Enlarge / Berlin, Germany - October 21, 2020: Electric vehicles on a public parking space on a street. (credit: Getty Images)
2020 actually wasn't a bad year in terms of global electric vehicle adoption. More than 3.2 million plug-in hybrid and battery EVs found new homes—a 43 percent increase year on year, despite the worst pandemic in several generations. Most of the credit belongs to Europe, where 1.4 million new EVs were sold, a tenth of all new light vehicle sales for the region and a 134 percent increase over 2019.
Unfortunately, things didn't look so great here in the US. Plug-in sales outperformed the overall car-buying slump, but depending on where you look, we're either up only four percent or down just over 10 percent last year.
The good news is that there's no mystery involved in boosting those numbers—we already know several ways to get people to switch to EVs. Europe's newfound fervor for EVs is being driven by the threat of massive fines for automakers whose fleets emit too much CO2. Policy levers don't have to be hitting sticks, though; there are efforts here in the US to extend the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs to cover the first 600,000 vehicles sold by an OEM, although that, of course, depends on congressional action.
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