The all-electric car, which had a brief heyday less than a decade ago and then went the way of the dodo, killed off by the car companies, is about to make a comeback.

Charged up with lighter, more sophisticated and efficient batteries, and competitively priced with gasoline-driven and hybrid vehicles, the new offers will be marketed and sold primarily as second cars - for running errands, taking kids to school and the like. These silent electric autos will be plugged into home outlets at night and during the day will be able to travel 100 miles or more without stopping for a charge.

Nissan said recently it has developed a mas-market electric car, due out by the end of next year, that will seat five and can have its battery charged to 80 percent of capacity in 26 minutes. It will have all the amenities car buyers want, Nissan says, such as navigation, super stereo and heated seats, and will cost between $20,000 and $30,000.

The company is not alone in pushing the resurgence of all-electric cars. On the drawing boards are cars and trucks scheduled to be introduced over the next year or so by Ford, Mitsubishi, Chrysler and Subaru, among others, according to the Electric Drive Transportation Association, a trade group.

"The electric car is clearly on its way back," said Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the magazine Green Car Journal, which covers the alternative energy auto industry. "Every automaker and battery company has been making incremental breakthroughs" in technology.

Who killed the EV1?

For a few years, into the beginning of this decade, several major automakers produced electric models to satisfy a California law mandating that a small percentage of new cars sold in the state be pollution-free. Perhaps the best-known was General Motors' EV1, which was sleek and fast and attracted a cultlike base of fans.

The GM cars, along with other electrics made by Honda, Ford, Nissan, Chrysler and Toyota, were for the most part available only on leases of about $500 a month. These vehicles were powered by heavy, inefficient batteries that cost as much as $30,000 apiece.

When the law requiring automakers to sell these cars was changed, the manufacturers essentially closed up their electric-car shops, recalled the cars, crushed many of them, and offered a smattering of gasoline-electric hybrids instead.

Electric car aficionados were outraged - they were given voice in the popular 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" - but that was the end of it.

Until now.

Field testing cars

The car companies, allied with battery manufacturers, say they have figured out how to mass produce an electric car that will fit into most people's lives in the same way as ordinary cars - you can buy them, charge them at home, use them for commuting and they will be modestly priced. But one thing the automakers have learned is that it helps to have widespread field testing of unfamiliar cars by fleet operators before trying to sell them to the public.

To that end, they have joined up with public agencies around the nation to provide electric vehicles for government fleets. Selling to the government allows automakers to monitor the performance of their new cars closely. It also gives them a built-in market.

In the Bay Area, for example, Nissan will provide 1,000 all-electric cars to Sonoma County within the next year.

Sonoma signs on

Cordell Stillman, Sonoma County's point man for the project and a devotee of electric cars - he's converting his 1958 Volkswagen to all-electric - says the partnership with Nissan started with a letter in August from the car company, asking if the county wanted to come to a talk about electric cars. Stillman didn't have to be asked twice.

He said staffers will use the Nissan electric cars to travel around the county, attend meetings, conduct field inspections and carry out other day-to-day business. The cars' batteries will be charged up at stations installed in fleet parking lots at night, "when the rates are cheaper," Stillman said.

"Nissan will get a lot of data on use patterns (of the cars)," Stillman said. "It's a little research laboratory for them."

For its part, Nissan has already done enough research to say it's at the point where it can sell electric cars to the public by the end of 2010.

"We believe the market exists for these cars," said Mark Perry, Nissan North America's director of product planning, "and we'll be making about 100,000 cars."

Better batteries

Perry said the secret to making the cars efficient and affordable lies in the batteries, developed jointly by Nissan and battery maker NEC.

"Batteries now are getting twice the power for half the weight and half the size," Perry said. The new batteries will be made of laminated lithium ion, an improvement, Perry said, over the nickel metal hydride and lead acid batteries of old.

Batteries still need to be charged, however. That is the ultimate tether, compared with the relative freedom of a gasoline-driven car.

That problem could be eased by a 2-year-old state law providing as much as $120 million a year over seven years to set up charging stations around California. The idea is that if these stations were at, say, every rest stop on Interstate 5, drivers could pull in, take a half hour break while the car is being recharged, then continue along for another hundred miles.

Ultimately, however, all-electric cars will probably be used mostly for short jaunts within a few miles of home, which is what most people do with their cars anyway.

In fact, according to Ken Kurani, a research engineer for the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, studies conducted over a 10-year period showed that some users of electric cars "figured out the car could actually be used for most of their trips, and it became unclear what the term 'second car' meant."