You want an alternative fuel with good acceleration?  Try nitromethane.
--scott

100 miles per charge is a bit light. Where I live its about 50 mile
trip to the nearest town with a Barnes & Noble store, Bestbuy etc. That
makes it slightly over 100 miles round trip.  With my current car I can
do that trip 3 times on one tank of gas with a bit of a reserve.

Since a significant amount of the time needed to get gas is the trip to
the station, start the pump, put the gas cap back, pay the cashier etc
it generally only takes me a few more minutes to get a full tank as it
does to pump in a few gallons.

Like some of the early electric cars it might be feasible for someone
who needs to travel only a few miles to the store,work or school, with
an occasional longer trip but if acceleration is poor it is a danger on
the highways and any long charge time makes it a poor choice in my
opinion for regular transport.

most

The fuel for an alternative fueled car (cng, propane, whatever) likely
won't be available every couple of hundred miles.

Yes it would - depending on the price.

I commute M-F about a 25 mile round trip, 52 weeks a year (excepting
vacations)  Occassionally I will do an extra 25-50 miles in one day for
errands to and from work.  I own my home and it has a garage.  I
live in a climate where the need for A/C in cars is about 3 months
out of the year.  I think this is an -extremely- common scenario.

If an electric car, for the sake of argument, were available that brand
new cost around $5,000 I would buy it and use it for commuting only.

But, would I think for a second that such a car could REPLACE my
need for a 'regular' gas-burner car?  Of course not!  I would get
BOTH vehicles. I've room for them, and the savings on the "commuting only"
vehicle mile would be quite worth it.

The problem with this, however, is that automakers simply aren't setup
to sell $5000 cars in any mass quantity, they haven't done this for, like
around 2 decades.

And unless such a thing was available mass-quantity, I and nobody I
know in this situation would buy one.  Why?  Because of support.

With a regular car from a major manufacturer I am pretty much assured
that I can walk into an auto parts store a decade from now and buy a
spare part for it.  Or drive it into the corner garage and get it fixed.
And more importantly, because a lot of other people will be in the same
boat 10 years from now, there will be enough of a market for spare
parts that there will be competition to supply those parts in the
aftermarket -
which will cause their price to be cheap.

With a specialty electric car, such as one I design and build myself, or
buy from a company that takes regular cars and retrofits them, replacement
parts will be sole-sourced, thus will be as expensive as all get out, and
there's no guarentee they will be available 10 years from now.  Even if
the company gives me a guarentee, if it's a small firm it might go out
of business.

The first generation of Toyota Priuses are almost past
their warranty, and are approaching 150,000 miles.  They are
getting close to being due for battery pack replacement.  It won't
be long before people are out there trying to buy replacement batteries,
battery control modules, hybrid control modules and inverters.  You
watch and see what the aftermarket does, I will bet that none of these
components will be available anywhere except from Toyota, and
they will be so expensive that it will make it not cost effective to
fix the car.

Ted

Hybrids seem to fit your model, and of course they would work well with
alternately fueled diesels, or even alternately fueled SI engines for
that matter.  People have been making "artificial" gasoline for about
three quarters of a century, though the early methods of making it were
anything but green.