Will the new vehicle market in the US be almost entirely ZEV by 2030?
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In 1975 average fuel economy for light duty vehicles was mandated to double over ten years to 27.5 mpg by 1985. In 2022, average fuel economy for light duty vehicles was 23.4 mpg. It's forty years short and four bucks shy of doubling by 1985. There's a near 50 year history of doing fake mandates. Nothing has changed, the latest rollback was just last month.
Indeed. Over the span of decades, the general direction is positive. Automotive performance and efficiency have simultaneously improved, both by considerable amounts. Some of this was purely from market forces. Some, from government mandate. Which dominated which, is inscrutable, and too politically fraught to disentangle. But regulatory or legislative targets have been woefully unrealistic. Their initial aggression gets attenuated as soon as reality hits theory. The trend persists, but the rate slows down.
Overall predictions about EV adoption have been... optimistic. There is no reason to believe that long-term trends won't eventually follow, but the rate-of-following will, for some, be disappointingly slow. Today, 4 years after this thread started, the OP's predictions seem more than a bit quaint. But if we replace 2030 with say 2050, then quite likely the OP will have been correct.
Last edited by ohio_peasant; 04-07-2024 at 11:38 AM..
There have been a lot of articles/videos written with dire viewpoints on the EV market recently. And EV company stocks have fallen, and not just for the bad companies. If you look at the data, then it's true that sales have leveled off for the past quarter or so. But I prefer to see more of a trend before pronouncing that "demand has collapsed", etc. At least wait to see if there are two straight quarters of flat unit sales. If that happens, then okay, you can do your pontificating - you don't want to overanalyze what could be a blip in the data.
Indeed. Over the span of decades, the general direction is positive. Automotive performance and efficiency have simultaneously improved, both by considerable amounts. Some of this was purely from market forces. Some, from government mandate. Which dominated which, is inscrutable, and too politically fraught to disentangle. But regulatory or legislative targets have been woefully unrealistic. Their initial aggression gets attenuated as soon as reality hits theory. The trend persists, but the rate slows down.
Overall predictions about EV adoption have been... optimistic. There is no reason to believe that long-term trends won't eventually follow, but the rate-of-following will, for some, be disappointingly slow. Today, 4 years after this thread started, the OP's predictions seem more than a bit quaint. But if we replace 2030 with say 2050, then quite likely the OP will have been correct.
I think it's still pretty likely by 2050. It won't be by 2035 though, let alone 2030. 2023 was actually a very good year for EVs. See, from 2018 to 2022 battery prices were only going one direction. Up. For EVs to replace ICE one thing they need to do is stop being more expensive which wasn't going to happen with battery prices increasing. LFPs getting introduced in 2023 was a major shakeup so some lower price EVs are now once again a possibility. Even LFPs need more time in the oven to lower manufacturing cost but they actually deliver. In contrast you have Tesla Battery day claims which were just fake pie in the sky stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OutdoorLover
There have been a lot of articles/videos written with dire viewpoints on the EV market recently. And EV company stocks have fallen, and not just for the bad companies. If you look at the data, then it's true that sales have leveled off for the past quarter or so. But I prefer to see more of a trend before pronouncing that "demand has collapsed", etc. At least wait to see if there are two straight quarters of flat unit sales. If that happens, then okay, you can do your pontificating - you don't want to overanalyze what could be a blip in the data.
The stocks were stupid. Unlike tech, legacy outmakers don't have a money printer. Nobody is going to buy up some startup EV company that has no business model but one or two good ideas for huge buckets of cash. Even Rivian which has made it passed the first hurdle, it's still a long-shot that it's going to be the next Tesla. But greed got in the way of thinking for a lot of fools. I can see getting in cheap on a hail mary hoping to score big on the next Tesla but nobody was getting in cheap on Rivian or Lucid or Canoo or Fisker or Mullen. These stocks should never have been valued anywhere remotely close enough for them to have seen the 99%+ loses (Canoo, Fisker, Mullen), 95% on Lucid, 90% on Rivian. Don't read too much into the tea leaves there. Lucid didn't IPO up there but got driven there by fools. Rivian lied to inflate its IPO pricing but mostly that was still on the investors. Anyone who did due diligence knew they were lying about their projected costs months before the IPO and people still bought it anyway just like the bought Canoo, Fisker, and Mullen. Just like they bought Nikola. Greed makes people do very foolish thing.
