The electric car remains a niche product. That was exactly ten years ago the conclusion of consultant firm Oliver Wyman. The last quarter of 2020 is now on its last legs and that offers the opportunity to compare the past with the present.
Exactly ten years ago, the Dutch consumer was introduced to the first modern electric passenger cars. Mitsubishi had the i-MiEV, Peugeot and Citroen the Japanese-based iOn and C-Zero and Nissan rolled out the first copies of the Leaf in October 2010. We should not expect much from EVs. At least, if we can believe the conclusion of Oliver Wyman that the consultancy firm drew ten years ago.
The agency predicted that ‘only’ 3.2 million electric cars would be sold by 2025, of which 2 million would find an owner in Asia. It was expected that in 2025 there would be room in Europe for the sale of 700,000 electric passenger cars. Other predictions: 1.3 million plug-ins and 500,000 regular hybrids would be sold in Europe in 2025.
Worldwide EV sales figures are not available, but we can look closer to home. In 2019, 15.3 million passenger cars were sold in the European Union. That number is even more than 15.6 million if we add the sales of the countries in the European Free Trade Association (Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein). If we roughly assume that Wyman classified the same region as Europe in 2010, we can at least make a comparison with last year’s situation. Of the 15.6 million passenger cars sold in that region in 2019, 359,796 had an all-electric powertrain, an increase of as much as 80 percent from the previous year.
This extreme growth is partly due to the ever-increasing supply of EV in Europe. We dare not make a prediction for 2025, as the growth in sales of EVs is very strongly linked to the availability of mass-affordable electric models. They are in the barrel, but whether it will be enough to reach the sale of 700,000 units in 2025 remains to be seen, of course. In any case, we are well on our way.
Plug-ins, hybrids and the tricky mild hybrids
Where there is still a good chance that Wyman’s EV prediction will come true, in the field of plugins it will most likely not work. Last year, the European Union and the countries of the European Free Trade Association sold 198,853 plug-ins (the Netherlands: 4,901 units, + 53.7 percent). That number is only about 15 percent of the predicted 1.3 million that should be sold in 2025. Although there is a growth in plug-in sales (2019: +7.1 percent), the forecasted 1.3 million seems very optimistic. The prediction of the number of regular hybrids to be sold in 2025 is difficult to compare with the present. The mild hybrid is on the rise, but we do not know whether Wyman would have included the mild hybrid among the regular hybrids. Jato Dynamics, the source of the majority of the figures in this article, does classify the mild hybrid among conventional hybrids. In the region described above, a total of 937,377 hybrids and mild hybrids were sold last year (the Netherlands: 28,840), a whopping 49.5 percent more than in the previous year (Netherlands: +25.5 percent).
Electric cars in the Netherlands
More than 50,000 electric passenger cars were sold in the Netherlands last year. For 2020, sector organizations Bovag and RAI Vereniging predict total passenger car sales of 425,000 units (-4.7 percent), of which at least ten percent (42,500) would be fully electric. In view of the global and therefore also European corona crisis, it is expected that these numbers will not be reached.
We will know for sure in 5 years, but the prediction in the field of plug-in hybrids does not seem to come true. We do not yet judge the EV forecast, but the figures look positive.