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The Once and Future Electric Car. "Why did we abandon the electric vehicle?" asks Dr. Jean Botti, chief technologist at Delphi Corp.'s Innovation Center. He pauses, then answers his own rhetorical question, "Two reasons: range and battery cost." Find a way to mitigate those two drawbacks, he posits, and there is no good reason why plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) couldn't be back on the road, and this time in much higher volumes. The idea sounds slightly subversive. After all, if there is one path in the automotive industry's recent technological history that most can agree was a dead end it is plug-in electrics. But the problem with those vehicles lay almost entirely in their reliance on heavy, expensive conventional batteries, not in the electric motors used or their control electronics. Replace those batteries with a power source that is durable, lightweight and offers a range analogous to an internal combustion engine, and suddenly plug-in electrics become a viable option. For Botti that power source is a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). He proposes a powertrain concept unglamorously called "EV range extender" that is similar in layout to the ones that drive hybrid vehicles today, but instead of an internal combustion engine powering the electric motor, there is the SOFC running on diesel fuel. Also unlike a hybrid, this system would bring back the bank of batteries used in EVs, but greatly downsize it to reduce cost and weight and increase usable packaging space. Delphi's modeling suggests that a 100-kg lithium battery array would meet necessary performance criteria and save enough space to turn a two-seater into a four-seater.