Bloomberg New Energy Finance just released an analysis, “Electric Vehicle Outlook 2017,” that estimates all-electric cars will get as cheap as traditional gas-powered cars sometime between 2025 and 2030. Importantly, the estimate assumes that government subsidies for electric cars are discontinued by that time, so the future price figures are market rates.
Bloomberg thinks electric car prices will drop thanks to price-lowering economies of scale and to competition among carmakers. It doesn’t assume any technological breakthroughs like new batteries that can store twice as much energy. This is good: making predictions about the future that hinge on a technological breakthrough that may or may not actually happen is always a bad idea, and will get you thinking something like the Singularity is right around the corner.
The Bloomberg Executive Summary is here: https://data.bloomberglp.com/bnef/sites/14/2017/07/BNEF_EVO_2017_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
Interestingly, the analysis also concludes that better electric cars will make plug-in hybrids obsolete since the latter are more mechanically complex and hence more expensive. A shortage of at-home car charging stations will also limit the potential customer base for electric cars, and cause electric cars as a share of the total passenger vehicle fleet to stabilize at about 50% by 2040. I wish I had access to the full report, so I can only guess that the at-home car charging problem will be most acute for poorer people who can’t afford to install them or who live in rental properties that lack them.
Links:
- https://venturebeat.com/2015/05/27/an-electric-car-future-is-coming-just-more-slowly-than-predicted/
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rise-electric-cars-kill-gas-150000844.html