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By that stringent definition, electric cars make up less than one-tenth of 1% of North America's new car market. More importantly, there has been no mercurial rise in the pure electric vehicle segment. Indeed, other than Teslas, EVs have been a tough sell.

Even Tesla's success story, however, is hardly reason to trumpet a revolution. The company recently announced that its S model outsold all other EVs, including GM's recently resurgent Volt, fans ratcheting up their refrain that Elon Musk's brainchild is the future. Unfortunately for Tesla lovers, proclaiming that the future of the EV market is about to boom on the face of the luxury-segment S outselling its low-cost competitors is a little like proclaiming that the sports car market ascendant if Ferrari managed to sell more 458s than Mazda does Miatas; chances are what the statistics would show would be that the MX-5 market had mysteriously tanked rather than that the Prancing Horse magically garnering significant market share. Tesla is to be congratulated for many things — the excellent performance of its S model, robust sales for what is, after all, an expensive, limited-use vehicle, etc. — but it remains a plaything for people with money to burn and is in no way indicative of an impending electric car revolution.
None of this is a surprise. What is a surprise — at least to me — is the news that loyalty to alternative powertrains is not a one-way street. Indeed, according to Tom Libby, a senior forecasting analyst for the company (which claims to have information on every car registered in the United States for the last 100 years, by the way), "Hybrid owners are not as loyal as one might think, a fair number have defected back to traditional powertrains." Libby told DrivingtheNation.com that the "significant premium" demanded for hybrid vehicles and the tremendous strides in fuel economy by lower-cost conventional cars are reasons for the desertion back to the conventional. That revelation may prove problematic for protagonists of electric cars since projections for consistent growth in the electrified vehicle segment assumed that that once converts adopted a green ideology, they never returned to conventional automobiles.

The automotive industry, if it is indeed going to wean itself off fossil fuels, needs electric vehicles and hybrids to dramatically increase in popularity. But the genre desperately needs to gain credibility beyond early adopters. Misleading claims and overly optimistic prognostications are hardly the way to build public trust. Indeed, I suspect that it is precisely the electric vehicle protagonists' phantasmagorical hype that has rendered the consuming public so skeptical.