Why The World Is So Excited About Electric Cars
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Consumer spending on electric cars is growing fast.
There is a lot of buzz about electric cars. All the big carmakers have either begun to sell electric cars, or are planning to. Some manufacturers, like Tesla, only make electric cars; other players, like Volvo, are repositioning themselves to sell only electrics or hybrids as soon as 2019.
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Last year set a new record for electric-car sales, although they still made up only about 1% of all cars sold. Detractors note that many of those sales were motivated by generous government subsidies.
The criticism misses a point, as shown by the International Energy Agency’s 2018 report on world energy investment. Any new technology, by definition, starts from zero. What matters is how fast it grows—and electric-car sales are growing fast. Moreover, consumer spending on electric cars is growing much faster than government spending in the sector.
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The trends suggest that sales will continue to rev up. The average cost of an electric car is falling rapidly even as the range it can travel on a single charge is going up. This is because the batteries that power electric cars are getting more energy dense—packing in more power to the same package for a lower price.
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