The Past and Future of Electric Cars
The future is electric. Sales of electric vehicles jumped by 37 percent in the United States in 2016, while analysts say that globally, electric cars will make up at least half of all new-vehicle sales by 2040.
Major automakers in the United States and abroad are now scrambling to keep pace with the competition and are announcing their electrification plans. Companies like BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, and Volvo are developing new electric vehicle technologies and ramping up their electric car offerings.
It’s the way forward, says Simon Mui, who directs the California Vehicles and Fuels, Energy, and Transportation Program at the nonprofit National Resource Defense Council. Over the next decade, electric vehicles will come to cost roughly the same as conventional gas-engine cars as battery prices continue to drop and the technology gets fine-tuned.
“The technology is hitting a tipping point, just as wind and solar has done,” says Mui.
While a handful of notable upcoming releases will help bring electric vehicles further into the mainstream, it’s also important to look to the past. A half-dozen models emerged over the past couple decades that have proven crucial for shaping the industry and the road forward for electric cars.
Future electric vehicle game-changers have studied these models and are using their lessons learned to make electric cars widely adopted and less expensive.
