Pros and cons of driving electric cars

On the plus side is the lack of a petrol or diesel engine with gearbox and consequent weight reduction, and there are the cost savings.

You no longer have to fill up with expensive carbon based fuels, and there are zero CO2 emissions, which, for the moment, means zero road tax and big benefit in kind savings for company and business users.

Also electric power is instant and can produce exhilarating acceleration like electric powered super cars the BMW i8 or the Tesla. Electric vehicles are also more affordable when you take into account the current government discount of up to £4,500.

They also now look like mainstream motors, rather than something out of Star Trek.

On the other hand, using electricity to charge them also costs money, both to generate at power stations and for actual charging at power points.

Also more you drive, the more electricity you consume. But modern batteries now have a claimed life of 100,000 miles and with a full charge costing around £2 to £2.50 per night, it's blindingly obvious where the savings will come. For the time being at least.

Daft as it sounds, driving an electric car is a bit like driving a six-litre gas guzzling monster.

Blip the accelerator on the big petrol beast and you can almost see the fuel gauge giving up the ghost as it heads south.

You get the same feeling when monitoring the power gauge on electric vehicles. They generally have a range of around 100 miles on a full charge, but you do start fretting when the range gets down to under 30 miles. On one trip I managed in the all-electric Nissan Leaf, Britain's first all electric car, I got home with about five miles to spare on the range gauge.

And that is the major problem. Without the charging infrastructure, consumers are still resistant and a huge effort needs to be made to install more charging points in towns, cities, service stations and public places to make it a really viable proposition.

Charging at home is not that simple either if you don't have a garage. Manufacturers usually provide an AC charging cable which plugs into public sockets, but home charging uses a standard three-pin plug or by specifying a bespoke wallbox at your home.

The good news is that four of the world's major car makers have joined forces in a bid to develop Europe's most powerful network of electric car charging points to be installed from next year.

I have driven a few all-electric vehicles over the last couple of years including the Leaf, the Mitsubishi iMIEV and most recently, the i3 supermini, the first fully electric car from BMW.

At around £30,000 for the electric-only and nearer £35,000 with range extender, a small two cylinder engine which cuts in to charge the battery when the power is low, the BMW is not cheap, but prices are dropping all the time.

When petrol/diesel power is banned, that range extender will no longer apply, so the constant problem of battery range remains. Also the more electrics in use, like wipers, lights, air conditioning and even the radio the more power will be drained. Hence the nervous monitoring of the power gauge.

Battery technology and charging infrastructure has come on. Where you can plug your car in, you can get it about 80 per cent charged up in around half and hour or so.

Twenty years or so might seem a long time away, but so much more needs to be done for the electrical revolution to be sustained. The good thing is that technology moves at a staggering pace, so maybe to the 300-mile range battery will be with us by then. There might even be advances in other areas such as hydrogen cell power or something altogether new.

There's also the small matter of plugging the black hole of lost fuel tax revenue

Let's make sure we are ready.