Electric cars are a curiosity that will never be practical
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtBatteries are too heavy, too slow to charge, and too weak. Electric cars are glorified golf carts with 60 miles of range, and the internal combustion engine is not going anywhere.
NowLithium-ion pack prices fell roughly 90 percent between 2010 and 2023. Electric vehicles passed 18 percent of new car sales globally in 2023, and several major markets have legislated end dates for new combustion-engine sales.
What actually happened
The skepticism had a century of evidence behind it. Electric cars lost to gasoline in the 1910s, GM crushed the EV1 in the early 2000s, and every revival since the 1970s had died on battery physics. The specific objection, energy density, was correct: gasoline stores vastly more energy per kilogram than any battery, and still does.
What the objection missed is that an electric drivetrain does not need to match gasoline on energy density, because it is roughly three to four times more efficient at turning stored energy into motion, and because battery costs collapsed. BloombergNEF's price survey put packs around 1,200 dollars per kilowatt-hour in 2010 and near 140 by 2023. That is the whole story in one number.
The caveats are worth stating: charging infrastructure is uneven, cold weather still hurts range, grid carbon intensity determines how clean an EV actually is, and mining supply chains carry real environmental and human costs. Those are the live arguments. "The technology cannot work" is not one of them anymore.
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Sources
- IEA: Global EV Outlookiea.org
- BloombergNEF: Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Pricesabout.bnef.com
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2012, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2020 learned the earlier version.