Given the amount of articles we produce each day about EVs, you’d have little reason to doubt predictions that the automotive landscape will be dominated by electric vehicles by the middle of the next decade.

But a recent article from Vice reminds us that experts once predicted that every car on the road by 2020 would be a hybrid.

The prediction came from a panel of 125 auto industry executives who, in 2008, were asked about their predictions for the cars of 2020 by researchers for IBM. And they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Twelve years later, when 2020 finally rolled around, just 3 per cent of cars sold in the U.S. were hybrids, and that figure only represented a rise from a 2.8 per cent market share in the year the study was compiled.

Related: Toyota Lobbied US Lawmakers Against EVs, Is It Time They Changed Their Stance?

The article explains how rocketing gas prices and a huge increase in awareness of climate change as a result of Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, helped create a demand in the U.S. for smaller, fuel efficient vehicles and resulted in Toyota Prius sales almost doubling year-on-year to 181,000 in 2007. Other carmakers, like GM, jumped on the hybrid bandwagon with cars like the Volt.

But hybrid technology was expensive, and when gas prices eased and carmakers began to implement technologies like turbocharging and stop-start systems to achieve fuel savings, buyers were happy to revert to buying bigger, conventional vehicles, and no longer felt compelled to buy hybrids.

So should we take current predictions about EV domination with a pinch of salt? Probably not. As Vice points out, the key difference between the period between 2008 and 2020 and today is that we’re no longer just relying on the customers’ sometimes changeable wants and desires to shape the evolution of our cars.

This time, technology (in the form of cheaper batteries) and, crucially, legislation in the form of forthcoming bans on ICE engines enacted by some U.S. states and entire countries, means buyers will have little choice but to switch to EV power.