Where EVs are Soaring

New York Times:

Last year, Americans bought more than one million fully electric cars, trucks and SUVs, a record and a milestone for the country’s transition away from gas-powered vehicles.

Electric vehicles grew to 8.5 percent of new auto registrations nationwide. Hybrids, which are gaining popularity among those who still want gas as a backup, accounted for an additional 10 percent.

But enthusiasm for plugging in hasn’t spread equally across the country.

Electric vehicle registrations grew rapidly in many metro areas, including in some states like Florida and Texas that were “not on the map” just a few years ago, said Tom Libby, an analyst at S&P Global Mobility, an automotive market research firm. But the West Coast, and especially California, continued to dominate the electric vehicle market.

Below, CNBC’s resident climate denier expresses skepticism about the sector in general. Wall Street Journal expert makes fair points.

Times again:

Last year, electric vehicles accounted for more than 30 percent of auto registrations in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. In Los Angeles, that number was close to 25 percent.

At the same time, “there are still parts of the U.S. that, frankly, don’t have anything to do with E.V.s,” Mr. Libby said. “They just have no interest in them.” Just 3 percent of vehicle registrations were electric in Detroit, the country’s auto capital, and only 1 percent in the Bismarck, N.D. area.

Americans who have made the shift to electric vehicles so far tend to be richer, younger and more likely to live in urban areas than the average person, research shows. Many reported being motivated by environmental concerns, and some by interest in the latest, cutting-edge technology.

That profile is changing, experts said, but slowly.

To fight climate change, the Biden administration and many state governments want to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles. That’s because cars, SUVs and pickup trucks powered by gas and diesel are, together, one of the biggest sources of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. (They’re a major source of other harmful air pollution too.)

But many consumers still have reservations about going electric.

International Energy Agency:

From 2019 to 2023, growth in clean energy was twice as large as that of fossil fuels. The new IEA analysis shows that the deployment of clean energy technologies in the past five years has substantially limited increases in demand for fossil fuels, providing the opportunity to accelerate the transition away from them this decade.

The deployment of wind and solar PV in electricity systems worldwide since 2019 has been sufficient to avoid an amount of annual coal consumption equivalent to that of India and Indonesia’s electricity sectors combined – and to dent annual natural gas demand by an amount equivalent to Russia’s pre-war natural gas exports to the European Union. The growing number of electric cars on the roads, accounting for one-in-five new car sales globally in 2023, also played a significant role in keeping oil demand (in terms of energy content) from rising above pre-pandemic levels.

The Driven (Australia):

The uptake of electric vehicles Australia has taken off again, with monthly sales in February showing the strongest appetite for the technology so far, reaching a record 9.6 per cent share in the month.

The latest data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) shows that a record 10,011 full-battery electric cars were sold in Australia in February. This was a huge rise from the 4,893 sales in January.

The 9.6 per cent share is above the last record posted in June last year, when EV uptake made up 8.8%.