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By 2030, half of all passenger vehicles produced in the U.S. will be all-electric, president Joe Biden declared, signing an executive order to that effect on 5 August.
Leaders of the United Auto Workers, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Stellantis—the Dutch auto company that is the latest owner of Fiat-Chrysler—were on hand at Biden’s White House announcement.
Although the 50-percent target is voluntary, auto companies have set similar targets for themselves.
Ford has said it expects 40 percent of its global passenger vehicle sales to be all-electric (EV) by 2030 and 100 percent of sales in Europe by then. General Motors has announced it will stop making petrol-powered passenger vehicles by 2035.
Volkswagen has ceased further development of gasoline and diesel engines and will be selling nothing but EVs by 2035; Fiat previously set a goal of making only EVs by 2030.
“This industry is going to spend $330 billion over the next five years on electrification,” John Bozella, president of the lobbying group Automotive Alliance for Innovation, said in comments at an 8 August conference quoted by Wall Street Journal.
“Even in Washington, that is real money,” he said.
To support the transition to EVs, the infrastructure bill now in the Senate includes $7.5 billion to build out a national network of EV charging stations.
Also, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors each are building their own webs of charging stations.
While building and maintaining EV charging stations will create new jobs, the shift to EVs will eliminate swaths of assembly-line jobs, as EVs have far fewer moving parts and a much simpler drive train than gas-powered cars and trucks.
About 37 percent of U.S. vehicle buyers are willing to consider an EV as their next purchase, according to a UBS survey earlier this year, a jump of 15 percentage points from a year earlier.
However, EVs made up only 3 percent of vehicles sold in the U.S. in May and June this year, the Wall Street Journal noted.
TRENDPOST: As the UBS poll shows, Americans are becoming more interested in owning EVs at the same time that auto makers are beginning to emphasize them. Advanced battery technologies are in development that can cut charging times and vastly extend EVs’ range, the two key barriers to EVs’ public acceptance. (See “New Battery Could Double EV Range, Slash Charging Times,” Trends Journal, 15 December, 2020, and “Machine Learning Slashes EV Battery Development Time,” 10 March, 2020.)
Also, studies by the American Automobile Association and U.S. transportation department found that most people drive less than 30 miles in a day, about 15 percent of the distance a fully-charged EV passenger car can go between charges.
TREND FORECAST: We have noted that car makers have not yet mastered EV technology, which limits public acceptance. (See “Will EVs Juice the Economy?,” 27 April, 2021.) However, the question remains, by 2030, will that issue have been solved.
While the transition to multi-fuel cars is under way, the technology of electric or new-energy vehicles is not being mastered. The problem of recharging batteries, an 1800 invention, limits EVs’ mass-market acceptability. And they are much more expensive… at a time when real wages are declining.
However, we also forecast that breakthroughs in combustion-engine development and higher-efficiency motor oils that significantly increase miles per gallon and diminish pollution also will help stall the move toward NEVs.
In the future, when advanced battery production is invented, when there is quick and convenient charging, longer ranges between charges, and falling prices, EVs will become the mainstream vehicle. In addition, auto companies will offer fewer petrol-powered vehicles, leaving more and more buyers to opt for electric vehicles.