The great race for electric vehicle dominance takes center stage at the Paris Motor Show this week, but not everyone is buying the hype.



Andy Palmer, chief executive of Aston Martin, which opted out of the Paris spectacle this year along with super-luxury rivals Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Lamborghini, says the road to fully-fledged electrification will be a long one.

"It's going to take a while, for sure. You've got a difficult circle to break, you need volume," he told CNBC.

Palmer, a self-proclaimed believer in EV technology who oversaw the Nissan Leaf electric-car program in his former tenure as an Executive Vice-President at the Japanese automaker, knows the headache of costly EV production all too well.

"The market has gone toward midsized cars where you don't have that pricing capability and as a consequence it's difficult to cover the costs," he says.

