REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Elon Musk, the CEO and founder of Tesla motors.

And futurist Lars Thomsen thinks that electric cars are such a disruptive technology that they will make gasoline cars obsolete--starting in 2016, or much earlier than most other analysts suggest.

Thomsen delivered a speech this past September, at the25th International AVL Conference Engine & Environment in Graz, Austria, that's contained in the clip below.

It's also in German, which may make the 36-minute-long video a bit impenetrable for non-German speakers.

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But Thomsen suggests that electric cars are a sufficiently disruptive technology that they will lead to quick behavior changes by consumers in the market forautomobiles.

He uses the example of Nokia as a cautionary tale, noting that less than 10 years ago, that company dominated the world market for mobile phones.

In June 2007, Apple released its first-generation iPhone, a radical new entry from a company that for three decades had confined itself to personal computers and portable music devices.

The iPhone was such a radical rethinking of what a phone should be and how it should operate--essentially a small Internet-connected computer, operated via a touchscreen, that also provided voice calls--that it completely reset the market's vision of what a "mobile phone" should be.

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