July 5, 2016

Is the glass half full or half empty for electric drive?

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty.
The engineer sees a glass that’s twice as large as it needs to be.

Recently the New York Times ran a story about how the new vehicle market is shifting away from hybrid and electric vehicles. They report that “This year, electric and hybrid sales have dropped to 2.4 percent of new-car purchases,” and that the US fell well short of President Obama’s goal of having 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. But perhaps most troubling to those of us who would like to see greater adoption of high-efficiency and zero-emission technologies:

So far this year, nearly 75 percent of the people who have traded in a hybrid or electric car to a dealer have replaced it with an all-gas car, an 18 percent jump from 2015, according to Edmunds.com, a car shopping and research site.

While this seems to be moving in the wrong direction, the implied prospects for the EV may be too pessimistic. The optimist in me looks at those same numbers and sees that people trading in a hybrid or electric vehicle are still about 10X as likely to choose another hybrid or electric as are those trading in a gasoline vehicle. (And the engineer says that whether hybrid or electric, we have about 10X as many cars as we need…)

But there’s a more important point. The article conflates powertrain technologies with vehicle size, like when it says in the second paragraph that “consumers… have rekindled their love of bigger cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, favoring them over small cars, hybrids and electric vehicles,” and when it presents the story of a Bronx resident who was giving up his Prius for a company pickup. As gas prices fall and the economy strengthens, data show that truck sales are indeed bouncing back from where they were a few years ago. And at the moment, the large majority of hybrid and plug-in hybrid, and virtually all all-electric vehicles on the market are cars. It should be no surprise that as consumers gravitate toward market segments with fewer hybrid and electric models available, hybrid and electric sales will suffer. But this need not remain the case if manufacturers develop additional hybrid and plug-in crossovers, minivans, SUVs, and trucks.