Electric vehicles are already high performing; within years they will also start winning on showroom price - Marc Tirl/DPA/PA Images
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Former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani famously predicted that “the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” He was convinced that within a few years of the start of the millennium, hydrogen would begin to replace oil as the world’s main transport fuel.
What Yamani missed, but Elon Musk, founder of electric vehicle company Tesla, spotted, was that battery technology was developing so fast that electric cars would soon match the performance of internal combustion cars, and then comprehensively outcompete them.
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The top-of the range Tesla SUV accelerates faster than a Bugatti Veyron, but can also seat seven, carry as much luggage as a Volvo estate and pull a caravan. It costs less than half of its petrol or diesel equivalent refuel, and with a tenth of the moving parts, has lower maintenance costs. Electric cars are smooth, quiet, and quick off the lights. They are also far superior as a platform for all the automation and communication technologies that are set to transform our driving experience and road safety.
So why do electric vehicles still make up such a small percentage of vehicle sales, less than 2% in the UK? Three reasons – range, charging time and infrastructure – but all of them will soon be history.
Tesla has shown that it is perfectly feasible to build an electric car with 300 miles driving range – as long as you’re not overly worried about price. But soon that sort of performance will be affordable: battery costs have fallen 70% in the last five years, and the next ten years will see them fall another 70%. Electric cars are already often cheaper than a petrol or diesel car if you include running costs, and that’s excluding subsidies.
By 2025 electric cars will start winning on showroom price alone. No technological breakthroughs are needed (although thousands of researchers are looking for them), just the same sort of scale-driven cost reductions that we have seen in flat-screen TVs, solar panels, even combustion engines in their time.
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