Technology Review: Blogs: Potential Energy: Why Electric Vehicles Will Be a Long Time Coming

Technology Review: Blogs: Potential Energy: Why Electric Vehicles Will Be a Long Time Coming

Don't be fooled by all the electric-vehicle announcements in recent months: these vehicles won't be taking over the roads by 2050, according to three-quarters of a four-person panel at last weekend's MIT Energy Conference (a panel that included a representative from Ford Motor Company, no less). The fourth person, and sole dissenter, was a representative from Better Place, a company that's helping Israel, and a number of other countries, as well as cities, end its dependence on gasoline by building infrastructure for electric vehicles. He thinks EVs will take over completely by 2050.

There's good reason to believe he's wrong.

The moderator, Daniel Snow, a professor at Harvard who studies the "last gasps" of technologies--how incumbent tech keeps hanging on in the face of seemingly superior challengers--drew on the oft-cited example of microprocessors. For years, researchers have been touting experimental alternatives to silicon-based transistors (nanotube, exotic semiconductors, shape-shifting molecules), but silicon is still the backbone of microelectronics because of heavy investment in research in silicon, economies of scale, and inertia: chip makers know how to work with it, so they keep working with it.