Zoomi Life

Yet another automotive expert has attempted to explain to people that the electric vehicle will not be the dominant form of transportation in the near future.  Back in July, Bosch executives explained how EVs aren’t likely to be a “significant” portion of the motor vehicle market for at least 20 years.  Now, Nissan’s CEO has said much the same.

Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan, speaking to a seminar in Michigan, explained that in ten years’ time, he predicts that electric vehicles will only make up about ten percent (10%) of the total global market in motor vehicles.

Like Bosch before him, Ghosn is getting a lot of flak from the electric press for his remarks.  Like Bosch before him, though, the Nissan CEO is right.  Like most emerging technologies just coming into their own in a market already saturated with options and that has an established culture behind it, EVs will have a lot of work to do to make headway against the traditional vehicles already ensconced in our cultures.

Many attempt to compare the EV to the PC, saying that the personal computer took the market by storm and became a household item virtually overnight.  However, this comparison is flawed for one big reason: PCs didn’t have to compete with other computers.  The personal computer was a brand new, never-before-seen technology that entered the market competing, literally, only with itself.

The only competition the personal computer had to face was with itself: which platform was better, how could it be made cheaper, what kind of things could make it more useful, etc.  There was nothing else on the market to compete directly with it.

Electric vehicles don’t have that luxury.  They are competing not only against themselves, but also against the established culture and accepted technology of petroleum-burning engines and accepted norms of vehicle performance and use in our daily lives. Nearly every home in the first world owns at least one car and it will be a long time before that one car is an electric.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it merely means it won’t likely happen at the breakneck speed most EV proponents would hope.

I would rather see it sooner than later, but several factors have to catch up: the technology has to become viable as a cultural replacement for petro-fueled cars (range, dependability, speed, safety, etc.) and has to be perceived as such by the mainstream.  The technology has to become on par in price point to its established counterpart.

After all of that, EVs still have to convince people, culturally on a whole, that they meet those expectations and then become common enough that they aren’t “new” or “unusual” to most people.

Long story short, those things all take time.