Man who famously said the same thing about EVs, even after 2 million had been sold.<p>Said it was just Obama making stuff up.<p>> LET ME BEGIN WITH A DISCLAIMER: I am neither promoting
electric vehicles nor denigrating them. I simply observe that the
rational case for accepting EVs has been undermined by unrealistic market forecasts and a disregard for the environmental effects
involved in producing and operating these vehicles. • Unrealistic forecasts have
been the norm. In 2008, Deutsche Bank predicted that EVs would claim 7 percent of the U.S. market by 2016; in 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek put the 2016
share at 6 percent. But actual sales came to 158,614 units, just 0.9 percent of the
record 17.55 million vehicles sold that year. • In his 2011 State of the Union address,
then–U.S. president Barack Obama called for 1 million EVs on the road by 2015,
and a concurrent report by the Department of Energy claimed that the country’s production capacity in that year would reach 1.2 million units. But the 2015
total came to 410,000 units, representing just 0.15 percent of all vehicles on the
road, and sales of U.S. brands reached about 100,000 cars. • And this triumph of
hope over experience continues. The worldwide total of EVs on the road reached
2 million units in 2016. If you plot the trajectory of the global stock of EVs since
the beginning of their sales to the year 2016, you will see that the equation that
best fits the data (a fourth-order polynomial) projects about 32 million units in
2025.<p>There was 4.2 Million EVs sold in the first half of this year. If sales remains entirely flat then between now and 2025 then just the cars sold over the next 4 years will top his prediction for installed base.<p>Sales won't remain flat.<p>> The myth that the future belongs to electric vehicles is one of the misconceptions of the modern energy era”. -- Vaclav Smil