Ah, but in which country? It will differ greatly for all sorts of reasons.
The UK Government has reckoned it wants no more i.c.-engine cars built after 2040. Norway is even more ambitious - but there are big differences between the geography, population and population density, road density by land area, and distances between towns and service-stations.
Britain has just had an unusually cold snap - nothing like that polar vortex freeze affecting North America but still enough to cause significant transport disruption for a few days, with the roads affected the worst.
I really can't imagine thousands of battery-only cars being any use in such conditions. For one thing, busy traffic becomes much slower and more stop-go.
I assume these vehicles either do not have heaters, or they do but powered from the same battery-pack as the transmission motors; or maybe an auxiliary pack. Ditto with the lamps and any extras like the radio. I wonder if anyone has done any genuine road-conditions tests on battery cars in the sort of places they are expected to perform.
Suppose in broad daylight on a Summer day in light traffic your car will take you 150 miles on a given charge and journey. Now consider the same journey in Scandinavian Winter: very cold and very dark; full headlights, heater on, very hilly terrain.
Or in England: still Mid-Winter; fully dark but possibly pouring with rain and in strong winds, in heavy traffic on a motorway with its service-stations averaging 30 miles apart - and no stopping in between except due to a breakdown. Full lamps again, heater and windscreen wipers on. Oh, and no cheating by saying use the bus or train if your home and destination areas are a few hundred miles apart with no direct public-transport between them. (Or none at all, direct or not.) Even commuting in major conurbations and their satellite towns could be become unmanageable.
Then there is also the question of how and where you recharge: the above has already seen very long queues at service-stations either for direct charging or (a bit quicker perhaps) for battery exchanges. Meanwhile the recovery firms are all busy rescuing umpteen cars and their occupants stranded by flat batteries - some where the drivers gambled too much on reaching the next charging-point.
Yes, such driving conditions also knock petrol and diesel consumption down, but refuelling is quick (and easy at the roadside if you do have to be rescued), and the energy density of a tankful of such fuel is much greater than that of a battery-pack. And you can carry a can of spare fuel.
There is another aspect: housing: I don't know about other countries but certainly in the UK, huge numbers of people live as I do, in homes built before cars were common or even invented; or in large blocks of flats. Homes with no ground for individual off-street parking. So nowhere to plug your car in over-night even if you can park outside your home (always a gamble in such areas) - but the push to be battery-only is driven by politicians and "green" types who can all afford homes with private drives. In fact there are now modern housing-estates, such as the rather absurd "Poundbury" suburb of Dorchester, built deliberately with limited parking, in an effort to deter car ownership.
I forecast vast social changes if the policy to eventually remove the i.c.-engine vehicle from the roads (and railways come to that) comes to fruition as some would like. Far-flung communities will become more remote, insular and deprived, possibly depopulated as those residents who can, migrate to the larger towns. Huge numbers of people will be unable to own a car - it would be as totally impracticable as that dream of summoning up a self-driving pool-car. Many aspects of the country's social, leisure and tourism life will die out; as will so many of their associated trades. I do not believe for one minute the ludicrously snobbish, metro-centric "Family We-All" claim that "everyone" will be working from home via the Internet (what, even brick-laying, transplanting hearts, driving trains...?). Nevertheless, with many people already becoming rather hermit-like and of poor social skills as they lean too much on their (not)"smart" phones; I suggest society in the mid-21C age of the Internet-of-all-Things and the Nissan Leaf Mk.56, will be very different, far more fractured and isolationist, and far poorer in so many more ways than just financially.
An example of the technical ignorance and complacency of many of the pro-battery campaigners was one MP who suggested putting charging-points into the lamp-posts! They may be upholding a worthwhile cause, based on our being informed by specialists in whose opinions we can only trust if we lack their specialist knowledge. I do not doubt the sincerity of many of them; but I have little respect for campaigners - like that MP - so clearly not comprehending the basic principles of the everyday science and engineering whose benefits they so take for granted.
