EV market overview: what challenges need to be overcome in the EV market?

Looking at charging infrastructure, it’s interesting to see the uptake and the ratios or the proportion of charges or fast chargers to electric vehicles, and whilst the data suggests that certain countries are ahead, you’ve got to factor in there’s many other factors and elements at play here. It’s not quite as simplistic as the data or this graphic would have you believe. So for example, in Norway, there are relatively few charges and fast charges. This is public charges we’re talking about so this is publicly available information. Whereas you look at somewhere like China who has quite a large bank of publicly available charging points and stations, but when you consider the socio-economic status of the countries, when you consider their lifestyles and the way in which people live in those countries are different. For example, there are quite a lot of single-family households in Norway which have a facility to charge their vehicles at home. That isn’t necessarily true for countries such as China.

There’s also a socio-economic element to it as well, so more in affluent countries we’re seeing greater adoption and uptake. Particularly when you look at the US, for example, there’s more adoption on the West Coast and now rising on the East Coast, where in Central America, South and Midwest there’s less adoption with larger and larger distances to cover so they are more reliant on a public charging network. So actually, what we do find is that in Canada and the U.S., they have a better ratio of charges to vehicles than somewhere like Norway, for example. But that’s because of the distances that they need to cover and to drive change in consumer confidence to be able to use electric vehicles. But they still represent a very small proportion of the overall electric vehicle sales, so there’s still some way to go really to help with the adoption of electric vehicles.

So in the UK for example, there’s a lot of challenges around the infrastructure in terms of getting out, getting it in line and reconciled with the uptake of electric vehicles. We are seeing now more public charges than petrol stations. But again, you have multiple pumps at petrol stations, so I don’t think we’re quite parity yet, although there’s talk about potentially being overtaken by the latter part of this year, in 2022. But as ranges improve on electric vehicles, what we should see is more and more adoption and less of a need for as many public charging points, particularly for those that can charge a home which is roughly about half the population, but also for those that can’t charge at home having the confidence to see that chargers are available, that they work, they’re not broken and the charging time comes down as well, that will be really important. As technology improves, that will improve, but there is a change in consumer behaviour that will be needed to allow the adoption before perhaps the charging infrastructure and the charging times are where they would be in parity to filling up with gasoline or diesel, for example.

There are many challenges and opportunities when it comes to electric vehicles, not only in manufacturing, producing electric vehicles and the technology that’s needed to support that, but also the adoption from the market consumers, but also from the infrastructure that it needs to support the uptake for electric vehicles. EV start-ups are really keen to get to market quickly so they can steal market share and establish themselves in an emerging market. But there’s a lot of headwinds those costs in terms of raw materials. That’s not the price parity that we want at the moment in terms of battery electric against ice vehicles. And there’s a lot of challenges around the technology as well that’s emerging.

All this is really driven by the legislation, the carbon reduction targets that the Government’s been setting for some years now. And really now we’ve got to see this through. There’s a lot of data that comes with it. So the charging infrastructure itself, charging habits and behaviour in terms of what do we learn from consumers using electric vehicles, how should electric vehicles be used, how should they be charged, what do we learn from it as well? And the infrastructure really does need to catch up with that so that we can allay any kind of fears around consumers with range anxiety or charging anxiety but the regulation is really driving this as the challenge there and the market and the OEMs are rising to the challenge. But, you know, there are a lot of challenges to overcome but the opportunity is that we can electrify a lot of our vehicles in a lot of applications, not necessarily all of them. Also, there are some emerging technologies like e-fuels and hydrogen and other things like that, that hopefully will support the desire for the globe to become greener and to reduce emissions overall.