The Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn, explains to Time magazine where zero emission cars are a 2012 reality because of governance:

You are going to have a collaboration between cities, government and car manufacturers toward making it easy for the consumer to go for zero emission cars. We have been very surprised by the very positive collaboration we have seen from many governments — we’ve signed Portugal, Denmark, Israel, France. We’re working with the Chinese. The overwhelming response from public officials is amazing. When zero emission cars are on the market, all the others are going to look really obsolete.

There are different ways of getting there. In Israel, for example, you don’t buy the battery. You buy the car, but you lease the battery. You pay a fee per month. We are working on quick charges where you can get the battery mostly charged in 25 minutes.

The leased battery model is interesting. Clearly the US is missing from the list of “positive collaboration”.