As the Man in the Tin Shed told me a while back, "Torque is your friend."
And boy, steam engines (develop maximum torque at dead stop - think about that) and electric motors shine. Our pedestrian Chevrolet BOLT EV surprises many drivers off the line, and yes, it peters out (redline) around 100 mph.
And the trick is NOT the motors - it's the battery technology that has always been the weak link. We leased a NISSAN LEAF for three years, and it was a refined golf cart, suffering significant performance loss with hot and cold, and any distance run (more than 50 miles) had to be considered with a charger along the way in order to make it back. But we loved the car, and it was perfect for short trips around home - which for most Americans, is where 70% of trips are anyway.
Roll forward to the BOLT, and it had enough legs, and enough direct current 480V chargers had been sprinkled around, that we were able to take two trips more than 1,200 miles each - one down to western North Carolina with one of the RAA events, and the other up to Maine.
Batteries have a long way to go to match the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and as we see on this site, it is far easier to tinker with the flow and compression and exhaust of hydrocarbons.