EV domination is coming — the electric car is killing the internal combustion engine. EV innovation is booming and carmarkers are reducing the amount of copper necessary for an EV. EV sales are through the roof and soon the whole world will be Norway.
The news from EV-World is so upbeat one feels like bursting into song in case one’s got shares in Tesla or, I don’t know, Lordstown. No, wait, Lordstown just filed for bankruptcy, my mistake. Tesla it is.
Tesla is doing great and so are all other carmakers (except Lordstown, that is). In fact, they are doing so great, competition has heated up to the point where carmakers are in a race to offer the biggest and best discounts and perks to buyers. The EV era is here!
For some reason, so are growing numbers of unsold cars, including Teslas. So are taxes on EVs in some U.S. states. So is demand for hybrids — arguably EVs’ biggest enemy. And so is a kind of worry that the world is not going to become Norway any time soon because even in Norway more people drive internal combustion engine cars than EVs. It’s complicated. It’s also funny. Of course it is.
Take this report from Bloomberg, which cheers the coming end of oil demand because of EVs. The prediction comes from BloombergNEF, which often rivals outlets such as the IEA and Ember in its completely impartial energy forecasting.
From that report, you’d learn that sales of internal combustion engine vehicles peaked as long as six years ago. Yes, that was news to me, too, but I don’t follow car markets closely. Not only that but thanks to EVs, global demand for road fuels is set to peak in three short years, with EVs “of all types” already eliminating 1.5 million barrels of oil demand daily. Well done, EVs “of all types”.
Yet it was Bloomberg again that reported on Norway’s apparent inability to kick its oil habit completely. It appears that EV sales now make up 80% of total car sales but in terms of miles driven, they account for less than a quarter of the total while diesel vehicles account for 43%. Rumour has it that even the Norwegians use EVs as a second car they don’t drive as much as their primary cars.
The state of affairs in road fuel demand was summarised in the same report by the chief commodities analyst of Sweden-based bank SEB.
“If you want to drive a truck, if you want to operate a mining machine, if you want to get things done in the world economy, then you need diesel,” Bjarne Schieldrop told Bloomberg. Well, that must have hurt. Truth often does.
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