They don't go far enough and then you need to charge them for eight hours. The answer is apparently better batteries and while the performance of batteries will improve, I don't see them getting to the point where one could reasonably drive from Sydney to Melbourne in a day nor Sydney to the Gold Coast any time soon.
One way to get round this would be to treat cars more like laptops; you don't use your laptop on the battery for 3 hours then sit round for 2 waiting for it to charge. You keep it plugged in when you can and only use the battery when you need to. If you inverted this idea and ran on battery around town, short trips and used power on longer trips - on the freeway / motorway. Then one could cover long distances with an electric car.
I'm not of course suggesting we whip and buy 1000Km flex and hang it from the back of the car, rather use some kind of induction in the road to get power into the car. Pretty much turning the motorways into huge Scalextric tracks. Some kind of induction system would allow the batteries to charge while also providing power to move the car.
It is probably not viable as the cost to build the infrastructure is most likely prohibitive and possibly having a big enough induction coil that close to people may not be healthy. Well, as healthy as the current western diet.
Another alternative would be to treat the batteries like BBQ gas bottles and rather than refilling them yourself you swap them when empty. Service stations would then turn into large charge lots. It might be more efficient to direct power to service stations than homes and businesses for charging?
My final thought was Hydrogen / electric hybrid. The Hydrogen could either charge the batteries or be the primary power source,
