Soaring EV Sales Leave Chargers Playing Catch-UP

US consumers are finally gravitating to electric vehicles. Now it’s up to charging infrastructure to keep pace. EV sales made up about 7 percent of all new light vehicle sales last year, according to data released by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents the auto industry. That’s up from 4.3 percent in 2021 and 2.3 percent in 2020. Light truck sales accounted for 68 percent of the EV market in the last quarter of 2022.

Adoption is far from being evenly distributed across geographies. California accounted for more than 20 percent of EV sales in 2022 – and had the largest year-over-year increase at 7.2 percent.

The District of Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and Nevada round out the top five places where EVs accounted for more than 10 percent of market share last year. By contrast, EV sales accounted for less than 2 percent of their state’s market share last year in Wyoming, South Dakota, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Dakota.

Despite the positive trends, the report highlighted two significant barriers to wide scale adoption:

Cost: Year-over-year prices for EVs rose more than $5,000 from the end of 2021 while the average cost of all new light vehicles rose about $2,400. While volatile gas prices helped boost demand for EVs, availability and costs of key battery-making critical minerals impacted EV prices, cutting the other way. Available U.S. Public Charging at the End of 2022 | Source: Alliance for Automotive Innovation, Get Connected Electric Vehicle Quarterly Report

Charging infrastructure: The 103,582 public charging ports currently available in the U.S. aren’t enough to meet demand, AAI says. (And technical snafus are a concern surrounding the chargers that are open to the public, as David Ferris reported for POLITICO’s E&E News last week. A study last year found that almost 23 percent of public fast chargers in the San Francisco Bay Area had “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures or broken connectors.”)

The AAI report cites a California Energy Commission conclusion that the country should strive for a ratio of 7 EVs per public charger. At the end of 2022, that ratio stood at 29 EVs per charger. Geographic disparities exist here, too. Nearly 30 percent of all charging infrastructure is in California. Of the more than 3,100 counties in the U.S., more than 60 percent had five or fewer chargers, and 39 percent had none.