Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Electric cars are coming on like gangbusters, as ranges increase and prices fall dramatically. Here are 6 headlines pointing to the green car future:
1. In Norway, electric vehicles in March, 2019, outsold gasoline-driven cars for the first time.
2. Indeed, electric vehicles in Norway were responsible for 58% of all sales last month.
3. Volkswagen not only plans a new fleet of electric cars, it plans an affordable $22,000 EV by 2023.
4. Chinese consumers had been buying 600,000 electric cars a year until 2018, when they bought 1.3 million EVs, increasing the purchases by 62%. Although China is reducing its subsidies for electric cars as the market matures, that step is thought unlikely to hurt sales in the medium to long run. Lithium ion batteries have come down substantially in price and are expected to continue to do so.
5. By 2030, electric vehicles will be cheaper to buy than old-fashioned internal combustion engines, across the board.
6. Making electric cars is itself a high-carbon process, although EVs over their lifetime put out much less carbon dioxide than do electric cars, even including the manufacturing process. One way to boost the ecological benefits of driving an EV even further is to manufacture these cars using net carbon zero techniques. Audi’s factory in Brussels aims to do just that.
And remember that when homeowners have solar panels on their homes, they can pay off the panels and a new EV more quickly, and the fuel is free.
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