How fast are sales of EVs growing? That depends. If you look at the full history of EV sales it looks like exponential growth:
But if you look at growth since 2020 it looks linear:
Take your pick. Sales in September were above trend either way you look at it.
NOTE: This includes only full, battery-operated EVs. In September, an additional 30,000 plug-in hybrids were sold along with 110,000 conventional hybrids.
If car companies want to increase EV sales to middle class and working class people they can't advertise the value of them, or anything about their goodness or virtue, they have to emphasize the brutal, hedonistic stupidity of them; that they enhance freedom and independence; that driving an EV is flying on a lightning bolt to say fuck society I am riding my thunderballs through the stormy sky!
And that you don't care about all the harm they might do to anything that gets in your way. With a soundtrack from Guns & Roses.
A campaign like that would probably double EV sales.
They gotta run ads for EV's showing them Blue Smoking the competition.
https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnpc9k8pIVI
At 4:50, Genesis GV60 vs Corvette something.
Here's some real man stuff,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxkB3wnFPhw
Park an EV in the background and just let it sit there. Don't even mention it. Let YouTube do the work for you.
Have you seen GM's new Hummer EV? 1000 horsepower, 9000 lbs, enough battery to build 4 Chevy Bolts instead. I wish I could say I just made this up.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ax4VaYxb3Nk
All short segments of curves look linear. I think the Calculus does some adding of linear segments.
Yep, I was going to make the same observation: an exponential always looks linear if you look at a short timescale. exp(x) = 1 + x + O(x²).
The only thing worse -- or at least as bas as -- Dad jokes are STEM perfesser jokes. Like the joke based upon your observation: "To a first approximation, _everything_ is linear". I first heard that one in a Classical Dynamics class. At 7:40 in the morning. The groans were pitieous, public, and many, believe you me. Didn't stop me from inflicting it on my classes, of course.
It's also very useful in just about every field.
Monthly new car sales are around 1,200,000. So EV's are still less than 10% of sales. Hybrids (all types) are a little over 10%--and combined, ca. 20%.
There's room for growth.
Yes and it still puzzles me that car manufacturers like Honda and Subaru just recently introduced hybrids in their line up. EV only works for some people that are wealthy and don't routinely travel long distances. More robust adoption of hybrid technology also seemed a no brainer
The fleet mileage requirements, CAFE, topped out in the '90's. CA's standard pushed things forward, effectively setting a national standard. Obama jump started CAFE and Biden is overseeing more increases.
Tesla made a lot money selling CAFE credits.
EVs are the future. Despite a few hitches, people will come to realize the great bargain that they are.
Two things could greatly enhance EV sales:
1. Non-Tesla. Carmakers should invest in creating ubiquitous charging networks. Don’t leave it up to the fly-by-night operators. The lack of good charging infrastructure is holding back sales and giving Tesla an insurmountable competitive advantage.
2. Tesla. A lot more people would buy Teslas if it wasn’t for Elon Musk. He needs to stop being an asshole.
Something to seriously promote the ease of home charging will help, too. Most people don't understand that you can even do that, or think putting something in to do that would be wildly expensive.
Not just home charging, but, a few EVs can actually power your house. No more "backup chargers" that have to be maintained and started every two months.
I love it when my neighbor says they have to get a tune-up/oil change and I say, what's that?
Not to defend IC cars, but actually tune ups (replacing and gapping spark plugs and a replacing and adjusting a couple pieces in the distributor - points and maybe rotor and maybe distributor cap) haven't been a thing for about forty years. Plugs now last 60K or more miles and ignitions are solid state and last forever. Cars used to need chassis lubrication every 1000-2000 miles and since the early 1960's it was first about 30K then pretty much forever.
I just upgraded my incoming electric panel to 200amps from 100amps, ran 100amps under the house to the garage, added a new panel, and put in a 60amp breaker, plug, and level 2 charger for $8,440. Admittedly, I'm going to use the 100 amps for more than just charging the car, but, yeah, it's wildly expensive.
I’m still waiting on my local utility to pull the wires for the service upgrade. We started the process only a year ago…
Is there a tax break or some program to help defer that cost?
A 220v 40 amp line will allow you to run a Class 2 charger that will add about 25 miles of range per hour.
A 110v 10amp line will allow you to charge at about 2.5 miles of range in an hour, while a 110v 15 amp line will give about 4 miles of range in an hour.
My house came with two 30 amp 220V outlets, each on its own circuit. It was built in the 1990s. My electrician guesses it was for arc welding or paint curing in the garage. There were a few electric cars back then, but I seriously doubt that's why someone put in those circuits. (My landscaper suggested it was for marijuana growing lights which fits with some of the odd ball plumbing.)
"Something to seriously promote the ease of home charging will help, too."
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a $1000 tax credit for EV charging infrastructure. Which admittedly doesn't solve the whole cost, but it ain't nothing, either.
It kind of is? Or can be?
My dad looked into a quote to getting the electricity in his garage upgraded to handle an EV. Cheapest quote was something like four grand.
Four thousand bucks to keep a $50,000 car, or even a $30,000 car charged is not "wildly expensive".
For most people it's also unnecessary. As one of the earlier posts notes, an ordinary 120 volt 15 amp circuit can add about 4 miles worth of charge per hour. If you charge your car at that rate for 12 hours per day (when used for commuting, most cars are home for more than 12 hours per day) you get nearly 50 miles a day of driving. That's 18,000 miles a year, which is more mileage than most privately owned vehicles are driven.
