We will all be driving electric cars eventually – what matters is the pace of change

In five years’ time there may be zero benefit to having been the first mover, writes Hamish McRae – as everyone else will have caught up

Tesla has been a frontrunner in the field of electric vehicles (Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Can Apple do to transport what it did to telecommunications? Can Tesla retain its brand value when all the world’s cars are electric? Can Jaguar Land Rover make the transformation to all-electric vehicles?

There are a string of questions hanging over the global motor industry, but one thing has become absolutely clear: everything goes electric. Jaguar Land Rover’s announcement that it will switch entirely by 2025 bows to the inevitable.

The only issue will be the pace of change, and every day that passes seems to shorten the time horizon. Of course, every shift such as this takes a while to feed through – the average age of light vehicles on US roads is about 12 years – but we have to accept that all the engineering skills that have gone into refining the engines and drive-chains of the internal combustion era will be redundant.