ELECTRIC CARS ON THE MARKET

Electric cars on the market

Porsche Electric Car

 A-new law to force US auto wide to produce fuel-efficient cars and more electricity. Increased competition for European cars. make traffic in the United States more energy efficient, President Obama last month introduced a new standard. According to this standard have to fuel cars per gallon in 2025 to create a sort of 54.5 miles, about 23 kilometers per liter. This journey is approximately proportional to the Co2 emissions of just 70 grams per kilometer. However, the European targets for 2020 are emissions of 95 grams per kilometer.

In order to meet the goal of US automakers Obama will not be without a large part of the electric car. Traditional combustion engines can meet the target, the current ada.Amerika not play well with this size in a market where competition is increasingly fierce in the field of energy efficiency. "People think the Europeans do much better, which used to be so, but it is now changing," said Peter Mock, head of research at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non profit organization that provides information on clean mobility.

In 2010, the U.S. economy continued recovery from recession. As part of that recovery, sales of U.S. light-duty vehicles rebounded to approximately 12 million in 2010 from less than 10 million in 2009. Historically, U.S. sales of new light duty passenger vehicles ranged from 15-16 million per year from 2005-2008.² Conventional hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have been on sale in the U.S. for over ten years, and today sales have grown to almost three percent of total light-duty vehicles. Over 1.6 million HEVs have been sold over the past six years. To reach the one million vehicle goal, EVs will need to average just under 1.7 percent of sales through 2015 (assuming sales of 12 million light-duty vehicles per year).

With increases in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, vehicle manufacturers are required to increase fuel economy through 2016, with further increases beyond 2016 under consideration. On March 30, 2009, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published the final rule raising CAFE standards for both cars and light trucks. These new standards will encourage the expanded market entry of electric drive technologies.

Market for Electric Drive Vehicles Expected to Increase

Over the past few years, interest in EVs in the U.S. auto industry has surged, with manufacturers beginning to introduce new generations of EVs. For example, in 2010 General Motors introduced the Chevrolet Volt extended range electric vehicle into the U.S. market. The Volt can travel up to 40 miles using power from its lithium-ion battery pack. After that, the Volt can travel up to 375 miles in extended range using its internal combustion engine electric generator. GM has announced plans to build 15,000 Chevy Volts in 2011 and 45,000 in 2012. Based on news reports, the company is working on plans to increase its production target for 2012 to 120,000. (See Table references.) In late 2010, Nissan introduced the Leaf, a 100-mile range all-electric vehicle that incorporates an advanced lithium-ion battery as its sole power source.

In 2012, the 96,000 plug-in electric cars sold in the U.S. represented a bit more than half a percent of the total market of 16.5 million vehicles.Market share is a good statistic: It's useful, and easy to track. But we need to piece together the relationships between vehicle price, type, and market share, to gain a fuller sense of the electric-car landscape.

U.S. Auto Market in 2013

Slimming down U.S. sales

Sales figures for all vehicles sold in the United States in 2013 can be obtained in many places; we used GoodCarBadCar.net (which kindly credits GreenCarReports in its Canadian Tesla sales reports).That data covered about 98 percent of reported U.S. auto sales, good enough for our purposes. The balance consists of commercial vehicles like delivery vans. We estimated Tesla's American sales based on its quarterly shareholder letters, and estimated sales abroad.

Looking up the entry-level sticker price for each of the 271 models listed, we used that as a proxy for each one's average selling price. It's a necessary simplification: automakers don't break down their sales by trim level publicly.Sales of deluxe models may push a vehicle's average transaction price higher, but dealer and manufacturer discounts have some counterbalancing effect--so the entry-level MSRP was a good first approximation.

Netting out Federal Credit

For electric vehicles, we added two steps. Since prices on several plug-ins were cut during the year (thank you, experience curve effects!), we used the average of the starting and ending MSRPs. Then we subtracted the Federal income-tax credit for each vehicle, to reflect the price most buyers would have actually paid.Keeping in mind that our calculated selling prices were rough estimates, we can see that about two-thirds of the U.S. market is made up of cars costing less than $25,000.