Increasingly, Car Manufacturers are seeing the benefits of Electric Cars, from Low Maintenance Issues, to Longer Range and Lower Cost, and are Jumping on Board.

Car manufacturers go all in on electric cars, raising specter of peak oil demand

Oil companies have long viewed electric cars as a frightening, if distant threat to the gasoline and diesel sales that account for 70 percent of U.S. demand for crude. But suddenly, that threat is speeding towards Houston's most important industry at rates far faster than once expected.

 From article, (After decades of flirtation, auto manufacturers are embracing electric cars as never before, maneuvering for control of what is expected to be the fastest growing segment of the vehicle market over the next two decades. General Motors, the largest American car manufacturer, says it will have at least 20 electric models on the market by 2025 while the European auto makers Daimler and BMW forecast that 15 to 25 percent of their sales will come from electric models by then.

In China, the government wants one in every five cars sold in the world's largest auto market to be electric in less than a decade. 

India's government aims to have only electric cars sold in the country after 2030. 

France and the United Kingdom, meanwhile, say they will ban petroleum-fueled cars by 2040.

Electric cars have been a buzzword around Detroit's automobile factories for years. But for every executive who talked about electric as the future of the industry, there was an engineer standing in back wondering how to resolve the problems of the vehicles' limited travel range and astronomical prices that made electric cars more wishful thinking than practical.

But improvements in battery technology have driven down costs from six-figures into the $20,000 to $30,000 range, while the range has expanded to the point someone in suburban Katy could travel to and from downtown Houston on a single charge. U.S. sales of electric vehicles climbed to 200,000 last year, a four-fold increase from 2012, according to Inside EV, a trade publication.

"There's always this hype curve and we've been through the hype curve on EVs many times," said Brett Smith, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan's Center for Automotive Research, who has spent more than three decades studying the industry. "But it's starting to look more realistic than it did 10 years ago".)

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