More than half of all car buyers want an electric vehicle, report reveals

Bloomberg has been publishing its annual EVO (Electric Vehicle Outlook) report since 2015 and this year's edition shows a truly seismic shift in the electric vehicle adoption. The report looks at current trends and predicts their impact on supply markets but it also looks at CO2 emissions in order to paint a full picture of the change.

The electric vehicle progress has been slow and steady - until last year. 2021 will go down in history as a turning point, the year that for the first time more people wanted to buy an electric car than a fossil fueled version of it.

That shift in opinions is huge because in 2020 only 30% of car buyers were considering an EV as a viable option. A lot has changed, the charging infrastructure is growing and getting more reliable, range anxiety is becoming an anecdote and people truly like the idea of noise-free and fume-free transport.

The EV sales have gone through the proverbial roof, with all automakers racing to bring as many new models to the market as possible customers finally have a choice with the majority of all segments offering at least a few models.

Nearly 10% of all passenger cars sold last year globally were electric - that is around 6.5 million new electric cars, twice as many as year before. The adoption is even more evident in public transport with 44% of all new buses sold last year being electric, that is a huge increase over previous years.

Commercial transport has some catching up to do and it will be interesting to see those numbers next year - 2022 should be the year of an electric truck with so many of them announced in the last few months.

China once again is an undisputed leader when it comes to EV sales, accounting for nearly half of all new electric cars sold globally but Europe is catching up quickly with the US in a distant third place. This will not last long though, with the US predicted to make a leap this and next year to close the gap. Interesting fact here is the market share of plug-in hybrid vehicles which has been declining steadily over the years with PHEVs now only representing about 25% of all electric cars sold.

Another area where China has a clear lead is the public charging points - it has 3 times as many public chargers as Europe and the US is again in a distant third place but this is a very fluent picture with the rapid growth meaning changes are frequent.

What is visible here though is the clear link between infrastructure and EV adoption. Customers are obviously more likely to shift to electric cars if the charging is not an issue, a message China understood well at the start of this race and one it decided to focus on. That decision is paying off now. This is a valuable lesson for the rest of the world.

The next interesting piece of information from the Bloomberg EVO report is the oil displacement by EVs - it shows the amount of oil use reduction due to the increased number of electric cars on the road. Thanks to all the EVs out there we use 1.5 million barrels of oil less every day. With a barrel of crude costing nearly $117 today that’s $175.5 million saved every day by consumers.

That's $64 billion a year although it represents only 3% of total global fuel demand it is still a huge gap for oil giants which they will need to find a way to plug. Not for a moment even I’m feeling sorry for them, with the prices of fuels sky rocketing recently and blame laid squarely at the Russian invasion despite the oil companies posting unprecedented profits. In any other circumstances there would have been talk about profiteering but the world stays quiet for now.

Another huge number tied to the oil use reduction are the emissions - with an average of 431.87 kg of CO2 emitted by one barrel of oil used we are talking about 647.8 million kg of CO2 less in our atmosphere. Let that number sink in for a while. That figure is per day by the way - it adds up to 236.4 million metric tons of CO2 less every year. It clearly shows we can make a huge difference by simply moving away from oil.

Last bit of information I’m going to look at is the demand for lithium - this is what the whole world is relaying on, despite its many disputed advantages (mainly environmental) the entire industry is pushing hard for lithium. We have new battery technologies using either less lithium or fully forgoing it, but it will take much longer for the entire industry to transition away. For now lithium is the go to material and the world needs more of it to meet the demand from customers wanting to own electric cars.

2021 was again a major year for the miners with the demand nearly doubling compared to the year before. With other industries' demand staying roughly on the same level, it was the automotive segment that exploded from just over 140 GWh a year to nearly 300 GWh a year.

And it is only going to increase with general electricity requirements to go up by 27% by 2050. Oil companies are facing existential threat with the oil demand to peak in 2027 - that’s only five years away. The new electric car market is worth an estimated $53 trillion between now and 2050 which explains why every automaker is shifting to EV manufacturing ditching internal combustion.

Seeing those numbers makes us realize the size of this shift, it truly is a seismic change in the market, in customer’s habits and business models. It’s amazing to witness this tide or rather tsunami of change. Sure, not all of it will be for the better, there are going to be problems along the way, a lot of good businesses will fail, a lot of people will be affected but there are going to be a lot of new exciting opportunities. And the world will be less noisy and a whole lot cleaner place.

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