Los Alamos says it can manufacture gasoline from CO2 in the air at a price of $4.60 a gallon
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
I don't think fully-electric cars are too far off, and when that is the case, the nuclear energy will be able to power the cars directly (or at least their batteries), along with solar power or whatever else.
Electricity is simply much more flexible since it can be produced and used in so many ways and distributed relatively cheaply. Gasoline only works for combustion engines, and it has to be manually transported. Our current infatuation with gasoline is going to look pretty stupid when we finally get to the point that it's hardly used anymore.
I mean, combine this with regenative braking and thin-film solar cells (so as not to add unnecessary weight and lower mileage), you could greatly improve over most current full-electric cars.
What I'm hearing from them is that the critical feature that is holding electric cars back is the power system. This field is pretty experimental but someone who could come up with the magic battery that charges in 5 minutes would probably have a valuable system on their hands.
Another angle would be to have cars that run on batteries that can be swapped out at gas stations as needed. There are a bunch of issues that need to be considered for this approach but it's still a neat idea.
I'd accept 2 hour charge time for in city driving, but most of my driving with work isn't in a city, and thus electrics are useless until they're as fast to charge as a petrol is to fill.
If they can make gasoline cheaply it's carbon neutral by definition. It's actually quite a promising avenue; one of many.
And when are you going to convert to the metric system like any other sane country?
http://www.google.com/search?q=4.60+USD+per+gallon+in+USD+pe...