Stephen Chu predicts 70% drop in EV battery costs between 2008 and 2015

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3. High-density traction batteries are finicky beasts.

For lead-acid you can get away with serial charging for awhile, but they don't like it (one bad battery in the chain can ruin the whole pack).

Li-Ion is a completely different game. Overcharge them, and they're destroyed. Run them down completely - same thing. Charge a cell too fast, it bursts into flame - and takes the rest of the pack (and most likely your car) with it. All production electric cars use a sophisticated electronic BMS (battery management system) to keep them in line.

Re: your DMV comment - when I first went to register my Ford Aspire EV conversion I had three clerks around the computer at a California DMV trying to figure out how to assign an electric powertrain to a car that was hard-programmed as internal combustion. It didn't matter to me except I would have to have the car smog-tested, which for obvious reasons wasn't possible.

In the end, they couldn't do it. I had to wait a few weeks for someone in Sacramento to get into the database and change my registration manually.