Predicting the Electric Vehicle Adoption Curve
Regular commenter BreathOnTheWind sent me this piece on the rise of electric transportation, and how this phenomenon will disempower OPEC. Can’t happen soon enough.
My only objection (a point I’ve made dozens of times) is the forecasted perfectly smooth growth curve which culminates in the prediction that 35% of all new car sales will be EVs by the year 2040. 25 years hence the penetration will be about one-third? Absolutely no. When this happens, it’s going to happen in a huge way, like the adoption of cell phones.
It took just a few years for that huge shift in telephony; the world went from a few million cell phones to more than five billion in the relative blink of an eye. We should expect the same in the EV space, especially considering rapid pace of improvement in the product and its cost-effectiveness. E.g., the price of batteries fell 35% last year–that’s one year.
What I found most interesting in the article was the relationship between the EV adoptation and oil. You have exactly stated my concern with the article. Extrapolation is a useful tool but it is certainly risky to suggest the growth in EV sales only based upon current growth rates. We can also gain from our experience with other consumer goods.
Exactly. We tend to believe that the future be a smooth and predictable continuation of the past, though we’re almost always wrong. As George Will (whose intellect I admire, though certainly not his values) said: The future always looks the past…until it looks like something else entirely.
The range problem of EVs could be solved with a battery exchange system. Others have proposed the same thing. That approach has been used for electric fork lift trucks for many decades. Of course it would require limiting battery assemblies to only a few standard types.
It is possible that improved battery technology could solve the range problem without a battery exchange system but that has yet to be determined. And, since many people drive almost exclusively in urban areas, EVs already have sufficient range for them.
Frank,
You raise two interesting points.
1) battery swapping. For some idea this concept first promoted in a 1950’s “Popular Science’ type publications, has captured the imagination on many people. Logistically the idea is just plain ludicrous, but it hasn’t stopped various people trying stop trying. Shai Agassi managed to talk some usually sensible investors into plunging billions in his Better Place Battery swapping scheme before it collapsed into bankruptcy. Battery swapping is one of those ideas that sound just great, until you thinkl about the downsides.
2) Although ardent EV enthusiasts have always argued to the contrary, consumers do want much greater range than the average EV can provide. It doesn’t matter whether they need the range or not, you can’t sell consumers something they don’t want, just because you think it’s what they need.
ESD capacity in EV’s is the subject of massive R&D. Sooner or later some researcher will produce a dramatic breakthrough in ESD that with also be relatively economic, able to accept fast charging, and be easy to produce.
When that occurs, EV’s will become the worlds main form of road transport.