are electric cars a failure?

Last month, the electric-car industry passed a small but important milestone. There are now more than 100,000 electric cars on America's roads, including those that operate as plug-in hybrids. That's happened in just two and a half years, as electric-vehicle sales have only been tallied independently since the last month of 2010, when a mere 345 were first parked in customer garages.

Despite this milestone, there's plenty of pessimism to go around regarding the adoption rate of the plug-in EV, which have thus far made up only half of 1% of all cars sold in the U.S. this year. My fellow Fool -- and resident Foolish auto expert -- John Rosevear offered a succinct overview of that pessimism a couple of months ago, which I'll sum up as this: There's no charging infrastructure, and the batteries make EVs cost more than is justifiable.

Does that mean EVs are a failure?

The American auto industry effectively began in 1896 with a 13-vehicle production run at the Duryea Motor Wagon plant (or garage, as the case might well be). Three years later, just before the start of the 20th century, there were roughly 8,000 cars on what passed for American roads -- virtually nothing was paved for vehicle travel. There were 8,000 EVs on the road after eight months of tracking. That's not really fair, though, because there are more than three times as many people in the U.S. as there were at the turn of the 20th century. Adjusted for population growth, there should have been 33,000 EVs on the roads after three years. That happened after 19 months, and we're now approaching three times that number midway through the third year of tracking.

Why compare EVs with the earliest cars? The "motor wagons" of the late 1800s faced similar challenges to those often attributed to EVs: minimal supporting infrastructure and a high price tag relative to the dominant (horse-drawn) transportation of the day.

The first gas stations wouldn't even be built until almost a decade after the Duryeas built the first 13 cars in America, and they had no drive-up pumps -- that innovation didn't arrive until 1913. There are already more than 6,000 publicly accessible EV charging stations in the country. This doesn't count interesting infrastructure developments such as Tesla's (NASDAQ: TSLA) battery-swap stations or its growing network of "superchargers" scattered across the United States. It's also worth noting that EVs, unlike early internal-combustion vehicles, can get recharged in most owners' garages.

EVs have to overcome an entrenched culture, just as early motor wagons did -- but today's car culture is far more deeply embedded in the national psyche than horses ever were. There's one automobile on American roads for every 2.3 Americans today, compared with one horse for every 3.5 Americans in 1900. The average person traveled about 340 miles per year in 1900, compared with 16,000 miles per year in cars and airplanes today. Despite facing one of the most entrenched opponents in the history of capitalism, EVs are already outperforming the puttering internal-combustion pioneers in terms of market penetration, price, and infrastructure deployment at a similar point after introduction.

Will EVs continue to outperform the original auto pioneers in the face of stiffer competition? I can't say. However, early results are indeed more promising than many pessimistic commentators would you like to believe. Just as autos replaced horses en masse once their technological superiority was undeniable, EVs will have to be objectively better than internal-combustion vehicles to justify widespread adoption. There are bound to be some bumps and bankruptcies along the way. After all, more than 1,000 automakers of all sizes were founded between 1896 and the mid-1920s. How many of them are still around?

*** [8/28/13]

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