Low Battery Prices & Affordable Electric Cars Sweeping into Europe
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A decade ago, you could buy long-range electric cars or you could buy affordable electric cars. You couldn’t find a model that was both. However, battery prices dropped and dropped and dropped, and the Renault Zoe, Chevy Bolt EV, and Tesla Model 3 led us into an era of long-range but affordable electric cars. I think that due to there being many long-range electric car options on the market for the past 3–5 years, we are discussing these battery price drops less than we were 5–10 years ago (when we were eagerly anticipating some mass-market options). However, those battery price declines have continued nonetheless, and they have allowed more and more compelling models to come onto the market. In the past couple of years, they have really helped to jack up affordable electric car options.
What brought all of this up now? T&E’s latest EV progress report. Despite covering these trends countless times and giving presentations all over the world about them a decade ago, the chart below jumped out at me.
It’s impressive and exciting that EV battery prices keep rolling downward like an escalator. Just since 2022, EV battery prices have dropped 27% in the EU! That’s a lot. In the next two years, they are expected to drop another 28%, and in the next 5 years, they are expected to drop 46%.
The lower battery prices are leading to more and more affordable electric cars, and if those future projections are even close to right, imagine how many more affordable electric cars can be built and sold.
This second graphic shows how much lower-cost EV batteries have allowed the market to add truly affordable/cheap electric cars — going from just two such models being introduced between 2020 and 2024 in the EU to six being introduced in 2024. And more than a dozen more affordable electric models are expected to arrive by 2027.
This last chart shows the addition of affordable models (the green parts of the bars). We can clearly see the jump in such model choice in 2025, but I think the bigger thing for me here is how much room there is to grow in that segment. The mass-market segment could also benefit from a large amount of support. I can’t wait to see how the numbers increase from 2026–2030!
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