Electric Vehicle Sales Are Running Out of.....Gas?

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-vehicle-sales-20140903-story.html

Punny title aside, I wonder just how true this is. Tesla's Model X is coming out next year & Nissan Leaf 2.0 will follow that. The market may be slightly stagnant, but new models are coming out soon!

What do y'all think? I got this article off of GasBuddy.com, by the way.

Soviet said:

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-vehicle-sales-20140903-story.html

Punny title aside, I wonder just how true this is. Tesla's Model X is coming out next year & Nissan Leaf 2.0 will follow that. The market may be slightly stagnant, but new models are coming out soon!

What do y'all think? I got this article off of GasBuddy.com, by the way.

Click to expand...

Terrible headline, the editor should be fired.
They are looking at Hybrids plus all plugin cars.
PHEVs and EVs continue to grow in sales.
Hybrids have stagnated.

What a crap article:

LA Times said:

"The whole automobile market has grown," Caldwell said. "We’re not seeing electric vehicles as part of that growth."

The numbers are surprising, Caldwell said, to automobile forecasters. Five years ago, analysts thought that electric vehicle sales would continue to expand as more manufacturers put more electric vehicles on the road and as the vehicles' cost came down.

That hasn't happened. Electric vehicle sales have slowed while prices have come down and dealers have been offering increasingly better deals on financing and incentives.

"It isn't growing," Caldwell said. "It's stagnant and even slightly down."

Click to expand...

This clown reports that EV sales are not growing while they ARE growing. He seems to be confusing market share with sales. I wonder where he is coming from.

Did he mention LEAF, the #1 selling EV, had a record month for August 2014?
Who else had a record month?

This is the problem with mainstream press. They are not data based - this is where they were collectively beaten by someone like Nate Silver because he was data based.

If this "journalist" had made the minimal effort to look at the graph of sales - the results would have been different. But I should note it is the editor who writes the headline and not the journalist.

Interesting to compare this with Insideevs article ...

http://insideevs.com/bmw-nissan-ford-gm-set-records-pace-august-evs-sales-us-higher/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

BMW, Nissan, Ford, GM Set Records In August To Pace EV Sales Higher In US

August for plug-in sales in America was a month like no other, as 11 plug-in vehicles set new yearly highs during the month!

And it was a good thing too, as very strong year-over-year comps (August 2013-11,273) coupled with Tesla’s summer production shutdown/focus on Asia threatened to end what was 44 consecutive monthly sales increases for the US market.

Make that 45 in a row now!

Click to expand...

Zythryn said:

Soviet said:

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-vehicle-sales-20140903-story.html

Punny title aside, I wonder just how true this is. Tesla's Model X is coming out next year & Nissan Leaf 2.0 will follow that. The market may be slightly stagnant, but new models are coming out soon!

What do y'all think? I got this article off of GasBuddy.com, by the way.

Click to expand...

Terrible headline, the editor should be fired.
They are looking at Hybrids plus all plugin cars.
PHEVs and EVs continue to grow in sales.
Hybrids have stagnated.

Click to expand...

Seems to me the article and headline say exactly that, so I don't see what the complaints are based on.

"Sales of all electrified cars totaled 408,516 vehicles between January and August, down just a tick from the 408,694 vehicles sold during the same period last year.

"Of that total, the bigger percentage gain came in plug-in hybrids, which grew from 28,241 vehicles sold to 40,748. Battery-powered EVs -- with no gas engine at all -- also grew, from 29,917 vehicles sold to 40,349.

"But traditional hybrid sales fell from 350,530 vehicles from January to August last year to 327,418 during the same period in 2014."

Considering that just the Prius (an electric car) sells more cars per year in the U.S. than all PEVs combined (I think it sells more per year than total PEV sales to date, but haven't checked the numbers), the stagnation in HEV sales is noteworthy. As the article points out, PEV sales remain basically a rounding error of total LDV sales at this point.

Edit: This almost year-old article from Brad Berman at Plugincars.com seems useful:

http://www.plugincars.com/risks-using-hybrid-sales-forecast-growth-electric-cars-128566.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

GRA said:

Zythryn said:

Soviet said:

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-vehicle-sales-20140903-story.html

Punny title aside, I wonder just how true this is. Tesla's Model X is coming out next year & Nissan Leaf 2.0 will follow that. The market may be slightly stagnant, but new models are coming out soon!

What do y'all think? I got this article off of GasBuddy.com, by the way.

Click to expand...

Terrible headline, the editor should be fired.
They are looking at Hybrids plus all plugin cars.
PHEVs and EVs continue to grow in sales.
Hybrids have stagnated.

Click to expand...

Seems to me the article and headline say exactly that, so I don't see what the complaints are based on.

Click to expand...

