Tariffs or no tariffs, EVs are going to win the day

One of the most important and positive trends that I’ve been trying to highlight over the past few years is the amazing progress in battery technology.

Huge increases in energy density and even bigger declines in manufacturing costs have made batteries competitive with combustion engines for a large variety of applications. The most important of these is transportation.

At the beginning of this year, the big story about electric vehicles was that sales were slowing down. Detractors of EVs — and there are a lot of them out there — declared that EVs are a flash in the pan, that interest is already waning, that the problems of EVs would prevent them from ever displacing internal combustion cars, that EVs will never be viable without subsidies, and so on. Essentially, the story was that the EV revolution was over, or at least stalled indefinitely.

That narrative has now essentially collapsed. EV sales reaccelerated in the US after just a couple of months, and their market share has hit a new record high:

And EVs continue to outsell combustion cars:

Nor is there any sign of a slowdown at the global level:

A number of developing countries are seeing truly spectacular growth in EV sales:

So EVs are still winning. But they haven’t won yet; only 4% of the global passenger car fleet, 23% of the bus fleet, and less than 1% of delivery trucks are electrified.

But at this point, I think the writing is on the wall.

The phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an older, inferior technology is not uncommon, and it generally looks like the EV transition is looking now. When a new technology passes a 5% adoption rate, it almost never turns out to be inferior to what came before; with EVs, that threshold has now been reached in