“The only thing that outnumbers the EVs on the road in America today is the number of white papers, op-eds, blog posts, Twitter/X rants, and analyst reports about EVs.” — Me.
Do you really need more opinions about EVs? No, you don’t. But I would be remiss if I did not post something about them. So for a recent conference I challenged myself to come up with ten different takes on EVs, riffing on the famous print series by Hiroshige, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. I’ll split this into perhaps three parts, the first today, in the form of occasionally-annotated pages from the PowerPoint I prepared for the conference. (And as always, thanks to the individuals and firms from whom I borrow insights!)
Yes, Mercer drags history into the discussion again.
First view: in the long term I don’t see how EV penetration does not surge in the USA. The rest of the world used to (in part) design for the American market. The tables have turned, and (in part: certainly not when it comes to pickups) we are now following the lead of the rest of the world. As succinctly put by that anonymous sage of Seeking Alpha, doggydogworld (I wish I were as blunt and undiplomatic as he is!):
We’ll see.
Onward! In the short term of course we have the famous slowdown (but please understand that a slowing of the growth rate is not the same as a reversal of the growth rate!):
But it is not just an American phenomenon:
And if we look not across the Atlantic but the Pacific, to Japan, I’d like to make a different point. Toyota has been excoriated in the press for not being green enough, for not converting wholesale to the EV Faith. Well, I think this is unfair. It is not a simple matter of “ICE bad BEV good,” though many Americans on the left and the right prefer to speak in this binary, and I think unproductive, way. Led by Toyota, the Japanese domestic market has done pretty darn well in terms of emissions reduction, via hybrids:
That is a lot of gasoline-sipping P/HEVs! And we can see the impact (only partially and only indirectly) in national emissions performance:
I can’t say that Japan has done a bad job in terms of emissions, in following its “hybrids first, electrics later” strategy. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, as has been said. (Oh and by the way, an Uncomfortable Truth for some is the fact that a lot of the US decline in emissions is due to the widespread adoption of … gasp! .. fracking. Natural gas is not solar or wind, but it is also not coal.)
And there is another country that has seen the value in interim steps on the path from all-ICE to all-BEV: China. As my readers know, I have always been a big fan of PHEVs (my family owns one, as well as a BEV), but again, the discourse in America is skewed toward “It’s all BEV or it’s nothing.”
That’s it for this installment. More in the coming days. I hope you find some of these different perspectives useful.
Meanwhile it is back to the NADA convention floor for me, where I will seek to answer the big, eternal, central question automotive retailing faces: “What is the ROI of the inflatable gorilla on the roof of a dealership?”
If you want one for yourself, go to www.dealermarket.com