My complaint is that their use of "Electrified cars" is meaningless at best, and more likely disingenuous. It's meaningless to lump them together. Hey, my Olds Delta88 had a 12V battery. Was it an "electrified car"? Give me a break.

I expect the term "electrified cars" was chosen for the sole reason of providing some type of plausible connection so that they could use Hybrid sales numbers to dump dirt on EVs. I see 2 pictures of Teslas and a link to a Gigafactory story. So why no pics traditional hybrids, which make up the lion's share of their "electrified cars" category?

William Hearst is having a chuckle, I'm sure.

GRA said:

Seems to me the article and headline say exactly that, so I don't see what the complaints are based on.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you did not notice that the article was edited about an hour after I posted. The title was changed (you can tell the original title from the web link) and the entire article was rewritten. None of the quotes in your post where in the original article. Instead, what you found was what I quoted in my post in the same portion of the article.

That's what all the complaints were about.

The article title makes no sense. The haters seem to be cornered at this point.

Smell the fear. It's only a matter of time.

When did Prius become an 'Electrified' car ?

When it suited them Prius's success was used in the past as a reason to explain why plugs are bad.

mkjayakumar said:

When did Prius become an 'Electrified' car ?

Click to expand...

From an engineering point of view of the drive train, it is. The drivetrain includes an electric motor and a battery. While it wouldn't be very sporty, to say the least, or have much useful range, you could remove the gasoline engine, put in a charge connection of some sort, and run it as an electric.

I've sometimes called a Prius a "quarter electric". Maybe "1/10 electric" is closer.

RegGuheert said:

GRA said:

Seems to me the article and headline say exactly that, so I don't see what the complaints are based on.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you did not notice that the article was edited about an hour after I posted. The title was changed (you can tell the original title from the web link) and the entire article was rewritten. None of the quotes in your post where in the original article. Instead, what you found was what I quoted in my post in the same portion of the article.

That's what all the complaints were about.

Click to expand...

No, I hadn't noticed that it had been edited, so good on you if your comments effected the changes.

mkjayakumar said:

When did Prius become an 'Electrified' car ?

Click to expand...

What part of HEV ("Hybrid Electric Vehicle") is causing you confusion? The Prius uses an electric motor (and sometimes the gas engine directly, IIUC), to propel itself, so it's an electric car.

mkjayakumar said:

When it suited them Prius's success was used in the past as a reason to explain why plugs are bad.

Click to expand...

Perhaps so, but not in this article (at least not as amended). Of course, at the time that any claims that 'plugs were bad' might have been made, batteries were far too expensive and limited to be useful for normal consumers.

"Sometimes uses the gas engine directly"

Sometimes? Are you confusing a Prius with PiP or a Volt?

I doubt the Prius can go 100 feet on a dry empty tank.

mkjayakumar said:

I doubt the Prius can go 100 feet on a dry empty tank.

Click to expand...

The current Prii are known to not start with an empty tank. (I've never tried emptying the tank in ours.)

Living in the mountains, however, it's not hard to fill the battery from regen when descending a few hundred feet from a nearby lake or ski area. With a full battery all of our driving in our neighborhood, including over a 100' hill, is easy to do on electricity alone as long as we don't accelerate too hard. Coming home on one 5.5 mile stretch of road with a net loss of 1000' and three short uphills, I can keep the engine off completely. Experiences like this helped get me hooked on electric driving and increased my desire to follow through with the LEAF reservation that I placed in 2010. Driving a hybrid is a compromise and will never be as nice as driving 100% electric, though it does go the distance on our road trips for now.

GRA said:

No, I hadn't noticed that it had been edited, so good on you if your comments effected the changes.

Click to expand...

My comments certainly didn't have an effect on the article, since I posted here. I was just pointing out that my comments were posted before the "update" which was an almost complete rewrite. You can find part of what I quoted as the big pull-out quote on the right, but really nothing remains in the article. And nothin you quoted was there at the beginning.

RegGuheert said:

GRA said:

No, I hadn't noticed that it had been edited, so good on you if your comments effected the changes.

Click to expand...

My comments certainly didn't have an effect on the article, since I posted here. I was just pointing out that my comments were posted before the "update" which was an almost complete rewrite. You can find part of what I quoted as the big pull-out quote on the right, but really nothing remains in the article. And nothin you quoted was there at the beginning.

Click to expand...

For whatever reason, the article was improved, so kudos to whoever inspired the changes.

GRA said:

For whatever reason, the article was improved, so kudos to whoever inspired the changes.

Click to expand...

After seeing this thread and the article early on, I posted a comment on the article, on the LA Times website as 'asbasile', questioning why the author lumped together EVs and hybrids while noting the LEAF's record August sales. I don't know if my comment made a difference, but it's nice to think that it could have. I have to commend Paul Scott for joining the fray later in the day and forcefully advocating for EVs.