We’re slowly going in the right direction which means a direction of CHOICE
Here are some of the arguments from a recent NY Times article on the authenticity of EV performance and sales claims:
Mr. Ghosn(Carlos Ghosn head of Nissan) said Nissan expected to sell at least one million units of the Leaf(it’s new EV) in its first six years — considered a model’s standard life cycle — and recoup the company’s investment within that period. In comparison, it took the Toyota Prius more than a decade from its 1997 debut to hit the one million-unit sales mark.
Most industry forecasts have been far more conservative. J. D. Power, the market research company, predicts that in 2020 only 1.3 million of a projected 70.9 million cars that will be sold worldwide will be electric, fewer than 2 percent. Even the most optimistic analysts put the figure at no more than 5 percent.
Buyers of electric cars, the pessimists predict, will be limited to a demographic niche: high-income, environmentally conscious and early adopters of technology. “It will be difficult to convince large numbers of consumers to switch from conventionally powered passenger vehicles,” J. D. Power said in a report in October.
The biggest constraint on Leaf sales, Mr. Ghosn said, will be how many electric cars Nissan’s factories can make. Over the next two years, the company, which now makes the Leaf only in Japan, plans to open assembly and battery factories in Europe, North America and Asia that will give it the capacity to make 500,000 electric vehicles a year.
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