You do realize that we have developed cars and furnaces etc. that run on electricity instead of such things a coal, right? And we're doing it because science has shown us we need to because of AGW.
One of my Norther Alberta rural redneck cousins runs his family's home on 100% renewable energy. He does this because the economics made sense. The cost of running a Trans-Alta Ultility line to his home was greater than the cost of building a solar power farm sufficient to supply his family's electrical needs.
Economics *will* win this argument sooner or later.
Electrical motors are superior in every respect to reciprocating piston engines. Electrical vehicles *will* replace reciprocating piston vehicles sooner or later. It's inevitable. How long it takes just depends on how long it takes for electrical energy storage density to reach a level that approaches chemical energy storage density. (added wild-card: fuel cells. If fuel cell technology improves to the point that a chemical fuel-cell, electrical battery, and electrical motor combination is comparable in weight to an equivalent piston engine, that's the end of the road for piston engines.)
(Something that I'm very interested in, that I haven't heard anything about is the potential of gas turbine engines applied as backup electrical generators in motor vehicles. Once upon a time Chrysler built some experimental cars using gas turbine engines instead of piston engines. Gas turbines are much more efficient than piston engines. The reason they suck in automobile applications is that gas turbine engines don't like to run at different speeds. They like to run at a steady RPM zone where their efficiency is at its optimum. So they suck as a primary driveline motor for vehicles, where speed is always changing. But if a gas turbine were deployed as an electrical generator in a vehicle where an electric motor was the primary driveline motor, the gas turbine could operate in it's peak efficiency zone and deliver much higher efficiency than a reciprocating piston engine.
Electrical motor efficiency x peak gas turbine efficiency x electrical conversion losses > reciprocating piston engine efficiency.)
In terms of power, I think that the most powerful engines we have-- trains, large ocean vessels, and so on-- are electrical generators (diesel or nuclear) driving electrical motors, driving hydraulic systems.
Eventually, our existing technologies will be replaced by something better, simply for economic reasons. And we can accelerate that process by incentivizing adoption of cleaner technology through public policy (ie, taxes on carbon emissions, tax credits for clean technologies, etc.)
-k