[imagesource: Adobe Stock]

When many people think of electric cars, Tesla is the first name that comes to mind.

Fair enough, because Elon Musk’s company was one of the first out of the blocks, and it has helped propel Musk to a personal net worth that hovers between the $150 and $180 billion mark.

The so-called ‘Tesla Mafia’ are keen to eat into that market dominance, but to really cause a shift in the market, you need the automotive industry’s biggest names on board.

Which they are, with The BBC reporting that “we are in the middle of the biggest revolution in motoring since Henry Ford’s first production line started turning back in 1913.”

Close followers of the industry believe we are nearing, or are actually past, the point where sales of electric vehicles (EVs) will overwhelm petrol and diesel cars.

A caveat – that is most certainly not the case in South Africa, where in 2020, of the 380 206 vehicles sold in the domestic market, just 92 electric vehicles were sold, which accounts for 0,02%.

We’re still dealing with the automatic/manual argument, apparently.

Back to those big names and the move towards EVs:

Jaguar [the I-PACE pictured below] plans to sell only electric cars from 2025, Volvo from 2030 and last week the British sportscar company Lotus said it would follow suit, selling only electric models from 2028…

General Motors says it will make only electric vehicles by 2035, Ford says all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70% of its sales will be electric by 2030…

Image: Jaguar

But what makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly.

If you compare the rise and rise of the internet with EVs, the buzz around the latter is comparable with internet buzz around the late 1990s or very early 2000s.

At that stage, most people knew about the internet, but it was still seen as something of use only to a certain subset of people. What followed was “explosive and disruptive” growth, referred to by technologists as an S-curve, which completely changed the way we conduct our daily lives:

Like the internet in the 90s, the electric car market is already growing exponentially.

Global sales of electric cars raced forward in 2020, rising by 43% to a total of 3.2m, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic.

That is just 5% of total car sales, but it shows we’re already entering the steep part of the S.

Read the full BBC report here.

[source:bbc]