37 million plug-in electric vehicles on roads by 2025, claims report

As prices for electric vehicles continue to fall and availability of charging stations improve, we could have as many as 68 million electric and hybrid vehicles around the world by 2025, with more than half of those being plug-in vehicles. Much of this will be driven by reduction in production costs for batteries used in their designs.

With Tesla's Gigafactory(s) expected to come online fully in the next few years, there are expectations of big drops in the manufacturing costs of the lithium-ion cells which power many of today's electric and hybrid vehicles. As prices for those vehicles fall in turn, Navigant Research's report believes we'll see an explosion of these sorts of vehicles in the consumer market.

As of September last year, there were less than 2.5 million plug-in electric vehicles around the world. That is cars that are powered entirely by electricity. Those numbers are set to explode by 2025, the report claims, suggesting we could have as many as 37 million of these sorts of fully electric vehicles around the world by then.

Tesla's Model 3 could go a long way to making EVs mainstream

Based on recent-ish (2014) numbers, there are around 1.3 billion cars on the roads around the world, so that sort of figure would represent around 2.8 per cent of the total number of cars on the road. That's far better than today, but considering the number of global cars will likely grow by 2025, that's still not too substantial a figure.

What is more substantial is the total of electric and hybrid cars, which includes those that are predominantly electric. Those figures suggest that we could have nearly 70 million by 2025.

Navigant believes that a big part of this increase will come from the growth in interest in long-range plug-in electric vehicles. It cites Tesla's Model 3 as having as many as 400,000 pre-orders at the time of the report's writing. It's expected that the proliferation of cars like the Model 3, could help make electric vehicles far more of a mainstream phenomenon than they are currently.

That will be required to drive the growth that Navigant predicts.

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KitGuru Says: I know not all of you are fans of autonomous vehicles, but how do you feel about electric ones? I'd love a Tesla Model 3, but even that is a little out of my price range until we get a few years beyond launch and there are some second hand models kicking around. 

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