The Pure Electric Car Market And Horizon - Part II
In The United States And Global Markets
In Part I, we started to investigate the global pure electric vehicle (PEV or EV) market. We established that the United States, China, Japan, and Europe (calculated by combining EV stock in nine European countries) have the largest markets for electric cars. China is currently the largest market for electric cars in the world. Surprisingly, the United States has the lowest stock of electric vehicles between China, Japan, and Europe as a sales region. This can be explained, at least in part, by the relatively low ranges of lower-priced EVs (and conversely, the high price tag of high mile range EVs), the limited size of most EVs, and lack of charging infrastructure in most US cities. With that said, I think that is honestly a short list that will be largely obliterated by coming advancements in battery technology that will inevitably come simply from the competition already going on between EV manufacturers as the electric vehicle market gains traction.
That was the gist of Part I. Now, on to new ideas for Part II.
The United States Pure EV Market
52% of pure EVs in America are located in five cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Atlanta (3). On one hand, that is really exciting, because it places these three cities as national leaders in accepting and adopting electric vehicles. On the other, it is a wake-up call to the rest of the nation -- our electric vehicle stock is disproportionately allocated in a few cities while it should be saturated across the country.
As of August 2016, year-to-date (YTD) sales of pure electric cars was 45,440 (not bad!). The Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf alone accounted for 15,000 and 10,000 units, respectively. (4)
These numbers are good, but not great considering that America's 2016 YTD sales figures for every electric vehicle available in the country don't even come close to the YTD sales figures of many individual models sold in the USA such as the Toyota Corolla or the Nissan Altima. With that said, we here at Drover are highly optimistic that every set of 5 years from here until 2060 will reflect tremendous growth in pure electric vehicle sales, adoption, and market share. Please don't take my putting EV sales numbers in perspective as negative -- I am just trying to accurately reflect the growth/size of stocks while still praising the growth in the technology/adoption we have seen so far!
My main idea here is that in 2016, we have seen some impressive EV models, sales growth, etc, and it will only get better from here!
Now, the above list of US cities are the 5 that collectively own over 50% of US EVs. However, this says nothing of market share -- or the foothold that EVs have in the markets of each of those cities compared to fossil-fuel burning gas powered cars. Looking solely at market share, 9 of the top 10 US cities leading in EV market share are in California. Atlanta was the only non-Californian cities to make it in the top 10 (evaluated from June 2015 data). See Data 1 and Figure 2. I made both of these myself, however using data from a June, 2015 CheatSheet.com article. (5)
Data 1 - Text version of data... the Top 10 USA Cities by Electric Vehicle Market Share. 9/10 are in California plus Atlanta, Georgia. Note that market share data is for both pure EVs and PHEVs. Below is the percentage of each city's electric stock is pure EV.
Figure 2 (below) just puts that same data on a map.
Los Angeles Case Study
6.3 million registered vehicles
24,000 Pure Electric Cars
1 LA Pure EV : 262 LA Other Cars
0.4% of LA Vehicles // 1.2% of LA New Car Sales
United States Car Market Horizon
Referring back to the IEA data in Part I, there are roughly 101,000 electric cars in the USA. Expanding that number to include plug-in hybrids, 490,000 EVs and Hybrids have sold in the USA. I am honestly not sure why the sales numbers don't exactly align with stock numbers, except that maybe the IEA uses some sort of formula to account for accidents/lemons/percentage of sales that aren't on the road anymore.
Eight different US States have committed to, just by themselves, bring the USA EV stock to 3.5 million + by 2025. (You can read more here, in an article by the Sierra Club, an environmental conservation group https://content.sierraclub.org/evguide/blog/2014/06/eight-state-ev-action-plan-raises-hope-questions).
Moreover, the IEA estimates that by 2050, EVs will have 40% market share in the United States car industry/sales landscape.
These numbers are really exciting and give us hope and enthusiasm to feature electric vehicles as central to our core philosophy.
See the third and final part of this series to learn about the current and future global market for pure electric EVs.
Missed Part I? Click Here... Continue reading! Click here for Part III
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Patrizio Murdocca is Chief Web Architect at Drover Rideshare, a student at Vanderbilt University, and President of Interfaced Ministries.
Sources
Green Car Reports --> (3) http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1086200_half-of-all-electric-cars-are-sold-in-5-cities-can-you-name-them
EVObsession --> (4) http://evobsession.com/electric-car-sales/
CheatSheet.com --> (5) http://www.cheatsheet.com/automobiles/10-cities-where-people-buy-the-most-electric-vehicles.html/?a=viewall
