“An on-board electrical generation capability, using some heat source to drive a Stirling-cycle hot air engine (or even a steam engine, we don’t care), which in turn drives a generator that supplies the electrical energy to drive the wheels would appear to be one of the better engineering designs to follow.”
The idea of battery powered cars reminds me of the pie-in-the-sky ideas many top-level managers who have never done anything physical in their lives come up with. To people who know nothing anything is possible. The fact that it hasn’t been done before is due to (pick one) big gas, big oil, chemtrails. My thermodynamics class in college was taught by a genuine NASA scientist. He had us work through every possible fairy dust idea with the most generous assumptions and none of them were better for the environment than existing technologies. But scientists aren’t the people making rules, regulations and laws.
Science and engineering professors with significant industry experience aren't worth their weight in gold.
They're much more valuable than that.