That’s almost double the average price that people pay for cars here. It’s even higher than the average new car price, and most people buy used. No doubt it would sell better, but it’s still not affordable for most people.
EVs are very simple mechanically. While batteries will need to be replaced over time, that’s very easy to do, and the lack of required maintenance elsewhere more than makes up for it.
Autonomic driving is improving at the speed of software, that’s why I said they’ll be mainstream in around 5 years. Electric cars are constrained by battery engineering improvements, which are much slower. Of course it’s possible that a breakthrough like supercapacitors could come along any day and completely revolutionize energy storage, but barring that, you’re looking at a slow steady crawl towards the point where all electric vehicles have the 500+ mile range of gasoline cars.
For most people that won’t matter, because they won’t own a car in the self-driving utopia I anticipate. If you need to drive cross-country, GM’s app will send you a hybrid that can be refueled, or you’ll switch cars every 300 miles like the Pony Express.
I’m willing to bet that fully autonomous private vehicles are not legally on sale in any developed country within five years. Maybe, just maybe, one or two states will go it along and allow it, though I would personally be amazed if the technical and policy issues around full autonomy are anywhere close to being resolved by then. Maybe we’ll see relatively widespread commercial vehicles in controlled settings.
Even the industry’s biggest boosters in their most optimistic forecasts don’t expect fully autonomous vehicles to be sold in material numbers until 2025, with “mainstream” adoption (still a small minority of the market) no earlier than 2035.
2025 L4/5 share of new car sales 0.4%
2030 L4/5 share 8%
2035 L4/5 share 30%
And that’s the most optimistic forecast, and assuming that the UK has the most autonomous vehicle penetration in the world.
Stusser coming in any minute to tell you it’s 5 years, damn it. :)
By mainstream, I basically meant available to consumers for a not outrageous price, like plug-in electric cars are today. If you define it as comprising 30% of the market or whatever, that’s a different matter entirely.
Where do you live? Here in the US there aren’t many new cars below $15,000. The average cost of new car according to Google is $33,000.
Electronic cars have less than 1% of the market in this country. If you factor it by year by year they might have passed 1% in a couple of the latest years.
Are you saying that if they manage to sell one car to one person in one state that allows them to be purchased you’d call the mainstream?
No, that’s what you said, it hasn’t the faintest resemblance to what I said.
This doesn’t actually have anything to do with demand… it’s all supply side. And Electronic cars barely have a market presence at all, today, after years. It has to be consumed to be mainstream… and you are saying you aren’t taking the market share into consideration at all.
Right, I was talking about price and availability.
Plug-in electric cars haven’t taken off yet in terms of market-share because reasonably priced ones have mediocre ranges and the Model 3 is just starting to emerge with a decent range. But they do exist, and they are available for purchase at prices a mere human can afford.
I don’t think you should call that mainstream. Under that definition, every toy flop in the history was mainstream… just no one bought it. The buying part is important here.
You gotta have a place to plug in a car if it’s a plug-in, too. We need more thinking about how to integrate plug-in electrics with existing housing patterns, especially those that are not suburban stand alone single family dwellings with garages and dedicated car spaces. I rather suspect that in some areas, like urban areas with on-street parking, autonomous car services may leapfrog personal electrics entirely.
Yeah, you probably don’t want to run an extension cable to the street with that kind of juice!
The lack of a solid plug-in network made electric a non-starter when I was buying a car last August. I would love to own one but being stranded because it’s 0 degrees outside and your range is cut in half would suck.
I think the plug-in thing is huge, as is the range and battery limitations, and if autonomous cars bypass or address it, sure they can pass electrics. Under his definition though, electrics are mainstream. According to what is being purchased or even just the number of them on the streets compared to other cars… not really.
Living here in (fairly affluent) Northern Virginia probably skews my attitude quite a bit. There are very large numbers of Teslas, Leafs, and Volts/Bolts on the road here, and a goodly number of parking garages have recharging stations.
I’m sure that Teslas are probably not more than 1% of the cars I see each day, but I see about a dozen each day – about equivalent to the number of, say Toyota Camrys I see each day (the Camry was 1.1% of auto sales last month - the top non-truck/SUV). Two years ago, a Tesla sighting was a rarity, worthy of a comment to my wife that evening.
Well, it’s not a great topic title currently since “better than a Jerry Springer episode” could mean almost anything.
https://www.fleetcarma.com/electric-vehicle-sales-united-states-2017-half-year-update/
The Market Share Metric
While H1 2017’s roughly 90,000 plug-in electric vehicle sales were down slightly from the 93,000 or so in H2 2016, this was due to broader market trends: Americans don’t buy as many cars in January and February. So, while fewer plug-in electric vehicles were sold relative to the prior six months, EV market share increased slightly to 1.07%.
Maybe they’re all in Virginia. It’s not that specific. heh. I see 2-3 SmartCars around here a month. That’s probably how many were sold last year too. Oh, I guess those mainstream as well.
I think one is saying that there will be an autonomous car in 5 years vs every car will be autonomous.
I also work for a large insurance company, not in analytics, and this is something we are taking seriously. The executives feel we have to have a product ready within 5 years for those cars.
I agree that most people will not have them, and that there are still a lot of issue to be solved including legal/laws.