17M Hybrid and Electric Cars Expected on the Road by 2020
Electric cars are slowly but surely nibbling their way into the consumer automobile market. So far, the progress has been slow, but forecasts are projecting that sales will increase exponentially in the near future.
CTV News reported that the latest projections from Juniper Research place the worldwide electric vehicle fleet at 17 million by 2020. To put that in perspective, the world only just reached the milestone of having one million electric vehicles(EV) sold last fall. Reaching 17 million in less than 5 years would mean sales would have to increase at an unbelievable pace.
Sales are projected to do so well because new technology lets manufacturers build electric cars with better ranges and the infrastructure continues to improve. As anxiety over range and reliability is eliminated, people are more open to buying these clean cars. While the cost of the vehicles is still a barrier, it’s a barrier that will also see improvement over the next decade meaning that there’s a good chance electric vehicles will become even more popular than expected.
Of course 17 million is just a drop in the bucket when the total number of cars on the road is over 1 billion. We have a long way to go before the majority of vehicles are zero-emissions and there’s no guessing if it will be plug-in electric vehicles or fuel cell EVs or even some other technology that nobody’s even dreamed about yet that will be the auto technology of the future. For now it’s just nice to know that in the next several years the world will be able to cut back somewhat on the amount of pollution in the air thanks to growing numbers of EVs.