Batteryless Electric Cars

John Peterson wrote an interesting article "It's Time to Kill the Electric Car, Drive a Stake Through its Heart and Burn the Corpse", which provides some numbers arguing that electric cars can never become widespread because of the limited amount of battery-making resources available in the world. Last weekend, I was in San Francisco and wondered, "why can't we make an electric car without batteries"? Why can't a car be like a trolley bus, and run off of the grid, literally? Behold, the trolley car:



Some issues to be solved by smarter people:

• The existing power lines can handle the load of the small number of buses. Can it handle the increase in load if cars became trolley cars? The load of trolley cars is also heavier than what is needed if all cars became battery-based electric cars, since batteries can be charge at a slower rate.
• You will need to go off of the grid and onto highways, especially in sparser population areas. The trolley buses may have batteries for this purpose, but perhaps a car could just go with a combustion engine. It will be a different kind of hybrid car.
• How to automatically reach for the power lines and connect / disconnect as needed and stow away the connectors when not in use. I'm sure the trolley buses already need to deal with this, but perhaps they have more time to do so and fewer drivers honking at their slowness.
• How to correctly account for usage and charge costumers.
• How to make it not ugly (the cars, and perhaps the cities).

Well, there's the idea. There is also the issue of the electric motor itself. Does that use resource-constrained resources?