaf, that gives you maybe 200KM of realistic, reliable range in the car you can buy right now, add a tiny little combustion engine (Petrol or diesel, who cares) that drives only a generator that replenishes battery charge (Not the wheels) fit maybe a 25L fuel tank and suddenly you have 500KM or so of touring range from full on both sources to empty. A little smarts in the software and interface so that the car monitors battery charge and offers you the option to fire up the range extension at some point before it runs dry, which you can cancel if for instance you know you are 10KM from home or a planned charging stop with 50KM of electric range to run, ignore it and it starts topping up, cancel it having forgotten the detour you had to make and it fires up by itself at some point when range is getting tight.
Until storage becomes cheap and capacity and charge times improve to more or less equal the convenience of an ICE car (Which WILL happen sooner or later) it would be a seriously good stop-gap, with the bonus of a 5 minute top up of the range extender every couple of hundred KM if you had an extended trip to do. That would suit probably 90% of the population.
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