Electric-Car Future Is Coming, Just More Slowly Than Predicted: Consensus

It's been no secret that President Obama's goal of 1 million plug-in electric cars on U.S. roads won't be met by the end of this year.

That's the goal he announced on the campaign trail toward winning his first term in 2008.

The actual number is likely to be perhaps 400,000 or so; the 1-million goal may not be met until 2018 or later.

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Every now and then, a reporter notices this fact, and an article or video segment appears to point this out.

Last week, for instance, Bloomberg published an article whose title suggested it might be broadly unsympathetic to the idea that electric cars will grow in number.

But despite that title--"Obama Scales Back Overly Ambitious Goals For Electric-Car Use"--the article came to roughly the same conclusion that most savvy industry analysts and observers have.

That is, sales of plug-in electric cars in the U.S. (and around the world) will grow as battery costs fall steadily

At the same time, gasoline-vehicle prices will be rising to cover the increasing costs of technology that lets them use less fuel, to keep their makers in compliance with steadily higher corporate average fuel economy rules through 2025.

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Bloomberg reporter Jeff Green includes in his piece a quotation from Daniel Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign--which lobbies for regulations that require more-efficient vehicles.

“The ground is being laid for an electric car future,” Becker told him. “But it’s not an electric car present.”

Many observers, including this author, feel that the true "hockey stick" upswing in sales of plug-in cars won't come until they are roughly price competitive with gasoline vehicles in the same segment.

That is, when the base price of a Nissan Leaf is within $1,000 to $2,500 the price of, say, a Nissan Sentra or Altima, then the electric car will get far more attention from average buyers.