Automakers have never been too thrilled about the prospect of ethanol-fueled vehicles. In part that’s because greens don’t like ethanol much either, due to its questionable environmental status (negligible greenhouse gas savings, high land use) – but also because of its known drawbacks: low energy content, cold-start problems, storage problems. For the most part, it has been tolerated for its benefits as a CAFE loophole.

Engineers consider electric vehicles much more promising from an environmental, cost, and performance point of view.

In fact, the current tech race is to put the first production electric car on the road by 2010. Both Toyota (with an evolution of the Prius) and GM (with the wildly anticipated Volt) are putting their reputations on the line to meet the deadline.

But as my Detroit News colleague Sharon Terlep pointed out in a superb article Tuesday, the effort is facing serious hurdles beyond the Herculean feat of producing viable lithium ion batteries (yes, the same ones that, in a much smaller application, blow up laptop computers due to overheating).

Writes Terlep: “GM has found that while the lithium-ion batteries themselves are hitting all the marks on early road tests, a host of other issues are beginning to crop up.”

Like? “A typical modern stereo system, for example, drains too much juice from the battery life.”

Ah, yes, all those other things Americans expect of a car other than just good gas mileage.

“Because of the limitations of a battery,” continues Terlep, “both automakers are likely to find it virtually impossible to deliver a plug-in vehicle that operates identically to a similar size gas-powered car.”

She quotes auto analyst Jim Hall: “An automobile with a gasoline engine as the power plant has a lot of energy on board — so much energy there are things that we never paid attention to.When you’re relying on the battery, all these problems stack up and you realize you have to do all these other things to optimize for range.”

Pols who think alternative technologies grow on trees should suck on that last quote for awhile.

Not for nothing has the extraordinary gas-combustion technology dominated the most demanding consumer product marketplace for over 100 years.