The electric future is coming. But how quickly is less certain.
Just a decade and a half ago, the then-CEO of General Motors Co. Rick Wagoner observed to Larry Burns, at the time GM’s head of research and strategy, that not many industries stay the same for a century. But the automobile industry, Wagoner added with some anxiety, had so far been the exception. Its business model remained that pioneered by Henry Ford with the Model T a century earlier — “gas-fueled, run by an internal combustion engine, rolling on four wheels.
“There’s a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen,” said the president. This vision clearly does not involve making the internal combustion engine better. The Roadster, starting at over $100,000, was not exactly a mass market car. But there soon were other early entrants. Nissan, where engineers had been working on an electric car for more than two decades, introduced the Nissan Leaf in 2010, the same year that General Motors came out with the Chevy Volt. GM followed up in 2016 with the Bolt, a major project accomplished in double-time under the then-head of development and now-CEO Mary Barra.
It will take time for EV adoption to have a major impact on emissions as cars stay on the road for a long time — the average in the U.S. is 12 years. But a total EV fleet for light vehicles would have a direct emissions impact. “Light vehicles” are responsible for about 16 percent of human CO2 emissions in the United States .
But the scale of what is required should not be underestimated. It will be a massive job to build up a supply system that supports the current 600,000 new EVs annually into one capable of supporting Biden’s goal of about 9 million annual new car sales by 2030. Just to get to Biden’s 2030 goal of 50 percent would require a 15-fold increase in annual production of electric cars over a short eight-year period.
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