Plugs Everywhere: Hybrid, EV Sales to Triple Globally by 2013, Report Predicts
By John O'Dell October 29, 2009By Danny King, Contributor
Gas-electric hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles may account for as much as 8 percent of new vehicle sales in the U.S. in 2013, up from about 2 percent last year, as the combination of rising oil prices, falling prices relative to hybrids' conventional counterparts and a broader network of plug-in charging sites pull more people away from gasoline-burning cars, according to a recent report on the next generation of autos.
Worldwide, hybrid-vehicle sales will surge to about 2 million units in 2013 from about 550,000 units last year, while rechargeable - or plug-in - battery-electric cars will account for about 350,000 sales, compared with less than 10,000 plug-in sales last year, according to the NextGen research unit of technology industry specialist ABI Research.
With domestic new vehicle sales slumping to about 13 million units last year and the U.S. accounting for about half of the hybrid vehicles sold worldwide, less than one in 40 new U.S. cars were hybrids or plug-ins last year.
"As the economy improves, the price of oil is going to go up, so it will be much more sensible to go battery-electric or hybrid," said Larry Fisher, research director for Oyster Bay, New York-based NextGen and project manager of the report.
"As hybrids and electric vehicles come into production in greater numbers, the cost premium will come down."
Whether the surge is already taking place is a question whose answer was blurred as new car sales to surged across the board in July and August, driven by the federal cash for clunker program, only to plunge last month when the incentives stopped.
Earlier this month, Ford said sales of its hybrids for the first nine months of the year jumped 73 percent from a year earlier to about 26,000 on the combination of clunker-aided sales and this year's introduction of hybrid versions of the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan sedans. But other car makers saw hybrid sales gains from the clunker program erased by weak sales in the other seven months of the period.
Overall, U.S. hybrid sales last month fell 4.1% from a year earlier, compared with a 22.5 percent September plunge for conventional car sales.
NextGen, however, believes, worldwide sales of hybrid vehicles will increase about 9 percent to 600,000 for the year.
A growing hybrid and electric-vehicle market will be a boon to battery-module makers in the U.S. and Asia, the study says, predicting that automakers will spend about $3.7 billion on battery modules in 2014, up from $1.3 billion last year.
Additionally, plug-in electric vehicle sales may accelerate faster than NextGen is forecasting if private charging system companies such as Coulomb Technologies and Better Place can reach agreements with public utilities like Southern California Edison t speed up the in effort to build a network of electric charging stations, said Fisher.
He added that such a broader distribution network will be far less likely for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles than for plug-in electrics.
"If the cost of charging an electric vehicle becomes low enough on a cost-per-mile basis, that's going to sway people," Fisher said. As for fuel cells, "there's no hydrogen-refueling infrastructure [now], and that's not going to change in the near future.
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Who is going to pay for the chargers? If I decide I do not want to own an electric or plug in vehicle, is the utility still going to raise my rates to cover the cost of other peoples chargers? Am I going to subsidize the chargers that go into peoples homes/garages?
Not very fair or democratic.
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