Though they’re no longer ugly, impossibly expensive and impractical, electric vehicles need to out-innovate fossil fuels if they are ever to displace the internal combustion engine
at the current battery cost of $270 per kwh, oil would have to cost more than $300 a barrel (in 2020 dollars) to make electric and gasoline equally attractive. If battery costs fall to $100, as Tesla Founder Elon Musk has targeted, oil would have to average $90.
.. an optimistic scenario, where battery costs fall 10% a year starting now and gasoline begins at $5 a gallon, electric vehicles will be competitive in five years. If battery costs fall just 5% a year and gasoline starts at $2.25, it will take more than 20... Electric vehicles are meant to be recharged at night. Economists Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Kotchen and Erin Mansur note in a 2014 article in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization that night is when electricity is most likely to come from burning coal. They estimate electric vehicles account for more carbon dioxide per mile than existing cars in the upper Midwest, where coal-fired plants are more prevalent, and more than comparable hybrids in most of the country... Yet they may not be the most efficient way to combat carbon emissions. A carbon tax, for example, would incentivize conservation and alternative fuels regardless of oil prices.