> The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed.
Plug-in electric sales in 2018 were up 61% over 2017, which was 51% higher than 2016 (via quick wikipedia check).
What numbers would you want to see before calling that a "boom"? How much higher than 60% growth does something have to have before it's not "strangled"?
I think that's silly. Clearly these things are going somewhere. Production at all levels is adapting to compete, and that means some areas (like Li production in the linked articles) are going to outstrip the field which remains limited by other things. But even right now they're clearly out of the "niche within a niche" category and growing very well.
Of course EVs are booming in relative terms. Things boom all the time in relative terms. That's not remarkable.
The pure EV market will eventually dominate vehicle sales in most segments, and most of the rest will be PHEV. Have EVs even hit 1% of worldwide vehicle sales yet? Call me back when it passes 10% and we'll talk about an EV boom.
The current trend is under 4 years until EV’s are 10% of global car sales. It’s likely adoption will slow down at some point, but 50% of all new car sales being EV could happen within 10 years. Though it would take much longer for EV’s to represent 1/2 of all cars on the road.
2.3% - at 60% annual growth would be ~100% in 8 years. Exponential growth is always unintuitive, but I'd expect many people in this community to understand it.
Next questions
What is the sustainable growth rate? Higher than 60%? Lower?
And are we going to, in 10 years, see more EVs sold (for much less each) than ICE vehicles are sold today?
The answer is we'd better, as we have to get those ICE vehicles off the road.
And I'm genuinely impressed that it's that high. I expected the Toyota Camrys and low cost Indian scooters to dwarf EV sales more than that—but I had forgotten about the Chinese manufacturers!
But I still agree with your point though, I don't call 2% market share booming. Not to mention the amount of incentives involves in pushing these numbers.
Battery and Charging point is still the biggest issue in most places around the world.
But if you include indian scooters, why not include pedelecs, or hover boards? And going the other way electric buses, and electric trains? Its useful to know the total number of electric people movers, its also useful to know how many electric cars there are. There is no moral component to that.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla alone is over 1% (maybe 1.5 to 2%?) of the US car market. Worldwide is likely to be even higher for electric cars in general.
The thing is that shifts in large markets like this take a long time to really be realized. It has taken Tesla 15 years to go from 0% to over 1%. Their current aggressive plans call to double that in another 2 years.
The real question is what kind of change can they make over the next 15 years. And for that, we need the crystal ball...
Oh, I underestimated total sales. For some reason I thought the US was closer to 15 million sales this year. I do think that estimate may be slightly undercounting Tesla this year, but I could be wrong.
yesterday I had a dollar in my pocket, today I have 2 dollars. Dollars in my pocket is booming right now. But relative to amount of dollars I have or that in the world, not so much. So I think other statistics would be more useful to determine quality of boom.
Last month you ate one doughnut, this month you ate two, so month-to-month growth is 100%. Is your consumption of doughnuts booming? To say that it is, I'd need to see doughnuts replace a significant portion of your calorie intake first.
Toyota RAV4 alone sold more than all plug-in cars combined.
I meant in the US. In comparison all Tesla models sold 192K last year, for a marketshare of a whopping 1.1% (information is also from carsalesbase). It's funny that you're comparing US sales for Rav4 (just one of half a dozen popular Toyota models), with worldwide sales of electrics, and then extrapolate Tesla figures even though we're in the middle of the year.
Out in the real world very few people can afford a $45k+ car.
Plug-in electric sales in 2018 were up 61% over 2017, which was 51% higher than 2016 (via quick wikipedia check).
What numbers would you want to see before calling that a "boom"? How much higher than 60% growth does something have to have before it's not "strangled"?
I think that's silly. Clearly these things are going somewhere. Production at all levels is adapting to compete, and that means some areas (like Li production in the linked articles) are going to outstrip the field which remains limited by other things. But even right now they're clearly out of the "niche within a niche" category and growing very well.