AROUND the corner from Glasgow Central station, where offices and coffee shops flock like mating birds, there is an impostor in the midst.

Caged behind glass are three green cars.

This is no ordinary showroom, however, but a glimpse of the potential future, courtesy of the power group SSE, capped by a big window sign that says: "The Electric Garage." It speaks to a time when we will supposedly have ditched our bent for burning long-dead animals and plants in car engines and will have converted to electric vehicles like these three specimens instead: the Nissan Leaf, the Mitsubishi Miev and the dinky Renault Twizy.

They are not for sale, but for Joe Public to test drive in the city centre. They are a popular draw, according to the SSE lady in the passenger seat of the Leaf as I adjust to having no gears and doing hill starts without the need for a handbrake.

Whatever all these other test drivers do after they have returned to the showroom, however, they are certainly not in a hurry to buy such a vehicle. There are only about 50 privately owned electric cars on Scotland's roads, which must be some sort of low-sales record for a major product after about three years on the market.

There are rather more in public-sector ownership, but don't get excited – we are talking something like 270 out of a total fleet of some 25,000 vehicles. Earlier this month, meanwhile, the Scottish Government was forced to admit, to jeers from the opposition, that only four of the vehicles in its own fleet of about 200 are electric, and only 22 more are hybrids.

This is some distance from its heady plans a few years ago. In 2009, then transport minister Stewart Stevenson announced plans at a Glasgow conference for all public-sector vehicles and 95% of new private vehicles to be low-carbon by 2020. The thinking went that getting Scotland off fossil fuel-powered transport was as vital to its carbon reduction targets as building wind farms to replace coal and gas-fired power stations. But if the minister's proposals sounded bullish at the time, they sound positively Herculean now.

Long-term followers of the fortunes of the electric car may not be surprised by this slow progress. The basic technology is not 21st century – it dates back to the end of the Victorian era, when such vehicles figured heavily in the nascent automotive sector before internal combustion engines took hold.

They made a brief comeback in the 1970s when the West faced the prospect of unaffordable petrol on the back of the oil price shock. In the 1990s, various car manufacturers brought out electric models in the United States – most famously the General Motors EV1 – under duress from environmental legislation. But these were phased out in the early 2000s because no-one wanted them, a story well told in the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car? a few years later.

So is it time to start filming - Part II? Not quite. The most obvious issue has been the shortcomings of the technology, the biggest of which is the distance they can travel on one charge. At best this is 100 miles, but somewhat less if you start revving the engine on a motorway.

Enthusiasts argue this problem is an illusion, given that the average car journey is just two or three miles, but the freedom to head for the hills seems to be hard-wired into the Scottish consumer. David Densley, SSE's head of sustainable transport, says: "People still want to be able to drive long distances – even if it's only once a year on their summer holidays."

People have long proposed getting around this problem with battery swap-out systems that would allow drivers to pull in at service stations and quickly swap their dead battery for a charged one. This idea seems to have stalled, however, after pioneer US/Israeli company Better Charge filed for bankruptcy in May despite having raised about $700 million (£462m) in venture capital a few years earlier.

One expert points out that most of the manufacturers have slightly different batteries, which are fixed into their cars. This makes it harder to get them in and out, especially given their quarter-tonne weight.

The other obvious solution is charging points, but until relatively recently, it took between six and eight hours to fully charge a vehicle. That might be fine for a car parked in the garage at home between short trips, but it was not much use if you were on a longer journey.

In theory this problem has now been solved with rapid chargers, which can take a car from empty to full in about half an hour, and are getting quicker all the time. They are a lot more expensive to install, however. Densley says that you are talking about £15,000 per charger, plus £5000-£10,000 for the grid connection.

Most experts say you won't need these in the home or workplace, where cars will generally stay long enough to justify a slower charger. But if you installed even 100,000 of these on public roads, it would cost up to £2.5 billion. There are also severe power grid issues with having such fast and huge power demands from one location.

Another potential culprit in the slow development of the technology is price. The UK and Scottish governments offer consumers and public authorities subsidies towards the cost of buying these vehicles, but they still end up being about £5000 more expensive than the fossil fuel equivalent.

And a major problem is on the infrastructure side – Scottish authorities focused for several years on building chargers for public-sector vehicles only. And sources claim that councils often built the few consumer ones in hard-to-find places that were generally only open during office hours and were poorly advertised. There are only about 350 chargers at present in Scotland, less than 100 of which are open to the public (including a small network in Asda car parks).

There has also been much talk of incentives, such as waiving road tax or allowing electric vehicles to travel in bus/taxi lanes, but little has so far been implemented.

