The Top Gear tests where rigged to demonstrated a BMW M-something used less petrol than a Prius.
Of course it was rigged, but they were making an important and very valid point - that these hybrids don't gain anything on long, constant speed runs. Over the 'route' driven, the M-something used less petrol than the Pious, and it's not hard to think why when there's all the weight and conversion losses putting the Pious at a big disadvantage.
There are of course other technologies worth looking at. One of the ways the Pious gets better efficiency is by having what is effectively a CVT (continuously variable transmission). This can dramatically increase engine efficiency by allowing the engine to run at best efficiency for any given power requirement, and using the transmission to match that to required output speed. You can do that with mechanical transmissions more efficiently (eg Torotrac) without the weight or efficiency penalties of electric conversions. It won't give you zero idling emissions (but stop/start and integrated starter/flywheel can), and it doesn't give you regenerative braking - but it's a darn sight lighter !
The Prius has NO, harmful, kerbside emissions - idling in jams.
That's technically correct, but the sort of nonsense a politician uses when he want's to tell a lie without actually telling a lie. IIRC the Pious won't go very far or very fast without firing up the engine - and then the tailpipe emissions are very much not zero.
The Toshiba batteries are the most advanced and not yet on the market but imminent. The 80% charge would need to be at zap stations, which will need to be built. The grid infrastructure is there. They can be trickle charged from home. The infrastructure upgrades would not be so disruptive at all. Large station supercapacitors can charge overnight and store to discharge for the day. In 1914 there was little petro distribution infrastructure - you bought petrol in cans from the chandler. It soon came.
Shanghai are using supercapacitor busses right now. They charge between bus stops by making contact with an overhead contacts at bus stops. Supercapacitors are used to claw by kinetic energy in trains and lifts. Overhead wires can be thinner because of it.
Sorry, on that you are completely deluded.
Do the figures and you'll find that our grid could
not support a significant proportion of cars going electric, and certainly not recharging during the day. Supercaps are fine, but not storing the sort of power capacity that would be needed. Oh, and BTW - do you know what the losses are in charging and discharging a cap ?
I can see the efficacy of their use in busses. A bus stops frequently and only travels short distances between stops. Thus it's energy storage requirement is quite small. Now unless you are advocating that we have to pull in every couple of miles to top up, then that's a red herring.
Apologists for these technologies, or rather advocating their use where they simply cannot work as claimed, like to use these inappropriate examples to push things along. It doesn't take a huge amount of engineering knowledge to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Your quote about petrol distribution infrastructure is a good example of that. It is true that supply adapted to meet demand. The big difference is that liquid fuel transport and dispensing can be built quite easily. A retail forecourt requires just the land you can see, and access to a road so tankers can get in for supply, and customers can get in to buy it. The electricity supply needed is just a normal commercial supply to run the lights and a few pumps - and these days the fridges as well.
You can't deliver electricity by tanker - so you need to upgrade the local distribution network to suit. I can assure you that these upgrades will most certainly be disruptive and expensive - involving the digging up of many miles of roads to lay new cables. This won't be a quick "dig a shallow trench and drop a cable in", these will be slow as the trenches for HV cables will be considerably deeper than for LV. Then the substations will need upgrades (new bigger transformers - lets hope there's room within the substation boundary for them), and the main grid may need reinforcement as well.
Of course, while some of this work is going on, the old kit (transformers, switchgear, etc) will need to be taken out of service - and that means you need to limit demand to what the rest of the supplies in the substation can handle. My brother is in the business, and when upgrading some kit in the substation I can see from my office window, they had to ask some large industrial users to reduce their consumption to avoid overloading the other half of the substation.
Now, for your homework, go off and find the calorific value of petrol/diesel (and propane as well please). Work out the equivalent in kWHr for a litre of liquid fuel.
When you have that, you can work out the equivalent power required to provide a rapid charge facility that comes anything close to filling a petrol/diesel/LPG tank - I think you may be a tad surprised at the figure.
You can also guesstimate the average quantity for a petrol/diesel/LPG fill, and the number of vehicles served by an average forecourt during a day, and hence the total energy storage for your "charge overnight, sell during the day" scenario - and the average power required from the grid.
When you've put some figures together, and can justify why they won't break the system, then you may get people listening.