It's hard for me to fathom how many people could possibly be so stupid but they were. Maybe it was the tech mentality. You had people used to speculating on startup tech companies that never need to bring a real product to market let alone one that can make any money as the goal in tech startups is just to have an idea and a patent that one of the big fish swallow up. Stupid though. Auto companies have pension liabilities, not tens of billions sitting in war chests. On the upside, the stupidity did provide funding for a lot of long shots. Without a whole lot of stupid there wouldn't have been any money for Canoo. I think it's quiet cool even though they'll probably spend more on private jets than producing EVs.
Indeed. Over the span of decades, the general direction is positive. Automotive performance and efficiency have simultaneously improved, both by considerable amounts. Some of this was purely from market forces. Some, from government mandate. Which dominated which, is inscrutable, and too politically fraught to disentangle. But regulatory or legislative targets have been woefully unrealistic. Their initial aggression gets attenuated as soon as reality hits theory. The trend persists, but the rate slows down.
Overall predictions about EV adoption have been... optimistic. There is no reason to believe that long-term trends won't eventually follow, but the rate-of-following will, for some, be disappointingly slow. Today, 4 years after this thread started, the OP's predictions seem more than a bit quaint. But if we replace 2030 with say 2050, then quite likely the OP will have been correct.
Predictions about EV adoptions for the most part have been overly pessimistic rather than optimistic. Remember, until very recently, the take on EVs for a lot of people and institutions is that they will never take off at all. If you look at EIA, BloombergBNEF, IEA projections, etc. from the past, the general projections of the past for today and the recent past have been substantially underestimating ZEV market share. Even more pessimistic has been a large swathe of the US public such as in this Automotive forum where you had the majority of people who've chimed in being much more pessimistic than that and you've had people project that they'll never make it all or more specific projections like they'll forever at most reach 5% or less of sales and that's already been surpassed.
There has been a very narrow window of time where a few automakers had projected greater than realized sales for their own products, but for a long time prior to that the trend has been by the vast majority of people, institutions and automakers to undershoot, sometimes vastly undershoot, EV adoption and competitiveness. Meanwhile, the total global ZEV market share even when there are slowdowns in one place or another at times, has been continued rapid growth with slowdowns at times in one market usually happening while there are accelerations in market share in other markets.
I'm the OP, and I want to note that I was and still am on the fence that we will get to vast majority ZEV market share in the US by 2030, and I defined vast majority as 95% of the light-duty new vehicle sales for BEVs, PHEVs, and FCEVs (this last one almost certainly will not contribute much of anything). This was not a prediction, but just a discussion of how plausible it would be for that to happen.
I did have two predictions. One is 10% by some point in 2023 and that was on the edge as Argonne National Laboratory stats says it just barely missed while Cox Automotive and KBB say the 10% mark was reached (10.2%) in Q4 of last year. Since that prediction was potentially hit (or just barely off), then I also feel alright about the next prediction I've been making which is that a majority (50%) of new vehicle market share will be ZEV by some point in 2028. The 2030 mark for vast majority (95%) of ZEV market share of new light-duty vehicle sales in the US though is not a prediction, only that I'm curious about whether it's plausible.
I do think 2050 for that is way too pessimistic. I think 2035 is more plausible, but I wouldn't completely rule out 2030 yet. Global market share for ZEVs is still rapidly improving as are the specs versus price. The thought process behind this is that even if the US is slower on the uptake initially, it's plausible is that when more areas in the US do start purchasing ZEVs en masse, it'll be at a better spec / price point such that it'd likely catch up quickly. In addition to that, I've been surprised by the roll out of some of the technologies behind it. For example, I did not think 800V and higher systems were going to be in place this quickly. Porsche coming out with the Taycan / J1 Platform that had it made sense as does having a luxury startup like Lucid hitting it--the weird part was seeing Hyundai / Kia launch it in its vehicles so soon after the Taycan.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-08-2024 at 09:30 AM..
