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Lazy Journalism and EVs

operationroot rant

Why the constant talk obsession with small EV market share is idiotic.

We have seen a year full of articles pointing out that EVs sales are rising but that at the same time EVs only represent a tiny percentage of the over all fleet. Journalists then usually conclude from this that the demand for EVs is unproven, because of these small sales numbers.

However, this type of reasoning is circular and ignores one important fact. EVs have generally been selling out their allocated quotas in every market they were offered. EV makers have simply been unable to meet demand. The sales figures represent the result of flawed capacity planning on the supply side and ignore the waiting lists that likely suggest a substantial miss-match with the demand side.

While it is true that nobody really can say for certain how large the total market potential for EVs will turn out to be, be it 25% or 100%, we are seeing sales growth at the rate of supply growth and then some... hence the waiting lists. Thus drawing any conclusions about future EV sales potential based on said capacity constrained sales figures is not only intellectually lazy but flat out deceptive.

If you want to speculate about the market potential of EVs, look at any other meaningful metric but please stop referring to those sales numbers.

END OF RANT