A number of automakers, including Ford Motor, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin, are scaling back or delaying their plans for manufacturing more electric vehicles. Even Tesla, which accounted for more than half of EV sales in America last year, has noted what could be a “notably lower” growth rate, CEO Elon Musk said in January.
Instead, automakers are returning to a making a variety of gas-powered vehicles, hybrids and fully electric cars, though the expectation of a all-electric future is still assume—just much more slowly than previously thought.
“What we saw in ’21 and ’22 was a temporary market spike where the demand for EVs really took off,” said Marin Gjaja, chief operating officer for Ford’s EV unit, during a recent interview with CNBC. “It’s still growing but not nearly at the rate we thought it might have in ’21, ’22.”
A record 1.2 million electric vehicles were sold last year, equaling 7.6% of the overall national market. This is expected to increase between 30% and 39% by the end of the 2020s.
