Should Canada make the switch to electric cars in 20 years?

Sunday on Cross Country Checkup: going electric. 

Picture this: a country with no more gas stations. Instead, you and every other driver on the road whiz and hum down the road in electric vehicles. Actually, no one is driving at all. The cars drive themselves. And we power them, not at the pump, but by plugging them in.

That scenario may be closer than you think.

This week, Britain announced it's joining France, Norway, India, Germany, and the Netherlands in promising to sell nothing but electric cars by the year 2040. That comes on the heels of news from Volvo - all their new models launched after 2019 will be electric and hybrid the first major auto-maker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by an internal combustion engine.

Also this week, the much-hyped Tesla Model 3s rolled off the assembly line - a sexy-looking EV able to go over 300 kilometres on a single charge. Price tag: a consumer-friendly $45,000, much less with rebates.

Does all of this finally mark a tipping point in the adoption of the electric vehicles? 

No one's declaring the internal combustion engine dead yet. Right now, less than 1 percent of all vehicles sold in Canada are electric. But some provinces - B.C., Ontario and Quebec - offer big incentives to buy EVs and sales are climbing. 

What do you think, are you ready to go electric? What about range anxiety? Do you worry electric vehicles will run out of juice, especially in our frigid Canadian winters? Are EVs as "clean and green" as they purport to be, if the source of electricity is decidedly dirty and dead batteries start piling up? Should governments use taxpayer dollars to subsidize electric vehicle sales and build more charging stations? Or should some money go to different and possibly better technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells?

Our question today: "Should Canada make the switch to electric cars in 20 years?"