As much as Tesla seems to dominate the automotive news cycle some days, the California electric-car maker remains a small player in a narrow niche of the market. Tesla didn?t even reach 80,000 global sales in 2016. That’s a small portion of the approximately 750,000 electric vehicles made worldwide last year, by all automakers combined, which in turn added up to just 0.2 percent of global vehicle sales. That’s a reality check, to be sure. But organizations studying the growth of the EV market?including some that are not proponents as much as observers or even competitors?are adjusting their forecasts upward.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), EVs will comprise the majority of the new-vehicle market by 2040?54 percent, versus 35 percent as it previously forecast. BNEF expects EVs will comprise one-third of the total vehicles in service by 2040, as internal-combustion vehicles are retired and replaced with electrics. There’s one big asterisk to BNEF’s bullish predictions: They include plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), which of course do still have an internal-combustion engine under the hood, pitching in to varying degrees. But by that time more complex PHEVs will be on the decline, they note, making up only 15 percent of the EV total?so even given that, nearly half of the vehicles sold by then won’t have a gas tank.
Now, even Big Oil believes it is seeing a faster rise for EVs than previously forecast. Exxon Mobil had been anticipati...