China is jumping on the bandwagon by not only encouraging electric vehicles but by saying that at some point, cars running on gasoline or diesel fuel will be banned.
Such an edict would not be very smart. More importantly, it wouldn't take into account the real world. It would be tough to ban the sale of such cars unless you were willing to grind the economy to a screeching halt.
France and the United Kingdom are proposing similar moves. Once again, governments around the world are deciding what is best for their citizens without taking the desires of those same folks into account.
At some point, governments will realize just how much petroleum-powered vehicles pay in fuel taxes to support the governments that talk about eliminating those vehicles.
It reminds me of tobacco taxes. Governments don't want cigarette smoking, but they're not willing to eliminate the revenue from tobacco sales.

It will be impossible for governments to stop being dependent on fuel taxes — not to mention the impossibility of eliminating gas- and diesel-fueled vehicles overnight.
Hurricane Irma in Florida demonstrated one of the shortfalls of EVs in an emergency. Two-thirds of the state lost power. Yes, gasoline was hard to find, but think of how much worse things would have been if millions of people had been stranded in powerless electric cars.
For EVs to be successful, the public is going to have to want to buy them in much larger quantities than today. That may happen someday, but governments can't make it happen by fiat.
Change is coming to the automobile industry, but let us hope that consumers drive it — not governments.
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