No they won't. Even the cheapest electric cars cost three to fours times as much as a cheap gas car in developing countries.
Every high tech product follows a law that it gets 20% cheaper when volumes of production double, and electric cars make up about 1.2% of the market now. So, they are going to fell 3x by the time production volumes reach 36% of the current car production, or about 25% of then-current car production.
But, they will actually own the market before then because cost of owning and operating an electric car is much lower than comparable gasoline powered one.
Easy to see that this curve converges to 100% of market share with quite a bit of margin. At least 2x margin.
There is nothing inherently costly in producing an electric car. Transmission is simpler because it doesn't need a gearbox. It has much lower center of gravity due to heavy battery so little mechanical trickery is needed to make it stable on the road. Electric motor is much cheaper than a complex ICE which also requires a lot of service. Only stumbling block is the battery - and they are getting cheaper every month. Most of the existing cost of electric cars is due to low production volumes as they eat away market share - there is a limit on speed of market adoption as well as factory retooling and business acceptance of the fact that electric cars are the future - but these are just technicalities, there is absolutely nothing preventing making a $15,000 mass market Ford Focus-like electric car, if built in Ford Focus-like volumes, that is.
Where to read more about this law?
Same thing now, with about 24 average mpg an existing car makes, eats 10 million barrels of oil per day (counting 81.5% average oil refining efficiency), or more than 20% of entire U.S. energy use - all kinds of energy, that is 7x more energy (ok, about 3.5x more given average efficiency of electricity production).
Even if that electricity was produced from oil on old-style single-stage thermal plants (a crazy idea - that would be the most expensive electricity in the world and no one is going to do that for sure), it would mean 2.7x savings. In reality, because most of that will be cheap coal and natural gas and renewables, there will be more than 10x savings.
The price has a large intractable stone in it - the battery cost. It won't go down very fast until new technologies are adopted. And it take a giga-factory to adopt a new technology. Rule of thumb: battery tech has to double the charge and halve the weight or nobody is interested in building the factory.
The center of gravity argument depends upon the current heavier batteries - but e-cars can't take off until something like metal-air batteries are working. And they weigh just about as much as a gas tank does.
As for complexity, sure compared to the mechanical engine it's simpler - 100's of parts vs a dozen. But the software has just exploded by orders of magnitude. Millions of lines of code instead of thousands. We mustn't underestimate this.
Then, there's a core of car buyers that have to grow old and die, and be replaced by e-car enthusiasts before the market moves significantly. Beta-Max was better than VHS (for the old videotape guys out there) but it died simply by being too late.
No, we won't see a $15,000 focus for decades.
The advances you are apparently dismissing as incremental have been enormous.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n4/abs/nclimate256...
Maybe its only one order of magnitude -- if I remember correctly, there were about 300,000 lines of code running on the main processor of the Toyotas that were investigated for unintended acceleration, with functions like "throttle angle control" that took several thousand lines.
It seems like there are still too few EVs to fully understand their lifespan and long-term maintenance costs (including battery replacement).
I also want to see how fast "fast charging" will be and what kind of adverse impact it has on the battery. Is it acceptable to the usability and lifespan of the vehicle to routinely charge on fast chargers? I don't want to sit at the charging station for 45 minutes when a gas car can be fully fueled in 5 or less.
At home, my expectation is that a vehicle does not need a garage, so charging at home may present a logistical challenge (OR, weather-proof outside charging stations might also be deployed). Likewise for apartments and condos with shared parking.
I think all these issues can be overcome, but they will need some thoughtful approaches to ensure that EVs are reasonable for as many people as possible to own and use, not just the wealthy.
That matters because battery capacity fade increases non-linearly with depth of cycling. If both a Leaf owner and a Model S owner drive 40 miles per day, I'd expect the Leaf battery capacity to fade more than 3x as fast as the Model S capacity, because of the deeper battery cycling. That's true even of the Model S 60/60D that had a 75 kWh battery software-locked to 60 kWh of usable capacity. The capacity fade is linked to the physical characteristics of the battery; the software unlock to a full 75 kWh just bought the option to discharge the battery more deeply for longer uninterrupted driving.
So, a net price of about $1K/kWh of battery seems to be the going rate.
How would that be possible? Charge and discharge cycles are closely monitored and controlled by computers.
The charging protocol is pretty well-designed for electrical safety already.