Check out how fast this market it going. (US battery electric vehicle sales per year: <a href="http://www.electricdrive.org/index.php?ht=d/sp/i/20952/pid/20952" rel="nofollow">http://www.electricdrive.org/index.php?ht=d/sp/i/20952/pid/2...</a>)<p><pre><code> 2010: 19 (lol, is that right?)
2011: 10,064
2012: 52,835
2013: 96,702</code></pre>
I've owned a leaf for 30 months now, driven almost 30,000 miles, and still like it.<p>Also, it seems every second car in the HOV lane in the SF bay area it's a Leaf...
and yet it is completely tasteless designwise. what an ugly, ugly car.<p>tesla is doing it right, the fiat500e is beautiful - why is it so hard to understand that design matters? the new BMW i3 is not exactly beautiful as well.
This is so nice, until you figure out that the electric car has been around since 1880: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car</a>. Now it's trying to claw its way to 0.1% of worldwide car sale - and let's not try to figure out which percentage of total cars used this represents (probably 0.00001%).<p>I know that after a tipping point adoption just starts snowballing, but that point still looks 10-12 years away (a market share of electric car sales at 10% or better).
It's interesting that this model has been unsuccessful in the US, but fits the demand profile perfectly in other wealthy countries.<p>The American market, as always, is difficult to move.