More from Obama's clueless Energy Secretary Chu: "Electric cars are just at the beginning of their development"

Dr. Chu on Profits, Horse Manure and Other Forces of Technological Change - NYTimes.com

“The clean tech industry is making great strides,” he said on Wednesday at the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference in New York. Technologies like battery storage have vastly improved, solar efficiency is improving and electric cars are just at the beginning of their development...Dr. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning academic before he joined the Obama administration, noted that a century ago, automobiles replaced horses and horse-drawn carriages within the space of about 25 years. “It was accelerated by the fact that there was an environmental imperative,” he said.

What kind of imperative? Well, New York City alone had about 160,000 horses hauling people and goods around at that time. “There was a very visible environmental impact that was piling up on corners all over the place,” Dr. Chu said. “So it hastened the shift remarkably.”

Affordable, desirable electric cars: They've been just around the corner for over 100 years

Recently reports have been current in certain newspapers that Mr. Thomas A. Edison, the inventor, has at last perfected the storage battery, and that within a few months electrically propelled vehicles, costing little to buy and next to nothing to maintain, will be on the market. The same story has appeared regularly for years and yet matters do not appear to have advanced much. –International Herald Tribune, November 1, 1907

Note that Chu does get something right above when he says that there was an environmental imperative to switch to fossil-fueled cars from horse-drawn vehicles.