EV inflection point

One thing I learned as a scientist is that you can almost never extrapolate a curve beyond the existing data points. Since electric vehicles came onto the mass market for cars, analysts have frequently predicted future numbers based on the idea that you can extrapolate current growth rates. Those predictions have now turned out to be completely wrong. The curve of EV market penetration has reached an inflection point, and has significantly slowed down. And as our household owns a fully electric vehicle, I understand why.

My wife and me disagree about the usefulness of our electric car. She hates the limited range, and our experience with public charging infrastructure really left her disgusted. We simply don't dare to drive beyond half the actual range of the car, so that we are sure we can always get back, and that actual range is only half of the range that if officially quoted for that car. We did trips where we pretended to need to recharge in order to try public charging out, but more often than not that either totally failed, or was excessively expensive. In the end, we just gave up on charging stations.

The reason I am more positive on the electric car is that I live in a privileged situation: I live in a single-family home with a garage, I have a private charging station in that garage, and I have solar panels on the roof which produce more electricity than our household needs. If feels a bit like free electricity, although technically you'd need to take the total cost of installation (for which we paid a rather reasonable €1.40/Wc), and divide if by the lifetime electricity production. Which is difficult, as you don't know the lifetime, nor the exact annual degradation of performance. If I consider only 10 years lifetime, I end up with an electricity price that isn't very different from the current network price; but if I consider 25 years and still 80% performance at that point (which is likely, but not guaranteed), I get the electricity at half the price than from the energy supplying company. I also have the advantage that I don't work anymore, so the car is charging at noon, when the solar panels are producing electricity. And while the limited range is annoying, over 90% of our car use is for short trips like shopping, and the range is totally sufficient for that.

The reason I understand why EV sales are falling is that I understand that few people are in my specific privileged situation. When I still worked in an office every day, I drove far more kilometers per year, and in the middle of the day, when solar panels produce electricity, the car was at the office, not at home. At that time I also still lived in an urban apartment building, and we were told that we couldn't get a private charging station, as the regular electricity lines installed on the road didn't have the capacity to provide everybody in the building charging his car at once. There is currently not a single high-rise building in the world that has EV charging stations for more than 10% of the people living in it, because that would require to completely rebuild the whole urban electricity network. And even at a national level, the electric grid in no country today could support 100% electric vehicles on the road. There are some serious practical limits to EV market penetration, which made it obvious from the start that the growth curve would have some inflection points slowing it down.

The biggest problem however is probably the disparity between the daily mileage that it is practical to drive an electric vehicle, and the daily mileage you'd need to drive to make it economical. As I calculated in a previous post, even considering "free" electricity, I save only €1,000 per year compared to a petrol car if I drive 10,000 km per year. And that is at my current local price of €1.50 per liter, or $6.20 per gallon, a price that would make most Americans choke. As our electric car did cost €10,000 more than a petrol car, it would take 10 years for the savings in energy to pay for the extra cost. And that calculation doesn't work, because after about 5 years you need to buy a new battery if you drive an EV. To make an electric car be economically viable, I would need to drive a lot. But if I drive a lot, then the range limitation and the time it takes to charge the car become really limiting. If you drive 100,000 km per year, you wouldn't want to do that in an electric car.

Electric vehicles are nice for people in an economically privileged position, as long as they care more about their ecological impact than about their finances. But that is a small market, which is now saturated. For the much bigger general car market, electric vehicles today aren't suitable.