...greed got in the way of thinking for a lot of fools. I can see getting in cheap on a hail mary hoping to score big on the next Tesla but nobody was getting in cheap on Rivian or Lucid or Canoo or Fisker or Mullen. These stocks should never have been valued anywhere remotely close enough for them to have seen the 99%+ loses (Canoo, Fisker, Mullen), 95% on Lucid, 90% on Rivian. ...
It's hard for me to fathom how many people could possibly be so stupid but they were. Maybe it was the tech mentality. You had people used to speculating on startup tech companies that never need to bring a real product to market ...
As an inmate of the start-up asylum, I personally feel the distinction between hardware and software. Software is notoriously easy to scale, going from initial concept to mass-produced product. Hardware is not. Valuation of software companies such as Air-BnB or whatever is happening with cloud computing or internet advertising, is... controversial already. But market experience shows that it sort-of works. Trying to do so with hardware, which means mixing chemicals, welding metal, routing wires, installing glass and plastic and so on, is... fraught.
So we have a problem bleeding over from the investment side, to the manufacturing and consumer-acceptance side. It's really really really hard to start a new car-company, or airplane company, or shipbuilding company. There's flair, flash and then despair. The financial side of things looks in hindsight like a charade. Potential customers, who maybe themselves have nothing to do with the stock market or IPOs or profit-and-loss statements, nevertheless see the hype and false hope, and lose confidence. They then take their consumer-dollars elsewhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
... Even more pessimistic has been a large swathe of the US public such as in this Automotive forum where you had the majority of people who've chimed in being much more pessimistic than that and you've had people project that they'll never make it all or more specific projections like they'll forever at most reach 5% or less of sales and that's already been surpassed.
That's because our Forum here is, to be blunt, politically tainted. EVs sound "woke", and woke = bad... so, to endorse EVs is lefty foolishness. So goes the narrative.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
Meanwhile, the total global ZEV market share even when there are slowdowns in one place or another at times, has been continued rapid growth with slowdowns at times in one market usually happening while there are accelerations in market share in other markets.
Growth has been fairly strong, but it's risky to extrapolate growth along the S-curve... I mean, in the initial stages, anything is plausibly exponential. As we ride the curve upwards, the results get more mottled.
Where I am particularly "pessimistic" is in the contention that EVs will completely replace ICE in any discernible near future. Many decades after the Model T Ford, horses remained the staple of transportation.. not by cowboys, not by hobbyists, not by troglodyte weirdos trying to make a statement, but by normal people in normal towns. As late as the year 2000, there were plenty of typewriters in offices. During my first encounter in a "professional" engineering environment, in 1990, there were still folks using slide-rules. Just as early-adopters are aggressive with new technology, so too, the "tail" of laggards is very long.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
The 2030 mark for vast majority (95%) of ZEV market share of new light-duty vehicle sales in the US though is not a prediction, only that I'm curious about whether it's plausible.
It's plausible, in some markets, such as California. Nationwide, in the US... OK, technically still "plausible", since the word is so elastic. But I'd place the probability towards the low-end.
That's because our Forum here is, to be blunt, politically tainted. EVs sound "woke", and woke = bad... so, to endorse EVs is lefty foolishness. So goes the narrative.
Growth has been fairly strong, but it's risky to extrapolate growth along the S-curve... I mean, in the initial stages, anything is plausibly exponential. As we ride the curve upwards, the results get more mottled.
Where I am particularly "pessimistic" is in the contention that EVs will completely replace ICE in any discernible near future. Many decades after the Model T Ford, horses remained the staple of transportation.. not by cowboys, not by hobbyists, not by troglodyte weirdos trying to make a statement, but by normal people in normal towns. As late as the year 2000, there were plenty of typewriters in offices. During my first encounter in a "professional" engineering environment, in 1990, there were still folks using slide-rules. Just as early-adopters are aggressive with new technology, so too, the "tail" of laggards is very long.
It's plausible, in some markets, such as California. Nationwide, in the US... OK, technically still "plausible", since the word is so elastic. But I'd place the probability towards the low-end.
Yes, I do think this site is mostly and strongly on the anti-EV side overall with much of that stemming from political tribalism. However, this doesn't change that the projections from many institutions like EIA, Bloomberg BNEF, and IEA among others from years back generally undershot predictions for today and the recent past.
It's risky to extrapolate base on a S-curve, but that's not the only thinking behind it. The other part of it is the pace of battery improvements over the past several decades including the most recent past decade and how that matches with consumer light-duty vehicle use cases. We're still doing something like a doubling of battery energy density very dozen year plus or minus a few years and that comes with a lot of changes in cost, range, max power output, max power input, and longevity while our driving habits haven't for how we use light duty vehicles have only changed slightly over the decades.
I don't think anyone is arguing that EVs will completely replace ICE in the near future. The near future can be a bit wobbly as a term, but I assume you're thinking in the next two decades or so. That's certainly not going to be the case simply because the average age of the US automotive fleet is something like twelve years or so and we're still now just at around the 10% mark for *new* plug-in vehicle market share. This means the next few decades at least will still have internal combustion engine vehicles on the road. I'm talking specifically about new vehicle market share and not total fleet composition.
Yea, 95% new vehicle market share for ZEVs (BEV + PHEV + FCEV) by 2030 seems very unlikely. It'd really have to be riding that S-Curve pretty hard. 95% is a hard target to hit, but I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing here. Some thoughts on how this might happen are:
- since the US market is doing its ramp up later than in a lot of other markets, that perhaps it'll be doing so when towards the end of the market share capture it'll also be coinciding for when it's actually affordable to consumers and profitable to automakers to make vehicles that cover almost all light-duty vehicle use cases.
- battery pack per kWh price improvements have gone down quickly and are projected to continue such. It hit a hiccup during the pandemic, but seems to have gone back to fast drops. Goldman Sach a few months ago is now predicting ~$100 per kWh (in 2023 dollar value) in 2025. For a while, the talk of purchase price parity without incentives was $100 per kWh but that was in the late 2000s / early 2010s dollar values. We're now talking about getting to $100 per kWh by 2025 in 2023 dollars which means, within bands of what we normally have in inflation, nominal value costs below $100 per kWh in the next two or three years. If the drops keep going after that as projected, then presumably that means EVs after that aren't just being produced and sold at price parity with ICE, but rather as an undercutting in price or greater profitability.
- battery energy density improvements (volumetric and gravimetric) seem to be ongoing and do not look like they're going to hit a brick wall anytime soon as two battery makers have recently announced solid state batteries with some notable energy density improvements in *production* vehicles to be out in the coming months, and as stated elsewhere in the thread, battery energy density improvements positively impacts a large array of EV attributes simultaneously.
- battery improvements and scaling of battery production seems to be hitting utility scale viability which points to the possibility that the effect of "Wright's Law" for battery prices and improvements can keep going and scaling beyond what even the EV market will support.
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Originally Posted by 2Navigate
No, the US car market will not be 100%ZEV by 2030.
I do believe PHEVs and BEVs will be 25%-30% of the new vehicle sales by 2030, nationally.
That's for CA. Nationally, it's a lot less. It will take decades to have about 1/2 of all registered cars electric.
Not 100% as I defined almost as 95% of new light-duty vehicle market share in the US. All is not the same as almost, and I clarified an actual percentage point of what seems like a reasonable definition of almost later in the thread and pegged it at 95%.
My prediction from several years back were:
- by some point in 2023 that 10% would be reached which supposedly it did according to Cox Automotive / KBB it did in Q4 of 2023, but just barely missed according to Argonne
- by some point in 2028 that 50% would be reached
I'm not making the prediction that it hits 95% new vehicle market share in the US in 2030, but I'm wondering if there's something I've missed that looks like it'll accelerate things even faster. That percentage is untrodden territory as even the highest ZEV market share country, Norway, hasn't hit 95% yet as it was at 91.5% last month.
I think this year in particular will be a tougher year for EV sales in the US and that's above just general EV competitiveness with ICE vehicles. Currently most EVs in the US are targeted towards the more premium part of the overall market and high interest rates should hit that harder and meanwhile there's the consolidation of the different charging ports / protocols that is still ongoing and with there still yet to be any vehicles outside of Tesla that is natively capable without an adapter, adapters for the others for the most part aren't rolled out yet, and the stations currently out there aren't anywhere close to being consolidated around NACs.
Also note that I'm talking about new vehicle market share as in sales of new vehicles for that month / quarter / year. This was not in reference to total fleet composition or registered vehicles.
This happens over and over again in this thread with "almost" being taken for as completely and new vehicle market share taken as total fleet composition or total registrations. I thought maybe a more old school forum like this would have people actually reading the topic before replying more often. Is it just my imagination or has this gotten worse on these forums?
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-10-2024 at 11:52 AM..
Don't know what to tell you. CA is ahead of everyone and the numbers are what they are.
1 in 4 of new sales are EVs, but they are only 1 in 30 of all cars.
However, I think overall fleet composition is more important than the max % of EVs.
The idea is to convert all ICE to hybrid at least, bringing up the average MPG of the entire fleet, regardless of how many EVs are sold.
In any case, it's only 6 more years. Let's revisit this thread then.
Don't know what to tell you. CA is ahead of everyone and the numbers are what they are.
1 in 4 of new sales are EVs, but they are only 1 in 30 of all cars.
However, I think overall fleet composition is more important than the max % of EVs.
The idea is to convert all ICE to hybrid at least, bringing up the average MPG of the entire fleet, regardless of how many EVs are sold.
In any case, it's only 6 more years. Let's revisit this thread then.
I just don't think people really read the threads they're posting in, and I think this has been pretty good proof of it unless "almost" and "new vehicle market" have taken on new meanings that everyone but me have agreed upon.
Of course overall fleet composition is going to trail shifts in the new vehicle market. The turnaround rate for switching vehicles including in California is not every year and even when people buy a vehicle that's new to them, they aren't necessarily buying a new vehicle produced in that year since there's a massive used vehicle market. Nowhere are we seeing people incinerating their vehicles after the first year of use. The average age of light-duty vehicles in the US is about 12 years and has been increasing. For reference, the new vehicle market share of ZEVs in California twelve years ago was about 1% whereas the new vehicle market share of ZEVs in California last year was 24.7%
I think this thread was good to revisit now as one of the midpoint predictions I made was for 2023 and that seemed to have hit the mark. The next midpoint prediction I made is reaching majority ZEV new vehicle market share by some time in 2028. I do not think 50% for ZEV new vehicle market share will be hit any time this year for any month or quarter, and it seems extremely unlikely for such in the next two years either, but by some point in 2028 still seems reasonable enough. 2030 at 95% though seems very unlikely, but as mentioned to ohio_peasant there are a lot of small factors that combined make it hard for me to completely dismiss.
I'll add a few more to those possible (but not necessarily strong enough or likely) factors with first the ones I mentioned already:
- since the US market is doing its ramp up later than in a lot of other markets, that perhaps it'll be doing so when towards the end of the market share capture it'll also be coinciding for when it's actually affordable to consumers and profitable to automakers to make vehicles that cover almost all light-duty vehicle use cases relative to ICE competitors.
- battery pack per kWh prices have gone down quickly and are projected to continue. They hit a hiccup during the pandemic, but seem to have gone back to fast drops. Goldman Sachs a few months ago predicted ~$100 per kWh (in 2023 dollar value) in 2025. For a while, the talk of purchase price parity without incentives was $100 per kWh but that was in the late 2000s / early 2010s dollar values. We're now talking about getting to $100 per kWh by 2025 in 2023 dollars which means, within bands of what we normally have in inflation, nominal value costs, rather than 2009 dollar values, below $100 per kWh in the next two or three years. If the drops keep going after that as projected, then presumably that means EVs after that aren't just being produced and sold at price parity with ICE, but rather as an undercutting in price or greater profitability.
- battery energy density improvements (volumetric and gravimetric) seem to be ongoing and do not look like they're going to hit a brick wall anytime soon as two battery makers have recently announced solid state batteries with some notable energy density improvements in *production* vehicles to be out in the coming months, and as stated elsewhere in the thread, battery energy density improvements positively impacts a large array of EV attributes simultaneously. Some of these are likely to show in range and DC fast charging speeds increases for new vehicles which make them viable for people without home or work charging in the market for a new vehicle produced in that year as they would offer a recharging experience similar to that of gas refilling for internal combustion engine vehicles in regards to frequency and length of time spent charging.
- battery improvements and scaling of battery production seems to be hitting utility scale viability which points to the possibility that the effect of "Wright's Law" for battery prices and improvements can keep going and scaling beyond what even the EV market will support which would further support the above the two points. This is potentially a double-edged sword in terms of resource competition, but it does not seem total mine-able battery resources are going to be a constraining factor given their ubiquity and a variety of usable battery chemistries.
Then a few additional ones:
- battery, powertrain, and inverter improvements have a chance of getting efficiency high enough that a much broader spectrum of use cases and vehicle types can gain sufficient daily charge from overnight or work parking with standard wall socket charging for covering daily use as they currently are in China and Europe. This would bring down the entry costs of/effort needed for home charging for a lot of people and make things like workplace charging much cheaper and faster to deploy.
- households that are more likely to buy new vehicles are also more likely to have a pathway to charging at home.
- the continued increase in longevity of vehicles of all powertrain types means the used car market for ICE vehicles remains strong and can cover a large portion of households who have less disposable income and are less likely to have charging at home or work. These households are and likely will be more likely to turn towards purchase of used vehicles which will still be predominantly ICE regardless of whether or not ZEVs take up majority of new vehicle market share in 2030. This essentially takes a greater proportion of those households out of the new vehicle market and into the used vehicle market instead or out of the market for longer by holding on to vehicles longer as the vehicles themselves last longer.
- the depression in sales last year, this year, and likely at least part of the next year from non-Teslas not yet moved to native NACS ports gives way in later years to cheaper public charger installation (as evidenced by Tesla's massively lower DC charging station costs even with the CCS compatible Magic Docks compared to CCS competitors in public bids) and much greater ubiquity and reliability of usable chargers rather than the current tri-furcated charging standards. This shift even among existing CHAdeMO and CCS2 stations should be doable within the next few years as the largest cost is permitting and larger infrastructure costs of delivering enough power to the stations whereas the change in hardware and software to support NACS at stations that are currently CHAdeMO and CCS2 is pretty minimal in comparison.
- the ability to install public charging including DC fast charging within parking basements and garages means better and more profitable land use utilization within denser, urban areas where home charging is less likely and land is more expensive since these can be integrated structures with other uses like residential, commercial, and office as opposed to what you see with gas stations where for various reasons need to be standalone.
- the additional utility value of electrical power storage might grow in appeal especially with the increase in home solar, and with a slight possibility of some kind of setup to take in excess utility generation in some periods. As a corollary to this that is unlikely but not completely improbable is the improvements in EV efficiency and photovoltaic efficiency and price coupled with the popularity of long-roofed crossovers and SUVs makes the additional cost of solar panels mounted to vehicles versus the benefits more appealing especially for those who do not have charging at home.
Are these all combined going to be enough to push to 95% ZEV new vehicle market share in the US by some time in 2030? Probably not even if incentives stayed in place until then, but they're also a large enough constellation of factors with enough uncertainty about how far they'll go in the time period for me to say a definite no.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-11-2024 at 09:57 AM..
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