We are all still awaiting BEVs with closer ICEV parity. That means cost and all areas of performance. A 200 mile range $35,000 BEV won't do for the masses. Battery tech has to catch up and fast if we are to eliminate fossil fuels from our lives and clean up the Planet before we all die from the poisoned atmosphere.

The problem with relying on battery tech to improve in order to make a 20k USD 300 mile range four seater BEV is that it will take many decades for that to happen and the planet can’t stomach many decades more with combustion engines. The only realistic solution is to make fully autonomous cars running as Uber style taxi services. That could be technically and legally feasible by 2020. After that we only need 10 more years for the auto-industry (or perhaps we should say the tech industry) to ramp up production of these robo cars to do all the mass transportation we need door to door. The auto industry will be forever changed. Brands will disappear. Car ownership will become niche and perhaps less that 5% of the population will opt for privately owned cars and most people will never take a drivers license.

The reason alternative fuels never took off was that gasoline was so cheap. The opposites would be ethanol in Brasil and diesel in Europe.
Additionally, most alt fuels don't reduce CO2 that much. Hybridisation helps, but only up to a point.
What you need is some class of electrification, be it PHEV or BEV, and a low CO2 elecricity supply. There is little point in electrifying if you are generating your electricity from coal.
PHEVs tend to be expensive, but you could encourage the use of a cloud PHEV where people own medium range EVs (like Nissan Leaf) and have access (at low cost) to ICEs (or HEvs or whatever) as required.
This does not require ANY new technology, just some bureaucratic streamlining to make it cheap to operate a car (or insurance) swap / ICE rental system.

I do not think you need autonomous EVs to achieve this at all. All you need is a mixture of (for instance) Nissan Leafs and Ford Focuses and an application to make swapping them easy.

Then you could do 80-90% of the driving on the Leaf and the rest on another car type.

Most of the AFV stuff prior to EVs was fakery by the politicians so that they could look as if they were doing something about high gasoline prices. They never chose what might actually work or even wanted it to work. Ethanol is usable but it is not possible to get the volume needed at this time. Methanol is toxic and bio diesel is a niche. In fact the main issue with the bio derived fuel is that the source is diffuse and dependent on collection of waste materials which vary highly in makeup.

The GOP pushed fuel cell cars too, because they knew it was highly unlikely to work and even if it did the hydrogen production and distribution would be controlled by the same people who sell us oil. Meanwhile we would still be using the oil that makes them and their true constituents rich. Hydrogen, it's the fuel of the future and always will be.

The media is not independent from the moneyed powers. Their hype is the hype they have been told to perform. They are simply propagandists.

Some hype is created by small companies hoping to get funding. They would subsequently pay themselves large salaries and then pretend that they are "just so close" to making the final discovery that will change everything. It's a living that many researchers pursue. It's a good scam because there are also legitimate companies with every intent to make real discoveries who look and sound the same. It's very difficult to know the difference.

EVs work. The only thing left is mass production to reduce costs, but this requires investment which must come from those that own oil investments (they have most of the money because that was the single most profitable industry in human history). EVs have also suffered from Obama's support. Everything that Obama supported became the enemy of the right wing. Thus much of the hype about some of the inevitable issues that surrounded the recovery act funding, the loan program and even the R&D work having to do with batteries was a mischaracterization of the actions or at least the severity of malfeasance for political reasons. The GOP cannot let anyone who is not lead by them succeed. They can talk about solyndra and A123 all they want, but an honest evaluation of the programs that funded these shows that the programs were largely successful. However, being 99.9% successful in the government is still failure because opposition focuses on the rare failure and the media sells hype and the people are stupid (many anyway). I would direct you to venomous media hype surrounding LG Chem and their plant in Holland Michigan. They were vilified in the media, but yet, as far as meeting the goals of building a viable US manufacturing base in the US they have been very successful. The hype at the time when the GOP needed to oppose Obama on EVs was very negative toward LG Chem, and while they did have some issues, these were corrected and actually minor in scope given the size and ultimate goal of the project. So, Obama has supported EVs and thus at least a good portion of the population hates EV simply because of that.

The loan program is government choosing winners. It is of course a GW Bush program, and prior to Obama it was fine for the loan program to pick winners, it only became problematic when Obama's administration would pick them, and of course they did. The rate of success with the loans is higher than the best venture capitalists and in fact because the interest is not too low, it will actually make money for the government and tax payers. That's a boring story for the media and they are also told not to make that point.

So, this study fails to address many of the real issues surrounding the topic they chose. Just more media spin, although, this one looks as if it want to make the whole topic academically boring so as to put people to sleep. They say nothing real and blame most of it on policy makers, which is code for politicians, but they take no side either liberal or conservative and there really is a big difference. You can find instances of failure on both sides, but only one side wanted the tech to fail and only one side wanted it to work. If you think that is not true, you are wrong.

In this century it does appear that EV (BEV, PHEV, FCEV) and autonomous vehicles will happen much like how the ICE automobile took over transportation in the twentieth century after 1930.
For autonomous vehicles, read the Bob Lutz tweet by MMillikin or http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28092/the-end-of-the-automobile/. Autonomous vehicles requires government regulations and preferably infrastructure changes that allow inductive charging on freeways eliminating any refueling problems even for large trucks. This will probably take at least two decades.
EV will happen much sooner, read Bloomberg Business about how "a shift is under way that will lead to widespread adoption of EVs in the next decade" - see http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-ev-oil-crisis/.

I don't think EVs will really take off until Gasoline gets expensive, and even then only in developed countries.

Gasoline can get expensive for two main reasons: expensive oil or high taxes. IMO, Taxes are a better way to do it because your government gets the money, not some guys in the middle east.

Perhaps "they" could ban diesel for cars in cities - that would push people to Gasoline or EVs and the reduction in pollution would make the city a better place to live in.

Either way, some degree of electrification gets my vote.

Another way to regulate to get rid of dirty cars without creating undue problems for people is to gradually ban registration of new cars that are polluting a lot but otherwise are street legal. For instance, large cities could start by banning the registration of car ownership for diesel cars for people living in these cities. So they start buying the gasser and hybrid alternatives. Subsequently when the robocars arrive in large numbers (after 2020) you start banning registration of any new car in large cities that has a combustion engine. This is an easy way to create a demand for less pollution cars. It does not put a burden on tax payers and it hit exactly where we need to start; the largest cities.

Harvey I wrote nothing about banning use of ICE in city cores. Only banning the registration of new ICE cars for people who live in city centres. Big difference. The point is to drastically and gradually reduce the number of ICE cars in city centres not to ban them.

Unfortunately, where machine guns cannot be banned, ICEVs registration bans will be difficult or impossible to do?

The top/best ways to accelerate the switch from ICEVs to electrified vehicles may be with:

1. Improved 120+ kWh (**) lower cost (under $100/kWh) batteries (by 2020/2025)
2. More improved quicker charging facilities (under 10 minutes with 800+ VDC)
3. Lower cost EVs versus equivalent ICEVs (subsidies equivalent to 100% of on-board batteries cost would be required)

The same could be said about FCEVs.

(**) The TESLA Model S-100D will be out before end of 2016 and Model S-120D about one year latter.

Meanwhile, many more extended range (700+ Km) FCEVs will be available at competitive price.

Cellulose ethanol was not done because the private sector refused to do it.

Cellulose ethanol was not done, despite EPA mandates that oilco's buy and blend it, because the private sector could not make it work.  Several efforts went bust, including Range Fuels (remember them?).

Some things are inherently difficult.  Breaking lignocellulose into sugars and fermenting them to EtOH is one of them.

Also, what BK4 and ECI said.