Yes, very fast. The idea of an electric vehicle is over 150-years old and still it faces a lot of problems that prevent it from replacing the internal combustion engine.

I'm quite sceptic about electric cars as they don't exactly solve the emissions problem, they just move it elsewhere, in this case to electricity production.
Changing to electric cars will mean an exponential growth of electricity consumption. The developed countries will have to invest billions of dollars on new power plants. And when the developing giants like China and India follow with hundreds of millions of electric cars, it will be an unimaginable challenge. They will need a lot of power and fast. Can they afford to only use renewable energy and nuclear power? Or will they have to rely on fossil fuels resulting more emissions?

^^ To emphasise bmer's point... this is the electricity source for the US (2006).


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So if everyone where to switch tomorrow, all you'd do is shift the pollution from petrol to primarily coal... and coal pollutes more then petrol.

So electric is a solution for certain cases, but not worldwide.

Hydrogen (which is not an energy source, but an energy carrier) has the same problem... it will be successful if and only if we can produce it using sustainable/renewable sources.

The advantage of Hydrogen (fuel-cell or liquid) is that it is a better and more efficient way to store energy then a battery.