The global market for electric vehicles has now reached at 740,000 electric cars

The global market for electric vehicles has now reached at 740,000 electric cars, out of which 320,000 were registered in 2014. The report was revealed by Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemburg (ZSW) in Germany.

 

This rapid growth has been driven by various market leaders, including the Nissan Leaf, Tesla’s Model S, the Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In and the Honda Fit EV, which dominated new registrations in 2014.

As a result of this growth, car battery suppliers generated revenues of €2 billion ($2.17 billion), growing 69 per cent to bring the number of EV’s on the road to 290000.

China is the world’s third-most bigger EV market, growing by around 54,000 vehicles in 2014, a 120 per cent increase, leaving with close to 100,000 EVs on the road, just behind Japan, which has 110,000 EVs.

The ZSW found that supportive policies in these three leading countries have helped accelerate EV adoption.

In China domestically made EVs are subsidized, making them cheaper whereas Germany has no market incentives to encourage motorists to purchase an EV.

Meanwhile, Germany had only 11,700 new EV registrations last year, leaving the country in seventh position for EV adoption with around 29,600 cars.

As a percentage, EVs account for just 0.07 per cent of all cars in Germany, whereas across Scandinavia that goes to 1.6 per cent.

Nissan’s Leaf the popular EV brand, with 150,000 Leaf models registered worldwide since its launch in 2010.

Second is General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, with 75,000 vehicles registered, followed by 60,000 Toyota Prius’s.

Tesla’s Model S has been sold 50,000 times, ahead of BMW’s i3, of which there are currently only 15,000 on the road globally.

The growth rate for the EV market is around 76 per cent, according to ZSW, and the number of new EV registrations has increased twofold each year between 2012 and 2014.

“If the momentum of recent years continues unabated, the number of electric cars worldwide will exceed one million in just a few months,” said ZSW’s head of electrochemical energy technologies division, Werner Tillmetz.

Having generated revenues of €2 million in 2014, the li-ion battery market for EVs could be worth €15 billion ($16.2 billion) by 2020.