You're spot-on. The fact is that a transition to electric vehicles is both necessary and inevitable, and that the timescale for the change is the average turnover in personal car ownership, that is 10 years give or take 5. If cheap oil runs out you won't be able to force a changeover of the entire vehicle fleet any faster than a decade or so, in part because you just don't have the productive capacity to make the damn cars any faster. And if the changeover happens spontaneously it will happen on the natural time scale.

Which means it is really really unfortunate that we're entering a depression because the policy-makers have reacted to a financial crisis with a contraction of investment and research. We're wasting a precious 5 years (and counting) and doing untold damage to the industrial fabric, when just a 15-year programme to set up an electric car infrastructure (charging points at private and public parking lots, higher grid power to support large numbers of cars charging quickly, retrofitting existing gas stations to provide electric charging, building up generating capacity, smart grids...) might get us out of the depression...

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker