Chairman Akio Toyoda believes battery electric vehicles will reach at most 30 percent market share, with the rest taken up by hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell and fuel-burning cars.
This already sounds like one of those predictions that most people won’t use airplanes because trains work just fine and get you there reasonably quickly.
Probably depends on how low the OPECs are able to keep fuel prices. Saudi Arabia can likely keep prices low enough, and continue marketing gas vehicles well enough to suppress EV usage, possibly forever.
Plus if they succeed, forever isn’t as long. It sucks, but the math may check out in the end.
With the way prices are crashing on evs? In China, high-end new dependable EVs are under 8k usd, and there are a lot of them on the streets.
Batteries are becoming more efficient and cheaper, and new storage solutions with more abundant, cheaper and safer materials are a matter of time with all the investment.
One decade of cost drops and performance increases that took ICEs over a hundred years to sputter up to?
Plus the limited maintenance?
Outside of military or emergency rescue, certain limited applications, I can’t see a continuing market for more expensive, more complicated, higher-maintenance vehicles when there’s a cheaper, cleaner, easier-to-fix solution with massive perpetual improvements available.
I agree that a more than 30% of current car owners would be better off with EVs in a purely economical world. We don’t live in that world. We live in one where in the US (and sadly spreading to other countries like Canada and Australia) people have convinced themselves it’s their patriotic duty to burn hydrocarbons.
If the car market continues to shrink, long distance travel will become a bigger slice of the market. Which could also decrease EV share.
Unfortunately, until capitalism is replaced I don’t see it happening either. And until things get crazy and painful enough to scrap the current system and start over, I don’t see capitalism going anywhere.
Even if those three countries took longer to shift(and they will because of tariffs), that’s only 400 million people.
If just China switches to primarily EVs, that’s well over a billion people.
Their public transportation and truck fleets are also switching to electric.
I’ve taken maybe twenty taxis and rideshares in China this month and all of them are electric.
Thailand is also using electric public transportation, obviously Japan is, any smaller countries in Europe will have a minimum of range anxiety, although the range anxiety doesn’t really matter since every year range is improving on electric cars anyway.
India’s an emerging economy also, with a larger population than China, and it makes every bit of sense to purchase EVs as their economy improves, as an economically safer choice in terms of production and purchase.
Capitalism doesn’t have to go anywhere, it’s cheaper and cleaner to produce these EVs than it is to produce the traditional gas car probably this year, maybe in a couple more years, but that tipping point is all but passed already.
The cost to produce EVs is going down by thousands of US dollars every year, something that hasn’t happened with gas cars in a hundred years.
If in just those two countries, 2 to 3 billion people and their transportation infrastructure are using EVs that are cheaper to produce, cheaper to fuel, and cheaper to maintain, that’s what people are going to buy, and that’s what companies are going to want to sell.