The newcomers — Canada, Australia, Spain, Thailand and Hungary — join a cohort that also includes the U.S., China and most of Western Europe. The trajectory laid out by these early adopters shows how EVs can surge from five per cent to 25 per cent of new cars in just four years.Most successful new technologies — televisions, mobile phones, LED lightbulbs — follow an S-shaped adoption curve. Sales move at a crawl in the early-adopter phase, then quickly once things go mainstream.
Countries that cross the tipping point have seen rapid rates of adoption, with a median sales growth of 55 per cent last quarter compared to the same period a year ago. As with any new technology, growth rates will eventually slow as a market nears saturation — the top of the adoption S curve. There will always be holdouts. In Norway, the world’s EV pioneer, growth appears to be slowing after reaching 80 per cent of new vehicles.
Sometimes sales volume itself can mark a turning point. After Tesla started selling the Model 3 in 2017, the company nearly sent itself into bankruptcy when it wasn’t able to make vehicles fast enough to drive down unit costs. Tesla executives determined that pushing production past 5,000 cars a week would kick off a virtuous cycle of declining costs and higher volumes, which is what happened.
Still, global sales of new internal combustion engines peaked in 2017, and net growth for car sales is now driven entirely by EVs. That’s a trend that BloombergNEF forecasts suggest will continue until the gas-powered automobile is a museum curiosity — whether that takes another decade or five.