Global Consultancy McKinsey Bullish on US Adoption of Electric Vehicles

I was quite surprised to see that global consultancy McKinsey ranks the US as the country most likely to lead the emergence of electric cars as a means of mass transportation. I wish I had access to the full report, as it apparently uses nine variables; I’d love to know which ones. They ultimately puts the US ahead of France, Germany and other western European countries that have up to now been in the vanguard of clean-vehicle technology. China is tied with Germany in third place.

Though I like what I see here in the US, personally, I’ll be stunned if the EV adoption curve in the US does, in fact, outpace countries like France. As I mentioned when I returned from the first annual French-American EV Conference last money, the French have dozens of well-backed, completely committed initiatives aimed at charging infrastructure and customer/business incentives, not to mention scads of EV form-factors under rapid development, from urban package delivery vans to mail trucks to passenger vehicles to electric bikes and scooters. Nicolas Sarkozy has personally been extremely active in pushing legislation that will drive the migration to electric transportation in public/private consortia that are not at all feasible in the US.

Having said that, I’ve gained a lot of respect for McKinsey over the years; they tend not to make mistakes based on laziness or incompetence in research. We’ll see.