Electric Car Sales Increase 228 Percent

Automakers operate on a different calendar, in which the 2012 model year recently came to a close.  As my colleague, Luke Tonachel, explains, this was the year of the green car, with record new fleet fuel efficiency, a 55 percent increase in hybrid sales, and more than a three-fold increase in plug-in electric car sales.  The last of those three records might come as a surprise to some, given the prevalence of stories pronouncing the electric car dead on arrival.  While it’s true that plug-in electric car sales still represent a very small fraction of total auto sales, model year 2012 saw about 38,000 Americans buying plug-in cars.*  That’s a 228 percent increase over model year 2011.*  Not bad for a new technology, introduced as the country recovers from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Critics often point out that plug-in electric car sales pale in comparison to incumbents such as the Ford F-series, Honda Accord, and Toyota Camry, but almost all vehicles fall short by that measure.  Auto sales are lopsided; of the 265 vehicle models currently available, the top 20 comprise over 40 percent of all new sales.  The Chevy Volt, often described by critics as a failure, falls right in the middle of the pack, outselling half the cars, trucks, and SUVs on the market.  It may not be a smash hit, but it’s certainly not a flop as some would have you believe.  In fact, the Volt is outselling many well-known models, including:

• Mazda: Miata, CX-7, Tribute, RX-8, 2, and 5
• Mercedes: S-Class, CL-Class, CLS-Class, SLK, SLS AMG, R-Class, G-Class, B-Class, and SL-Class
• Land Rover: LR2, LR4, and Range Rover
• Audi: A3, A5, A6, A7, A8, Q7, R8, and TT
• Lexus: GS, GX460, LX570, CT200h, HS250h, LFA, SC430, and LS
• BMW: Z4, X6, 1-Series, 6-Series, and 7-Series
• Nissan: 370Z, Quest, Cube, GT-R, Xterra, Titan, and Armada
• Porsche: Boxster, Panamera, Cayman, Cayenne, and 911
• Chevrolet: Caprice, HHR, Cobalt, and Corvette

You don’t hear pundits dismissing all those cars as failures, though they’re all selling less than the Volt.  In fact, five of the models named above made Car and Driver’s vaunted 10 Best Cars list for 2012.

Dismissing modern plug-in electric cars less than two years after their introduction is also simply premature.  The hybrid Toyota Prius is now the world’s third best selling vehicle, but that didn’t happen overnight.  In 2000, the first calendar year the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight hybrids were made available in the US, combined sales were 9,350.*   When the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf became the first widely available plug-in electric cars, combined annual sales were 17,840––twice that of the first year hybrid sales.*  It should be noted that the Prius was not available for all of the year 2000.  However, in their second year, the Prius and Insight combined for just over 20,000 sales.  Second year sales of electric cars in contrast, led by the Volt, Leaf, and Plug-in Prius, are on pace to reach about 50,000 by year end––2.5 times the comparable year for the now ubiquitous hybrids.*  That upward trend should continue over the next several years as automakers introduce up to 40 different new plug-in models.*

Nevertheless, it’s going to take some time for electric cars to reach a mass market, as is the case with any new technology.  It took 45 years for electricity to reach 40 percent of our homes, and a full 64 years before the telephone did the same.  Thankfully, technology adoption appears to be accelerating; mobile phones saturated the market in just 20 years, and tablets and smartphones are proceeding at an even quicker pace.

There’s reason to hope electric drive technology will continue this trend.  Once folks get behind the wheel of an electric car and experience 100 percent torque from a standstill, a singularly quiet cabin, and the convenience of refueling at home, they’ll have a hard time going back to a car that relies on thousands of explosions of fossil fuel every minute.  In many ways, vehicle electrification is the most important evolution in automotive technology since we ditched the steam engine.

In the long run, the advantages inherent in driving on electricity will attract drivers who are sick and tired of gas prices spiking every time there’s a violence in the middle east, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, or a fire at a refinery in California.  They’ll turn to electricity, a cleaner fuel made from a diverse supply of domestic resources, the price of which has been equivalent to buck-a-gallon gasoline for the last forty years, and is predicted to stay that way for the next three decades.

