Europe’s Present Is Our Future In Australia
The sales statistics for plugin and electrified vehicles in Europe for September have arrived. A megatrend appears to be: an overall reduction in new car sales. Car sales appear to have peaked in 2017 at approximately 100 million vehicles per year. The numbers have been going down ever since. The number of electrified vehicles is increasing, eating into diesel and petrol sales. There is only a minuscule number of hydrogen cars sold globally.
The stats for the four largest markets look like this:
Figures shown above are numbers of new vehicles sold and the segment’s percentage of new-vehicle sales in brackets.
Mild Hybrids, or HEVs – here are some thoughts from Jose Pontes:
Broadly speaking, plugless hybrids continue to grow in double digits globally, mostly thanks to mild hybrids, but one can already see that in countries with high plugin shares, like 30%, hybrid growth has stagnated and in Norway, they are losing share like petrol and diesel, so as a general rule, we have this:
— Less than 30% plugin share: HEV growth;
— 30–60% share: HEV stagnation;
— More than 60%: HEV sales drop.
It was not that long ago that these European markets were less than 5% plug in. In only a few years, they have made quite significant gains and appear to be entering the vertical section of the S curve for technology disruption — sales in many European markets are double those of last year.
What relevance is this to those of us in Australia? Last year, plugins had less than 1% of market share. This year, they are already exceeding 2%. We seem to have skipped the 60% growth phase and moved straight to the 100% growth phase. From my reading, and also my personal experience in showing people my Tesla, there appears to be a huge thirst for EVs despite common concerns regarding cost and charging.
I believe that the only limiting factor here in Australia for rapid uptake is the availability of vehicles.
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