Tesla Chronicles #22 - EVs are Taking Over

Well, just this week, California became the first state to legally mandate (force) the transition to 100% EV auto sales by 2035. In fact, they have set % Targets every year from now until then as well. I am not sure how that is going to play out. I am personally not a fan of this approach, but I also recognize that CA has a unique topography and climate that makes SMOG a huge issue that most other places in the US do not experience. Here is the thing, I believe that CA will actually get to their targets without FORCING it on people. They are already the highest adopter of EV anyway. So let's talk a little about the growth of EV sales in the US. Last year, Tesla sold over 300,000 EVs in the US. So far, through the end of June, they have basically sold the same amount as they did all of last year. Tesla currently accounts for 4% of all new vehicle sales. One out of every 25 vehicles currently sold is a Tesla. (see https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/ ). In fact, if we look at ALL EV sales in the US, they currently account for 5.6% of all EV sales (1 of 18), and if you include Plugin-Hybrid vehicles, they are at 12.6% (1 in 8). (see https://joinyaa.com/guides/electric-vehicle-market-share-and-sales). I personally think that too many people in the anti-EV crowd, or in the EV denier crowd (people who believe that EV sales aren't impressive), often only look at the overall % of EV that are on the actual road, which is a skewed value. EVs really have taken off in the past 3-5 years with the introduction of the Tesla Model 3 in 2018 and the Model Y in 2022... Tesla's two most popular vehicles. So you get only a couple of years of EV sales included in cars on the road.... and of ALL cars, you have to take into consideration that many cars on the road last at least 10 years.. many even longer... this results in something like only 1-2% of cars on the road in the US currently being EVs. According to Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-09/us-electric-car-sales-reach-key-milestone ). Once a country achieves 5% of new car sales being EVs, they have achieved the "tipping point" for mass adoption of EVs. This is based upon the analysis they have done of other countries that have recently gone past this milestone. You can read the article, but basically, every new technology (TV, phones, internet, LED lights) are adopted according to an S-Shape adoption curve. Sales crawl early, but then go mainstream quickly once adoption exceeds a given value, then it slows down at the end as a small percent of the population will just refuse to adopt. In the case of EVs, they have found that value is roughly 5%. If the US EV market follows others, they are projecting that 25% of cars sold in the US will be EVs by 2025... that is only 2.5-3 years from now....and adoption just increases faster after that. The "gotcha" here in this case is that I believe that the US Automakers are going to struggle keeping up with demand, which might keep the adoption rate down slightly. Other countries where this has been observed and studied are generally much smaller countries, so production rates weren't nearly an issue.