Nearly 136,000 light-duty EVs were sold in September 2023 – up 67 percent from last September. After months of light-duty EV sales hovering around 10 percent, September brought us an EV market share of 11 percent for new sales. The US surpassed one million EVs sold in 2023.
U.S. consumers purchasing new light-duty cars or trucks are increasingly considering electric vehicles, which are on pace to make up 9% of sales this year according to data from EV Hub, a tracker run by Atlas Public Policy. US EVs, including plug-in hybrids, were 7.3% sales in 2022.
U.S. consumers purchasing new BEV (pure Battery Electirc) and PHEV (plug in hybrid) light-duty cars or trucks, will likely by about 15% of sales in 2024.
Combined U.S. sales of hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles reached 17.7% of new light-duty vehicle sales in the third quarter, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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EVs have serious supply chain problems that will take decades to resolve. Where and how will the electricity to charge them come from? Where is the electrical distribution infrastructure to get the imaginary charging capacity to where it is needed? Where are the chargers?
The secretary of the DOE found this out the hard way in Grovetown GA. These are the fundamental problems that must be solved for EVs to become ubiquitous.
I think Toyota got it right with a focus on hybrids until such a time that all these basic infrastructure components can be put in place.
I embrace this.
Though I personally don’t care whether the electrification of transportation saves the earth or not (however you define ‘saving’, reducing: emissions, mining, fossil fuels, consumerism, conservatives, OPEC, land use, industrialization, globalization, poverty, liberal grand-standing, etc., etc.), I fundamentally believe that electricity is a far more versatile and robust way of providing some-to-most of the propulsion capacity for a wide range of road, track, flight, and other means of transportation -and- as a significant means to heat and power most things. Electricity can be centralized, dispersed, regulated, localized, sourced at all levels of shack/ house/ building/ campus/ town/ city/ region, –and– stored.
What would/should be the motivation? personal choice and reliable redundancy.
What would be the impediments? capital cost mostly, use costs somewhat, regulatory mostly, and reliable maintenance significantly-if not predominantly.
So, it may be a necessary evil to over-regulate through ICE bans, bribery-level rebates, and fascism-type EV/anti-emissions scare-mongering — knowing ‘full well’, that likely, it is little more enforceable and ‘sticky’ and desireable than ruthlessly enforcing jaywalking – an exercise in ‘virtue signalling’ with a nod to minor threatening liabilties, with its quiet ‘retirement’ in more ‘stable’ times…
Sally forth EVs then… we hope you are the illegitimate child of future greatness as a PHEV, range-extender, house/business back-up/ grid extension, and robust SUV, with a limitless and cheap path to abundance -rather- than the forced, narrow path to a golf-cart and AC/usage scarcity world view/ culture. Be Great or just stay niche.
Seems like only through an ‘Interstate’ scale project would electricity achieve the scale and coverage to reliably serve throughout. I think the jury is still out on whether that was the most cost-efficient way of getting connections to all areas.
The problem here is that the economy does NOT have an infinite capacity to absorb mandated stupidity. These massive subsidies and mandates are making us poorer as a society.
And it’s not like they’ve shown even the slightest inclination to do the infrastructure spending necessary to make an EV future actually feasible. They’re treating the infrastructure as something that will magically appear if they force everybody to replace fossil fuels with electricity for every possible use.
They’re going to impoverish us trying to create a magical EV utopia, and maybe even collapse the economy. They’ve already gotten rid of something like 110% of all the functional redundancy in the grid, blackouts are basically guaranteed at this point.
Fair points. the talking Heads seem to think we can ‘have it all’:
https://www.govtech.com/fs/can-the-u-s-power-grid-handle-an-all-electric-future
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https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-ev-transition-explained-2658463709
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https://www.utilitydive.com/news/transportation-electrification-and-evs-who-pays-for-grid-upgrades/639420/
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Though, sounds like ‘jungle rules’ for the foreseeable future – i.e chaos, at least until the non-ICE sales regs kick in in some states in the 2030s. It might be just one of the key reasons for re-locating -not best schools- but can your region supply reliable power. All the more reason to hedge and get a PHEV, if you need a car, so that you can function without car electricity for a week or 200 miles, whichever comes first.
That’s a lot of word salad. I guess you’re super smart. Question: have you ever been out of the first world? Do you think maybe your perspective is influenced by living in a rich society? You seem willing to make decisions for me. That is the major fault in our society. Busybodies hijack society while I’m busy working.
You’ve got an administration that’s doing everything short of simply ordering people to buy EVs even if they don’t need a new vehicle. Of course EV sales are up.
They’ll go up a bit further if the administration cuts to the chase and simply bans selling anything else, by setting technologically infeasible mileage standards.
This is not anything like a market driven adoption of the technology. It’s a product of utterly massive subsidies and mandates, at an unsustainable level.
Regs are so tight. Cummins settling $1.65B over ‘cheat device’ 2013-2019. Prolly going to bankrupt Cummins. The Dems strangle business.
I agree.
I’m super Pro-EV, I own a Leaf, hoping to upgrade a a better EV in a year-ish.
While I don’t like the current admin trying their best to destroy gas/diesel. I still think EV sales would be up year-over-year. It’s not a fad. EV’s are the logical path forward, but I also think you need to have that happen organically. It’s a multi-decade transition, and the faster you force it to happen, the harder your making it on your citizens.
It’s not purely a fad, and the next generation of sodium batteries might make EV’s economically sensible. Right now the battery cost is too high, and repair costs scary high, while the advantage in reduced maintenance only kicks in if you can afford the one time cost.
The problem is that EVs are somewhat of a niche solution at this point. They’re not so great in areas that get really cold, or really hot, both heating and cooling tank the battery range. But if you live in Southern California, or your daily round trip commute is within the battery range, they seem practical enough.
They’re really luxury vehicles compared to ICE vehicles, but this is somewhat obscured by the government’s massive subsidies of the EVs, and regulations intended to make ICE vehicles unaffordable. In a subsidy/mandate free market, it would be much clearer that EVs are just much more expensive than ICE vehicles at this point.
But some combination of secular religion and the opportunity for graft in an artificially manipulated market is prompting politicians to try to force them on us before they’re ready.