"EVs are the future."
Indeed. The only power source more ubiqutous than the gas station is the electric outlet. The former is on most street corners; the latter is in every room.
Imagine never having to drive to a gas station again. That's the promise of EVs. All the stuff about saying "fuck you forever" to Russia and the House of Saud is just sweet bonus.
You have 220v 40 amp outlets in every room? 110 v is only good for about 4 miles of range per hour of charging.
4 miles of range per hour of charging is enough for most people.
Tesla can't make more cara than they're selling, so not much pressure on Musk yet.
Other manufacturers could maybe make more than they're selling, but only if they cost more than they're selling them for.
It's a bit of a problem. Which is why Biden is pushing battery production.
Tesla did cut their prices this year, in what was seen as an effort to increase sales.
I assume it was because Tesla finally has competition including on price. And certainly many EV car buyers are liberals who have noticed that Elmo is an apartheid baby fascist ruining a major current platform.
Identifying an entire company with one person has its downside. I wonder if many Americans decided to not buy Fords in the late 1930's.
There were a lot of them. Henry Ford was a lot like Elon Musk, a fascist nutcase. Even during World War II, the elder Ford refused to cooperate with the war production effort. It was rather clear which side he was on.
It's a mathematical fact that exponential curves always appear as linear curves if you look locally.
How shocking that a 4 year trend through a world-wide pandemic looks linear.
I assume you're posting this because there's been some noise recently about how EVs sales are lagging. And you might have read that Akio Toyoda made stupid comments claiming that this proved his direction of Toyota (before he retired as CEO) to pursue hybrids and hydrogen cells was the correct choice.
I've always been amazed at people who insist that hydrogen cars are the future--it's as if they never stopped to ponder the reality that *there is no hydrogen* out there to use as fuel. Just water, which is like saying "there is plenty of wood for our campfire!" when all you've got is ashes.
It's an insane proposition. They have to expend energy to extract it and waste it during conversion back to usable energy, slashing efficiency to below 35%.
The ammonia engine idea is interesting though. Toyota demonstrated a car that burns ammonia and produces nitrogen dioxide and water. There is ammonia infrastructure, and a group in Australia has demonstrated a path using solar energy to turn sea water and atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia. I'm guessing this will be a small part of the future market and that Toyota should consider cranking out an EV.
EV= what?
Electric bicycle sales are soaring, as they have been for the last few years, even as bicycle sales stay flat. I think that many people in densely populated areas (or in areas like mine, where safe, paved bike trails are in place) have replaced at least part of their IC engine motor vehicle use with an ebike, as I have.
""In the period from the summer of 2011 to 2012, some 70,000 units (ebkes) were imported into the United States. ... Then from July 2012 through June 2013, sales more than doubled to 159,000 units.....From virtually nothing a decade ago, electric bikes have become an $11 billion global industry."
That was in 2013. Growth accelerated after that, particularly during the pandemic. In 2019 sales in the US alone rose 51%.
So if you're not including ebikes among EVs, it makes sense to take some account of them. Not everyone is buying one to replace a gas vehicle, as I did, but enough people are using them to make a dent, and more are using them each year.
I had a very interesting conversation with an executive at a large rental company not long ago. His company is one of the biggest buyers of cars in the US. He had some interesting insight into where we are with EVs in this country.
In short, the infrastructure is simply not in place to handle a large fleet of electric vehicles. To give just one example. he said if his entire company's fleet in one large tourist city in the US (he named the city but I'm trying to keep some of the details of our conversation private) were electric, this city would have to double its electricity generation capacity. Think about that.
I call shennanigans on what your rental car exec said. Rental cars are a single digit percentage share of the number of cars in the country. Unless there are some very, very specific and abnormal factors at play with your unnamed tourist city (aberrantly very large percentage of rental vmts, aberrantly very small starting electricity demand for the city, etc.) electifying the rental cars in just one fleet of just one rental car company isn't going to significantly move the needle.
Nationally speaking, more energy is devoted to electricity generation than to transportation as a whole,* which means that completely electrifying ALL transportation itself is unlikely to require more than a doubling in generation capacity (esp. since we have excess generation capacity and smart EV policies will incentivize charging during slack generation hours); suggesting that electrifying a tiny fraction of the transportation fleet would require a doubling is just not credible.
_______
*38 quadrillion btus for electricity, versus 27 quadrillion btus for transportation, in 2022. See https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/.
Yeah, exec was wrong, as one random guy often is. But didn't the (somewhat deceptively named and how about going back to non-PR names for bills) Inflation Reduction Act include a bunch of money for charging and other electric infrastructure?
Think you just rediscovered the Taylor Expansion.
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This is why my Google feed has been overflowing with stories about how carmakers who have committed to EVs are now pooping their pants. Instead of growing EXPONENTIALLY, adoption of EVs are only growing LINEARLY -- at an annualized rate of "only" 73% -- over the last 3 years. It also explains why I am seeing all the Doom stories about why consumers are now "having second thoughts" about EVs.
What a crock! EV adoption is still skyrocketing, just not quite as fast as some analysts expected.
lol, +1.
Have to wonder who started that media frenzy and what their real agenda was.
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