* Sales data and forecasts from Alan Baum & Associates.

NRDC

8 Comments on "Electric Car Sales Increase 228 Percent"

actioncjackson on Thu, 1st Nov 2012 9:49 pm 



You ever throw a hotdog down a hallway? How about a toothpick into a volcano?

GregT on Thu, 1st Nov 2012 10:26 pm 



Where I live, our electric utility company has announced that one half of all of our electricity by the year 2020 will need to come from conservation.

If we were to plug in a couple of million electric cars, we would have no power left for home use.

DMyers on Thu, 1st Nov 2012 11:43 pm 



Good point, GregT. The grid can’t accommodate that kind of drain. On a common sense level, that fact should jump out at anyone contemplating the subject. Gas to electric does save gas, but it doesn’t save energy. The faith in the efficacy of that conversion likely comes from the belief that there’s still an eternity of coal in them tar hills, even as we crank up more generators for the morning electric car commute.

In order for electric cars to replace internal combustion vehicles, we should move away from an obsession with battery storage and pursue direct power connection. I can remember when the city buses in Indianapolis were all electric and were fed by overhead electric lines. In a modern day version of the same, we could insert electric transmission strips in the highways, something like the old Strombecker tracks with two strips to power the little electric race cars.

Unfortunately, we’re too spent out on wars to afford an infrastructure upgrade like that, and it still doesn’t solve the energy problem, but that’s the only way electric transportation could work (batteries won’t).

John Orr on Fri, 2nd Nov 2012 12:21 am 



With electric cars we will all be tripping over extension cables, a lot of people don’t have a garage or private drive and if you can’t park exactly outside your door you might need a 100m cable, but then the chances your friendly neighbours splice your cable rises considerably! Suppose you could off set this loss to the neighbour by claiming you tripped on his bit of cable and claim you injured yourself!

BillT on Fri, 2nd Nov 2012 3:41 am 



“… Not bad for a new technology …”

The author needs to do a little research and discover that electric cars are about 110 years old. They were being sold in large numbers early in the last century, until GM, Firestone, and the oil giants started buying up the electric trolly and light rail and tearing them up so they could sell rubber tired, gas powered buses. End of electric cars. Those same corporate giants still have a strangle hold on the auto way of life and will not allow anything to compete in a real manner.

That said, electric cars cannot come back in quantity for the very reason mentioned in the replies above. We do not have the electric to power them, nor the grid to make it possible. And the talk of a ‘smart grid’ is also a joke in our recession/depression economy. We prefer waging war to cars, obviously. That is where we put most of our borrowed government budget.

DC on Fri, 2nd Nov 2012 7:05 am 



The NRDC has been noted along with some other high profile enviro-groups, as being co-opted by corporate power. Now why would a group like NRDC praise EVs? Hybrids are not EV’s, and even if they were, EV’s leave about 98% of the problems cars create, completely unresolved. So what is going on here? The NRDC cant be serious about the so-called ‘Volt'(Gas!). What problem(s) exactly does he think the ‘volt’ is solving? Does the NRDC really think that the problem with gas is in its price at the pump!? Astounding really isnt it? The NRDC real concern here is ‘high’ price of gas for amerikas shopping and driving commuters.

This is exactly what James Kunstler’s refers to when he said,

“The creme of the US environmental movements main concern seems to be how to power the cars by other means”

Kenz300 on Fri, 2nd Nov 2012 2:28 pm 



Will bicycles and trolleys make a come back and rise in popularity?

The rising price of oil is making all other options look better.

Mark Davies on Sun, 4th Nov 2012 6:53 pm 



Petrol heads will always seek to undermine electric cars because they are either ignorant or have a vested interest in fuels that keep us all hostages to the oil producers. Change will come as people open their minds to new ideas and technologies. There is vast potential to harvest renewable energy via solar, wind, wave power, etc. The human race must pursue these new sources of energy or exist on a smoking rubbish tip that the earth will become if we carry on as we are.