According to Vaclav Smil:
Technical success of electrics comes down, most fundamentally, to batteries. The lithium-ion battery, with its many flaws, is still the only relatively lightweight commercial option and Edison’s dream of a perfect car battery is now more than a century old. Bold plans come and go: a 1980 report on the introduction of electric vehicles in the United States predicted 1–2 million units in sales by 1985 and as many 11–13 million fully electric cars by the year 2000. But by the end of 2012, the United States had about 50,000 electrics on the road, no more than 0.03 percent of all light-duty vehicles licensed to operate in the country. Undaunted, a campaigning President Obama did not repeal his 2011 State of the Union goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015.
Clearly, electric hopes never die — but electric realities keep intervening.
