Even Big Oil Execs Think We’re Headed To An Electric Future

[Note: All predicted right here at AR1.com long ago] Within the auto industry, we can attest that attitudes about electric vehicles are radically different than they were just a decade ago. But finding out that a Big Oil executive has predicted electric vehicles (EVs) will become a huge future chunk of the world vehicle market? That still has our hair standing up a little bit.

At the Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics conference, in Santa Barbara, California, Royal Dutch Shell CEO Peter Voser anticipated that in 2050, 40 percent of all vehicles, globally, will be electric.

By that time the total number of vehicles, globally, will have doubled; so that could still result in more vehicles using gasoline today. Of course, it's likely that by then that even the dinosaur juice-burners will continue to become much more fuel-efficient than they are today.

Renault-Nissan CEO and president Carlos Ghosn has recently predicted that ten percent of all vehicles sold worldwide by 2020 will be electric.

Nissan has invested about six billion dollars into vehicles and a proprietary battery-pack design, and it has made plans to build up to 500,000 vehicles per year. The 2011 Nissan LEAF will first be offered on a limited basis late this year in a few select cities, but the automaker will eventually mass-produce the model in Tennessee, among other global locations, with Renault and Infiniti-branded EVs also in the works. TheCarConnection.com