Last August, the overcrowded City Hall East garage lost a row of parking spaces. Each of those spaces now has an “Electrical Vehicle Only” sign and a battery charger the size of a wall furnace. Since the row’s revamping, I’ve seen exactly one electric car parked there.As it happens, this is Year 1998, the year when (it was decreed by state officials in 1990) 2 percent of all California cars were supposed to run on batteries. Rough math suggests that’s over half a million cars. Last time I looked, the number of battery buggies running around town was in the hundreds. This means you’re more likely to see a Lamborghini Countach on the freeway than a GM or Honda electric.There are technological reasons for this impasse: Battery technology brooks few breakthroughs; the periodic table is only so long, and the combinations of chemicals and elements used in batteries were all thought up by 1910, and most batteries are incredibly inefficient when it comes to storing electricity. That’s why the current generation of electric cars can’t make it from Pasadena to Oxnard on a battery charge. Though I read in the L.A. Times recently that the next generation may make it past Carpinteria. Swell.