Are Electric Vehicles Already Halfway to Market Dominance?

[kristopher]

Are Electric Vehicles Already Halfway to Market Dominance?
Tam Hunt, Contributor
December 16, 2013

Electric vehicles have been all the rage in the last few years, but...

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...In terms of the US as a whole, we are fast approaching 1 percent of all sales coming from EVs (pure battery electrics, BEVs, and plug-in hybrid electrics, PHEVs, but excluding hybrid car sales). EVs will comprise about 2/3 of a percent for all light duty car sales in the U.S. in 2013. We’ll easily pass 1 percent in 2014. One percent is still very small — way too small — but it turns out that reaching 1 percent is a really important milestone. In fact, the game may be won when 1 percent is reached.

Huh?

Ray Kurzweil, an American inventor and entrepreneur, discovered the Law of Accelerating Returns by studying numerous technology adoption curves....

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So how can 1 percent of all EV sales suggest in any way that we’re on the road to a world dominated by EVs? Here’s why: 1 percent is halfway between nothing and 100 percent — in terms of doublings. That is, there are seven doublings from the start of growth to 1 percent and seven doublings from 1 to 100 percent. One double is two, which doubled is four, etc.

Kurzweil’s best example of the counterintuitive nature of his law is the Human Genome Project. This was a government-funded effort to decode the entire human genome in about fifteen years. Well, halfway through the project the effort was only at about 1 percent completion. Many observers wrote off the effort as a failure that couldn’t possibly reach its goal. Kurzweil, however, wrote at the time that the game was won because 1 percent was halfway to 100 percent in the terms that actually mattered: the rate of improvement in sequencing technology.

And he was right. ...

Applying the Law of Accelerating Returns to EVs

Back to EVs, it seems incredible but the following is a mathematically true statement: if customers continue to buy EVs at the same rate of growth as we’ve seen in the last two years all cars sold in 2020 will be EVs. This is because seven years is seven doublings and seven doublings from 1 percent gets us past 100 percent. Of course, the “if” in my statement is the key. No one should reasonably expect that we’ll see 100 percent rates of growth in EV sales every year through 2020 — we won’t. This rate will surely slow down substantially as various obstacles present themselves. But even if the rate of growth averages “only” 50 percent each year, we would reach 100 percent of all sales by 2026. This won’t happen either, but it is reasonable to expect that a very substantial percentage of all cars sold will be EVs by the mid-2020s. Figure 1 shows the result of various average growth rates over time. Even at 20 percent annual growth EVs comprise almost half of all cars sold by 2034.

More at: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/12/are-electric-vehicles-already-halfway-to-market-dominance?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-December18-2013

[msongs]

1. bye bye tuneups, oil changes, and your local neighborhood garage (unless the techs get

massive retraining and replace their soon to be obsolete internal combustion engine stuff with electronics)