Range Anxiety
“Range Anxiety” – a cartoon that illustrates the electric car industry is suffering a number of setbacks on its journey to mass adoption.
Last year, Bloomberg News was talking up the 31 countries where new electric car sales have exceeded the 5% tipping point of top new car sales, which they pointed to as the threshold for mass adoption for electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, fossil-fuel companies have piled into the electric car industry, with BP’s charging business (BP Pulse) installing more than 27,000 charging plugs so far and aims to get to 100,000 by 2030 and the Saudi’s pouring investment into electric car companies like Lucid Motors and Ceer Motors.
However, some of these advances are hitting headwinds from government intervention and the private sector.
According to AlixPartners, China subsidized its electric car industry to the tune of $57 billion and now is starting to aggressively export cars around the world (e.g. there are currently 10K Chinese EVs piled up in the port of Amsterdam), which has resulted in governments starting to impose import taxes to prevent their own car industry being wiped out.
Governments are also starting to dial back incentives, for example the UK government recently ended the last remaining subsidies for electric cars, to focus on expanding the charging network and supporting other battery-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, in the private sector, Tesla, which owns and operates nearly two-thirds of the fast charging ports in the United States and Europe and deploys more chargers each year than all other providers combined, last week laid off most of its Charger Network team.
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