Adrian Loening, chairman of the Electric Vehicle Association Scotland, says: "A lot of councils have found it harder than they expected. Putting a rapid charger into a car park needs a large power supply, it needs regulation, signage, planning and so on.

"South Lanarkshire, Borders, Glasgow and Dundee have all done well. Maybe behind the curve is Edinburgh, Argyll and Highland, though it's harder for rural areas because people generally travel longer distances."

John Curtis, a consultant at motoring website That Friday Feeling, says councils have also been faced with issues like lack of extra funding, the uncertainty about whether electric will beat other low-carbon technologies, such as fuel cells, and the fact that electric cars make little difference to emissions while most of the grid still runs on high-carbon power. He also points out that, despite the low numbers, there are actually more public-sector electric vehicles in Scotland than the rest of the UK put together.

On the other hand, Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries all have several times more than the UK, while Japan and the US are way out in front.

According to data from consultants Frost & Sullivan, there were 54,520 electric cars running in the US last year against just 1423 in the UK. Analyst Anjan Kumar puts this down to manufacturers testing models in their own markets, plus government incentives in some places that make the cars as cheap as their fossil fuel equivalents.

This year, however, the authorities in this country have been getting more serious. Loening says that a £2.6m Scottish Government programme to build 500 public charging points, including 28 rapid versions, with a view to having a charger every 50 miles, shows a shift in focus from the public sector to consumers. It has also commissioned SSE to make domestic chargers freely available to households which have off-street parking (which admittedly excludes sizeable minorities in Scotland's cities).

This is all part of a bigger £37m UK programme to build a charging network – beyond which many would argue that it will be for the private sector to take over. The Scottish Government is also preparing to launch a "roadmap" in the coming weeks to point the way forward.

The other notable change is from the manufacturers, following years of frustration about continual promises from the likes of Renault to launch products only to keep delaying them. Renault now has a range on sale, accompanied by other big players including Peugeot and Citroen. The BMW i-3 is launching later this month is a hybrid electric, which combines the hybrid concept of a self-regenerating battery with the plug-in technology of an electric. The hybrid electric version of the Toyota Prius has helped to drive electric uptake in Japan, and cars like the i-3 are being tipped to do the same here.

At the same time, Nissan has launched a reduced price version of the Leaf that moves it virtually into the fossil-fuel-powered price range, while also committing to the UK by setting up a major production line of the car in Sunderland recently.

In short, many believe there has now been too much financial commitment from the big car companies for electric cars not to take off. But more cautious voices point out that we still have to solve problems like the fact we will overload the grid if big numbers of cars are plugging in in the early evenings. "Smart grid" functions that prevent the power from flowing until later at night are still five or ten years into the future, by which time the grid will probably be relying on more green power than at present.

Then there are hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which have also been delayed but should begin reaching the market within the next two or three years.

Put all these things together and you get big disparities in how fast experts think things will progress with electric vehicles. Where Adrian Loening reckons that there could still be 3.5 million electric vehicles on UK roads by 2020, David Densley of SSE thinks 200,000 to 500,000. Frost and Sullivan think about 700,000 in the whole of Europe, only a fraction of which would be in Scotland.

Who can say, seems to be the conclusion, but it may yet be a case of Who Resurrected The Electric Car.

Electric Vehicles

They run on a battery, which is charged from the mains. While the basic technology has been around for over a century, they became more viable with the advent of lithium ion batteries a few years ago. With big manufacturers like Mitsubishi, Nissan and Renault all in the market, some believe they are finally getting close to take-off.

Hybrid Vehicles

Vehicles like the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid run with a petrol/diesel engine and a system that allows the battery to recharge at times while driving. This increases fuel efficiency and lowers emissions, particularly during urban driving. Their UK market share grew from 2.2% to 3.1% last year.

Hybrid Electric Vehicles

These vehicles incorporate a battery that charges from the mains and a small petrol/diesel engine that takes over when the electric charge is used up. This is seen by enthusiasts as a compromise between the range problem of electric vehicles and the emissions problem of traditional ones. The Vauxhall Ampera and Toyota Prius Electric have been gaining traction in some markets, while the BMW i3, below, which includes a tiny petrol tank, is launching here later this month.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles

These vehicles are very similar to pure electrics, but instead of charging from the mains they use fuel cell technology to convert hydrogen into electricity for the battery. The Hyundai ix35, Toyota Highlander and Honda FCX are already being deployed in Europe, the US and Japan. But it is likely to be at least 2015 before fuel cell electric vehicles reach the UK in significant numbers. They don't share the range problem of electrics, but there is the costly question of building out a network of hydrogen fuelling facilities around the country.