The future for pure-electric vehicles is in city commuter vehicles, and also delivery vans in large conurbations where each vehicle's daily mileage is small and can be predicted fairly accurately. Basically the milk-float concept but improved and adapted for other applications.

I think the market for electric versions of normal cars will grow, but will only be a small part of the total until such time as oil and gas become scarce and very expensive.

The history of the motor industry has largely been the survival of the fittest (with one or two exceptions I can think of), That's likely to be the case in the future too, and so that's why I think there's the rush of electric vehicle development now. It's so that when either oil and gas become prohibitively expensive, or there's the long-awaited breakthrough in battery technology, the cleverest manufacturers will be able to explloit the new reality, rather than having to mess about developing prototypes from scratch.

I think electric vehicle development is also being wafted along by develpment of hybrids, which are likley to share some of the technology of pure electrics.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 05/12/2013 at 19:19