A better comparison is the replacement of horses with tractors in agriculture. As the figure below shows, it took 20 years for the number of horses used on farms to drop by 50% and over four decades before they were largely phased out. A similarly slow transition can be observed in the railroad industry, where the railroad companies replaced steam locomotives with diesel engines.
To date, EV sales have been limited to early adopters and luxury car buyers. The cheaper EVs like the GM Bolt sales are anemic: it represented 4% of GM’s sales in the last quarter. The necessity for large subsidies and a wide variety of intangible incentives suggests that EVs remain an inferior product and there is little reason to believe that will change soon.
There is a significant chance that the electric vehicle will prove to resemble the CFL more than the Model T, something that is more expensive but with inferior characteristics, except for reduced emissions. The recent spate of price reductions still leaves them more expensive than competing conventional vehicles, and improvements in cost and performance for lithium-ion batteries seem to be slowing.
Alternatively, EVs could never become the primary light duty vehicle, but becoming a second car of choice for many families and increasingly used in some urban settings. Battery improvements would be offset by lower government support but the industry would thrive, albeit with market share on the lower end of projections. My belief is that this is most likely.
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