Reply #36: How many people would have to buy electric cars in the next 7 years to replace [View All]

[Bill USA]

enough gasoline to stop gas price rises? and how many electric cars would have to be purchased (and therfore, built) to eliminate, let's say, 15% of the gasoline we currently use? That would be 21 billion gallons (15% of 140 Billion gallons).

Now, let's assume, for simplicity, we are talking about pure electric cars like the Leaf. That would mean electric cars would reduce gasoline consumption 100% for each electric car driven in place of an ICE powered car. A comparable car (weight and payload) getting about 33 mpg would consume 364 gallons of gas per year (assuming 12,000 miles driven per yr). So how many electric cars (for example, Nissan Leafs) would be required to eliminate 21 Billion gallons of gas consumption?.....57,750,000 (21 Billion gallons divided by 364 gallons). That would be 23% of the fleet). That many Leafs would cost $1.9 Trillion. Do you really think we are going to sell 58 million electric cars in the next several years? Do you think the world has the production capacity to make that many electric cars in that period of time?

Try to understand this, The price of oil/gas is going up right now. In the next few years it will go up enough to stop our recovery and put us back into a deeper recession. When we go into a deeper recession with sustained high unemployment, like we have now, how many $33,000 Leafs or $42,000 Volts do you think we are going to sell?

...we need to use an approach that will reduce gas consumption in the next few years. Not 20 years in the future.
Electric cars are a long term proposition. They won't be able to help us reduce gasoline consumption much within 10 or 20 years.

If you had read the post I provided a link to you would see that it is estimated by Bloomberg New Energy and J.D. Powers that we might sell enough electrics in 2020 to equal 9% of new car sales and 22% of new car sales in 2030. If we are selling enough electrics to equal 22% of new cars in 2030 that would mean that electric cars would equal about 7.5% of the TOTAL FLEET in 2030. That's a good deal short of the 23% of the fleet I mentioned above that would be needed to eliminate 15% of our gas consumption (for the light transport sector).