*Sales of electric cars in the U.S. are said to be on the rise.
Here’s more from Car and Driver:
After a decade of slow but steady sales growth, electric vehicle registrations in the U.S. shot up 60 percent in the first quarter of 2022 even as overall new car registrations dropped 18 percent. It’s the latest indication that domestic EV acceptance may have turned some important but invisible corner recently.
The sharp increase in electric-vehicle registrations at the start of this year meant that the EV share of the overall market hit a historic 4.6 percent. One big reason we’re seeing more EVs in people’s driveways is the explosion in exciting new models, from the Ford F-150 Lightning to the Kia EV6 to the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Per Yahoo, “new registrations for EVs have jumped 60% from a year ago in the first quarter and have hit an all-time high of 4.6% of the overall market.”
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“It’s the technology of the future,” said Eric D. Wachsman, the director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute. “The question is: How soon is that future going to be here?”
“Today, electric drive vehicles to tend to cost more than conventional vehicles,” said vehicle technology expert Pat Davis in a 2010 interview.
“As we mentioned there is a $7,500 tax credit available to help reduce that original cost. In addition, you are going to save significantly on fueling costs as we talked about,” he continued. “And information on these tax incentives can be found on our Alternative Fuels Data Center. So currently, they’re more expensive than their counterparts mainly because of the batteries and the electric drive components,” he explained.
“We’re supporting a number of manufacturing facilities under ARRA; costs are coming down greatly with batteries, and costs are coming down with power electronics,” Davis continued. “So we’re going to see that cost differential between electric vehicles and conventional vehicles shrink over the next few years, and it’s going to shrink pretty dramatically. Although today’s plug-in electric battery with a 40-mile range is going to cost by itself about $10,000 today, we expect that to drop significantly over the next five years,” he said.
Today, “Supply-chain problems plaguing the auto industry may have an impact on which cars are being sold, given that some automakers have to make production decisions about which models to build or not build based on the supply of semiconductor chips or other components in short supply. If you’ll allow a bit of speculation, the fact that EVs command more attention from the public and the higher starting prices for many EVs could be two potential reasons for automakers to prioritize EVs over internal combustion engine vehicles,” per Car and Driver.
