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In the week ending 13 March, a quarter of shoppers on car sales website Edmunds.com considered a hybrid or fully electric vehicle (EV), 39 percent more than the week before and an 84-percent leap from February, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Gasoline prices notched a record-high U.S. average of $4.33 a gallon on 11 March, according to AAA data.
Every dollar added to gas prices adds an average of $50 to monthly household expenses, financial services company Northern Trust said.
Two-thirds of Americans are anxious about rising gas prices and 49 percent feel the operating cost of a gas-powered passenger vehicle is no longer affordable, according to a survey earlier this month by market research firm Pipslay.
Nearly half of those surveyed said that an EV could provide a viable alternative to gas buggies, Pipslay found.
Most people willing to consider buying an EV would do so because of gas prices, with environmental reasons placing second.
EVs have been drawing more consumer interest as prices have fallen, largely as a result of improved battery technologies. Batteries comprise 30 to 40 percent of an EV’s cost.
EV sales made up 9 percent of the world’s new car purchases in 2021, compared to 4.1 percent in 2020, more than doubling its number of units to 6.6 million vehicles, the International Energy Agency reported.
TRENDPOST: As we note in “U.S. Oil Industry Will Not Raise Output, Executives Say” in this issue, this new wave of interest in EVs comes with a heavy dose of irony.
Governments and auto makers are spreading networks of charging stations across the U.S., as we reported in “How and When Electric Vehicles Will Go Mainstream” (21 Sep 2021).
Emerging battery technologies are extending EVs’ range between charges to as much as 700 miles, twice as far as many gas buggies can travel on a tankful of fuel (“New Battery Could Double EV Range, Slash Charging Times,” 15 Dec 2020).
New technologies are coming to market that can whittle charging times to almost the same as it takes to fill a gas tank, which we detailed in “New Lithium Battery Design Could Charge EVs Ten Times Faster” (7 Dec 2021).
But just as EVs are easing drivers’ reluctance to own the, EVs also are becoming less available: scarcities of nickel and other key materials are driving prices to record levels and the continuing shortage of computer chips is cutting vehicle production, problems we detailed in articles such as “EV Battery Materials to Be in Short Supply for Years,” (27 Jul 2021) and “Nickel is the New Gold” (21 Sep 2021).
TREND FORECAST: Until, or if, there are more technological battery advancements, the shortage of materials and resulting higher prices will delay EVs entry into mainstream vehicle ownership by at least five years.