In the very limited areas where there is currently Supercharger coverage. Also, 30 minutes for a charge isn't exactly fast.

It's fast enough for most needs. If you're traveling across country, a 30 minute break every 5 hours might be just what the doctor ordered. If you break apart your eating times just right, you can have it coincide with eating times.

If charge time were reduced to 30 minutes in the general case for electric cars, I'd be much, much more likely to consider them a viable alternative to my current car. We just need the infrastructure. Honestly, I believe that the car that's going to win the transition race is going to be the one that acquires the infrastructure the most quickly, be it electric fast-charging stations, hydrogen refineries/pumping stations, electrically-charged gel stations, or whatever thing we end up thinking up.

How about the car that can use the infrastructure that already exists?

All this talk about new transportation fuels imho always sidesteps the fact that gasoline will never run out.

Petroleum will, but producing gasoline out of other sources is something that we already know how to do, and have done in industrial scale in the past. Fischer-Tropsch is cost-effective from coal at some point below $150 oil price. If you want to be carbon neutral, you just have to use a carbon feedstock that fills from the atmosphere, and a carbon neutral heat source.

A hydrogen economy is a complete hoax. If you want to make your fuel synthetically, hydrogen has practically no advantages over synthetic gasoline.

From what I understand, alternative gasolines tend to come from plants that we would otherwise be eating. I believe a more sustainable system would be one that doesn't use something we're already using for an area as vital as our food. Hydrogen, as an example, isn't something we ingest; and the output, so they claim, is water. Also, coal is probably the most bad-for-the-environment, dangerous and radioactive thing we as a human population work with on a regular basis; and I personally would rather we reduce our use of coal than encourage it as a fuel source.

That's true for ethanol (which was a terrible idea), but you can also get gas from coal gasification[1] as your parent noted [2]

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification [2] - Fischer-Tropsch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process

And the radioactive coal?

Part of making fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process is actually to turn the coal into CO, which is then used further on in the process. This step is extremely good for removing impurities. All the radioactive stuff is going to be in the ash.

However, using coal means that you are not carbon neutral. It's a lot better to use some process of sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere -- either through plants, or directly. The plant solutions differ from plant oil or ethanol-based fuel production in that the plants are not expected to add any energy to the mix. This makes the process a lot more lenient on what you can stuff in, and makes the drain on agriculture a lot less severe. Also, since the nutrients in the plants are going to be left behind at gasification, they can be reused as fertilizer.

Incomplete combustion is a much bigger problem for complex molecules like hydrocarbons. Even with catalytic converters, small-scale consumer engines throw out a lot of toxic crap besides pure CO2.

This kind of user behavior will be very expensive in terms of capacity requirement at the super chargers. If everybody comes in at lunch time and dinner time there will be at least 30 minutes of queue to get to a charger.

I figured someone would say this; and you're right, if everyone goes to lunch at the same time, then you've got a problem; but, ideally people will think of this ahead of time, and adapt their eating times by 10 or 15 minutes so people are eating not at noon, but instead between 11 and 2pm.

Considering 300 miles will take 4+ hours, 30 minutes for a refuel/bathroom/coffee break is hardly a deal-breaker. If you are not making a long trip, then keeping the car topped off in your garage should take care of most charging needs.

Musk has said he plans to blanket the country with Superchargers in the next few years, so that is just a matter of time. Remember that it took decades before we had gas stations all across the country.

Patience, patience.