SOLVED: How Big Is The EV Market, Really?

We usually start our conversations with the premise that the market for electric vehicles is about 75% of all passenger vehicles today. Of course that is limited to first world, fully developed countries like Canada, the US, Germany, Australia and England. As technologies improve in the coming decades, like having readily available hydrogen (yes, hydrogen vehicles are EV’s), that number will likely increase to 90%.

However, we also think the road to 75% will be a bumpy one once we get past about 25% market share. At this point all of the fanboys, the easily persuaded, and those that previously didn’t really understand why EV’s are better and cheaper than ICE vehicles, will have already purchased them.

So the question we have is how big is the EV market really?

How Big Will The EV Market Be in 2030?

We know that:

1. More and more employers and commercial building owners in which people work, will make EV chargers available to all
2. New apartment and condo developers providing shared parking are providing some access to EV chargers
3. Most existing employers, commercial buildings, apartments, and parking lots do not have any meaningful charging facilities in place today or serious plans to add them at scale in the next 5 years

Those that can best use EV’s are those who can easily charge at home. So we can provide a rough calculation of how many people live in single family homes( with garages, carports or private driveways) where they would have easy access to at least a 110 Volt standard outlet they could use to charge overnight.

Here are some representative first world countries and the percentage of their population that live in single family homes:

To keep the calculations simple, we use those numbers without any weighting, we get an average of 63%.

Now lets figure out how many of those would be well suited to the Electric Vehicles as they exist today (average 250 Mile / 400 Kilometer range, and not appropriate for towing long distances). We were not able to find reliable statistics for this in enough countries to make a determination, so we will rely on anecdotal evidence and claim that 80% of passenger vehicles on the road today are not used for long distance drives or substantial towing.

So it turns out that our premise of 75% is wrong. We now think that the total EV market before the year 2030 is about 50% of all passenger vehicles in developed countries.

How Big is The EV Market Today?

The most appropriate target market for electric vehicles in 2024 are those who have ready access to charging and need a second vehicle or already have one. In the United States about 75% of households have “access to” two or more vehicles, but we know that only about 63% of the population live in single family homes and we guess that about 80% of those do not tow or drive long distances regularly, so that gets us back to about 37.8% (75% x 63% x 80%). If we add in those with only one vehicle (about 25% of US market), short drives and easy access to chargers outside of the home, we can guess that the total addressable market for EV’s in 2024 is about 45%.