Are Electric Vehicles inevitable?

Yes, says Eric Kriss (and I agree).

"A hundred years from now, historians may view the early evolution of the automobile as something of a happy confluence of unlikely events that could never be sustained; the electric car was completely inevitable, notwithstanding the gas-powered blip of the 20th century.

“You may find it remarkable,” a professor in 2108 might tell her (virtual) classroom, “but in 2008 everyone drove cars powered by petroleum engines so hot they could boil water and so poisonous they could kill you within the hour if left running in your closed garage.” But let's start at the beginning: 127 years ago.

The beginning

The first automobile, introduced at an 1881 exhibition in Paris, was – surprisingly – an electric one. But the internal combustion engine quickly eclipsed the electric motor due to the unique physical qualities of gasoline, refined in Russia for the first time in the 1860s. A German mechanical genius, Karl Benz, conceptualized the gasoline engine in the late 1870s, and just four years after the first electric car's premiere in Paris, the first gaspowered vehicle – a Benz, naturally – was introduced to the public, and the fledgling automotive industry never looked back."

See the rest here: http://fairislepress.com/dl.php?file=InevitableElectrics.pdf