To succeed, electric cars require batteries that store the greatest possible amount of energy in the smallest, lightest, safest, and cheapest package possible. But batteries pose a brutal technical challenge--one subject to all manner of misunderstandings and misinformation. Can today's lithium-ion batteries cut it? What new battery technologies lie on the horizon?

Today from 2:30 to 3:30 pm Eastern time, GM's director of Global Battery Systems, Bill Wallace, and PopSci's Seth Fletcher, author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, will field these questions in an online chat, right here.