In reply to girlymonkey:
Out of interest, what's the (realistic) range? There's an electric Transporter now but the range is only 82 miles, which is nowhere near enough for my average climbing journey, especially considering that you wouldn't want to run it down all the way.
The ranges on the best electric cars are getting comparable to conventional cars though - about 400 miles. Again, question whether that's a realistic range and you wouldn't want to run it down. However once a journey is longer than about 100 miles, I'd want to stop anyway, so in practice a realistic range of 300 miles should be fine and this will improve with time. Could do with prices dropping to more reasonable levels as well!
I reckon in about 5 years' time e-cars and e-vans will be getting fairly common as range increases, availability of charging improves and prices reduce.
One of the ironies at the moment is that some people who may well be interested in getting an e-car can't do that because they don't have home charging facilities. For example, people living in city centre flats who don't use their cars much and/or don't travel very far most of the time - there is no provision for charging in all those car parks in city centre apartment blocks. I don't know if the government has mandated it for new builds - if not, they should do.
The dealership told me the target market for the e-Transporter is business users whizzing round cities all day but never doing that many miles (eg delivery drivers). One of the issues with that driving pattern is the DPFs on the diesels don't like it, resulting in lost time etc.