Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) soared from 3.2 million worldwide in 2020 to more than 10 million in 2022, Bloomberg NEF reported. 

This year, the market will grow, but more slowly, expanding by about 3.6 million vehicles to 13.6 million, the news service reported. Roughly 75 percent will be fully electric and only a quarter will be plug-in hybrids.

Chinese consumers will buy about eight million of those EVs. Europeans will take more than three million and U.S. shoppers will buy 1.6 million, Bloomberg predicted.

That U.S. sales figure represents “a breakout year,” Bloomberg noted, thanks to the combination of continuing tax credits and new manufacturing capacity spurred by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Growth will be moderate in Europe, Bloomberg said, with Chinese companies making more than one EV in every 10 sold there.

Globally, the number of EVs of all kinds on the road will grow from 27 million to 40 million this year, rising to about 3 percent of the global fleet from less than 1 percent in December 2020.

“EVs [are] one of the fastest-moving parts of the global energy transition,” Bloomberg noted.

The number of public EV charging locations around the world rose last year to almost a million, compared to 450,000 in place in 2022. The number will rise to 1.3 million this year, Bloomberg expects.

Sales of all-electric vans and trucks will jump 80 percent this year from last, reaching about 600,000 in a world where demand for commercial vehicles has remained largely stagnant during the COVID War and in an economy beset by both rising prices and rising interest rates.

In the U.S., fleet owners have placed sizable orders for electric goods-movers from Daimler, GM, Tesla, and Volvo, among other makers.

TRENDPOST: Whether this sunny forecast comes true depends on the continuing supply of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other materials essential to electric transportation.

The global minerals industry has key choke points where a natural or geopolitical disaster could hobble green tech’s momentum. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo provides 70 percent of the world’s cobalt. China produces a major portion of the global lithium supply.

The Congo is politically volatile; China has recently suffered a range of setbacks ranging from floods and blackouts to COVID waves and regulatory strangulation.

To keep the green revolution moving, more countries will face controversies surrounding new domestic mining operations. Those battles will place greater emphasis on mass-scale recycling of every kind of hardware.