No Country for EVs: In US it takes 3 weeks more to sell an electric vehicle than a fossil fuel car

The year-on-year demand for Electric Vehicles in the US has sagged so much so that carmakers are now reassessing their investment plans in the sector and delaying introducing new models. According to Wall Street Journal, the demand has shifted to hybrids and traditional ICE vehicles, customer inertia being attributable to relatively exorbitant costs and patchy availability of charging stations. The demand pattern bears out the sentiment, according to WSJ, since the urban areas still have raked in good sales figures as compared to rural and semi-urban areas owing to issues with the number of charging stations. According to the WSJ report, EV inventory is piling up at the dealers’ and it takes three weeks more to sell an EV than a fossil fuel car. As per the report, sales of EVs rose in the first 11 months of 2023, but at a pace way slower compared to the last year. Car experts, though, are hopeful that sales will pick up once there are more affordable models available on the roads and the charging infrastructure improves, but it begs a vicious circle: at the present rate of sales and the debilitating availability of charging stations will automatically keep the market demand suppressed. Reports from October this year reveal that auto major General Motors has delayed opening an EV truck plant in Michigan owing to slowing demand. Yet another report from WSJ from October pointed that sales of EVs was up 51 per cent across the first nine months of 2023—this is in itself huge as compared to the meagre 14 per cent increase in the sales of traditional vehicles—but this growth is down from 69 per cent in the same period last year. This trend is worrying for the US since its rival EV markets, namely China and Europe, have had a better year. According to the WSJ report, nearly 27 per cent of the vehicles sold in China in the third quarter of 2023 have been EVs; EVs account for 15 per cent of vehicles sold in Europe in the same period; US, on the other hand, is a different story at just 8 per cent.