As an aside, I think that's a poor analogy. Electric cars have been around since the late 1800s, only a decade or two after the first internal combustion engine, and for a while set land speed records. The last 30 years of electric cars did not start from scratch.

Electric motors reached a technological plateau. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car points out, it required MOSFET power converters and lithium-ion batteries. Before then, it could appear that it reached a technological limit.