A small-scale but significant share of auto owners in the United States have traded filling up for plugging in, and many more than are thinking of joining them. In a recent Pew Research Eye survey, 7% of U.Southward. adults said they currently have an electric or hybrid vehicle, and 39% said they were very or somewhat likely to seriously consider buying an electric vehicle the adjacent time they're in the market for new wheels.

Exterior of a few major metropolitan areas, electric vehicles (EVs) aren't all that mutual in the U.S. While their numbers have grown rapidly in accented terms in contempo years, that'southward from a relatively minor base.

Europe leads the way in new electric vehicle sales

Equally of 2020, about 1.8 million EVs were registered in the U.S., more three times every bit many as in 2016, according to the International Free energy Bureau (IEA). They come in three broad categories. All-electric vehicles (too called battery-electric vehicles) accept been the fastest-growing category: The total number of such vehicles registered in the U.South. has soared from fewer than 300,000 in 2016 to more than 1.1 meg last twelvemonth. Consumers have purchased the other 2 types of EVs, plug-in hybrid vehicles and fuel jail cell vehicles, at lower rates.

With electric vehicles (EVs) slowly merely steadily gaining in popularity in the U.S., we wanted to observe out but how widespread they are, and how their growth here compares with that in other parts of the world.

Our main information source was the International Energy Bureau, an chapter of the Arrangement for Economic Cooperation and Development. Nosotros as well used data on EVs and charging stations from the U.S. Free energy Section, specifically the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy and its Culling Fuels Data Center. This dataset is updated oft; we accessed it on May 25, 2021.

Other sources included the Census Bureau, for data on vehicle registrations and information on electrical cars a century ago, and the Idaho National Laboratory for information on the past, present and possible future of electric cars.

Although the details can be a bit confusing, these days electric vehicles (EVs) come in 3 basic types. "All-electric vehicles," sometimes called "battery electric vehicles," run entirely on the electricity stored in their onboard bombardment packs. "Plug-in hybrid electrical vehicles" have a small internal-combustion engine along with the battery pack; should the batteries run down, the gasoline engine can take over. With both those types, users recharge the batteries by plugging their cars into special charging stations. The third type, "fuel cell electrical vehicles," has onboard fuel cells that generate electricity from compressed hydrogen to power the motor. Simply there are far fewer fuel cell vehicles than the other two varieties.

All of these are singled-out from "hybrid electrical vehicles," in which a relatively pocket-size electric motor supplements an internal combustion engine. This was a common setup in the first generation of mass-marketplace "electric cars," just because these cars don't have rechargeable batteries and their electric motors are too pocket-size to propel the car on their own, they're not generally counted as EVs today.

Merely the U.Southward. represents only about 17% of the world'south total stock of ten.2 one thousand thousand EVs, according to IEA information. People's republic of china has 44% of all the EVs in the globe (more than 4.5 million), and the nearly 3.2 million in Europe account for about 31%.

Electric vehicles make up large share of new car sales in Northern Europe

The fastest growth in EV sales has been in Europe: a chemical compound annual growth rate of 60% from 2016 to 2020, compared with increases of 36% in China and 17% in the U.S.

Electric vehicle registrations in the U.S.

Last yr, nearly iii-quarters of all cars sold in Norway and more than half of those sold in Iceland were electric – by far the highest market shares for EVs in whatsoever of the 31 countries for which IEA has collected data. In ten other European countries, between a tenth and a third of all new-machine sales terminal yr were electric.

By dissimilarity, sales take slowed in the U.S. in the by few years, largely due to the declining popularity of plug-in hybrids and the phaseout of federal tax credits on some of the nearly popular models. Last year, nearly 64,300 plug-in hybrids were sold, almost half equally many as in 2018, according to the IEA. Meanwhile, about 231,000 all-electrical vehicles were sold in 2020, downwardly 3.2% from 2018. In each of the past three years, EVs accounted for almost 2% of the U.South. new-car market. The COVID-19 pandemic may have affected vehicle sales of all types in 2020, making comparisons difficult.

California has by far the highest share of EVs of whatever U.S. state – which is to be expected, given that for decades the state has required carmakers to build EVs and has used an assortment of rebates and other incentives to encourage Californians to buy them. As of 2018, the near contempo year for which federal information is available, California had about 12 EV registrations per one,000 people; the next-highest land, Hawaii, had roughly half dozen registrations per 1,000 people.

To support all those EVs, California as well has led in building out networks of charging stations. Of the more than 42,000 publicly accessible charging stations in the U.S. as of May 25, 2021 (containing more than 102,000 individual outlets) across the U.S., well-nigh a third (xxx.8%) are in California, according to Pew Research Center's analysis of Energy Department data. For comparison, there are an estimated 145,000 to 150,000 gasoline retailers in the U.S.

Relative to the size of its vehicle armada, though, Washington, D.C., may exist the nearly convenient identify in the U.Due south. to drive an EV. The 237 charging stations in the federal district have a total of 630 outlets, or one for every 487 privately owned cars and trucks on D.C. roads. (Vermont and, yes, California place second and third; the national average is one outlet for every 2,570 individual and commercially owned cars and trucks.)

Electric vehicle charging outlets mostly concentrated in large U.S. cities

Nationwide, the number of publicly available charging stations has more than tripled since 2015, when there were fewer than 32,000 throughout the state, according to IEA data. The agency projects that number to grow dramatically past the terminate of the decade, to between 800,000 and 1.vii million, depending on which public policies are adopted. (President Joe Biden's infrastructure proposal includes a national network of 500,000 charging stations; in the Pew Inquiry Heart poll, 62% of Americans said they favored such a plan.)

Electric cars weren't always such a small percentage of the U.S. market. Over a century agone, while the auto business was still in the learner'south-permit stage, electricity competed fiercely with steam and gasoline to exist the new industry'south ascendant power source. In 1900, in fact, more than a third of all cars built in the U.S. were electric, according to a Census Bureau study from that fourth dimension. (True, that was 1,575 cars out of a full of iv,192, but however.)

Within a couple of decades, yet, several developments would lead to the dominance of the gas-powered internal-combustion engine. Amongst them were public desire for longer-range vehicles; electrical starters replacing cumbersome and chancy hand-cranks; lower gasoline prices; and assembly line mass production. By 1935, electrical vehicles had all but disappeared.