The uptake of electric cars in Europe's biggest car markets will accelerate over the next three years, with EVs overtaking internal combustion engine car sales by 2025, according to a report from the Platform for Electromobility.
The Platform for Electromobility, according to its website, is an association of organizations that are "committed to promote electromobility and strive to collectively develop solutions to electrify European transport, and to promote those solutions to the EU institutions and Member States."
According to the report, as cited by Business Green, the main factors driving increased uptake of EVs in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Poland, would include a more extensive choice of EV models, tighter emission regulations, and other government initiatives aimed at phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles as soon as possible. Falling upfront costs for EVs will also play an essential part in increased sales.
Upfront costs, by the way, were identified as the most important factor for a purchase decision, according to the company that conducted the survey on which the report was based, among 14,000 new car buyers across Europe. What the survey results suggest, then, is that when EVs reach cost parity with ICE vehicles, uptake will accelerate considerably.
The Business Green report argues that from a lifetime perspective, many EVs are already cheaper than ICE cars thanks to lower maintenance needs. Yet based on upfront costs, EVs still have a way to go until they become price competitive with gas guzzlers.
Yet, according to the Platform for Electromobility, there is a chance that EVs will reach cost parity with ICE cars within three years, and within 10 years, nearly all cars sold in Europe will be electric.
"We all need to respond appropriately to ensure we meet the demands of consumers," said the chairwoman of Platform for Electromobility, Amelie Pans. "It is our common responsibility to ensure that everyone in Europe, wherever they live, can switch to electric vehicles as early as they want."
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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While EVs’ handicaps like price, range, charging time and charging points could be sorted out in due course, one major question remains unanswered, namely how will the global electricity generation expansion needed to charge the supposedly hundreds of millions of EVs on the roads by 2040 be sourced: solar, nuclear or hydrocarbons?
The ongoing energy crisis in Europe and the world at large has demonstrated unequivocally the inability of renewables on their own to satisfy the electricity needs of Europe and the world at large because of their intermittent nature.
Nuclear energy is losing support around the world particularly in Europe because of problems of disposing of radioactive wastes and rising costs of de-commissioning at the end of its lifetime. Moreover, it isn’t capable on its own of supplying the world with electricity.
That leaves hydrocarbon-generated electricity principally coal and natural gas. But using fossil fuels to generate the extra electricity needed to charge the millions of EVs on the roads undermines the raison d’etre of EVs and therein lies the problem.
Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
International Oil Economist
Visiting Professor of Energy Economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London
Dr Salameh you are missing the point of the city bans of ICE vehicles - it is because ICE vehicles cause lethal air pollution which kills millions of people each year. Just as cities banned open coal fires in the 1960s due to the lethal smog, so ICE vehicles will be banned in the coming years.
I note that 85% of electric generating capacity retirements in the USA in 2022 will be coal, and 8% natural gas. While of the planned additions 46% will be solar, 17% wind. We are heading towards a world of EVs powered by renewable energy.