Electric vehicles could make up 15 to 35 percent of total new vehicle sales globally in 2040, according to IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions.
The findings are part of a new research project, Reinventing the Wheel, that will be conducted over the first half of 2017.
“The key question is whether we are approaching a transformative shift akin to the first decade of the 20th century, when the internal combustion engine, cheap gasoline, bicycle technology and mass production combined to usher in the automotive age,” said Dr. Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit.
He is chairman of the study who wrote about the beginning of the automotive age in his most recent book, The Quest. “Converging developments along multiple tracks are leading us to focus on this important question.”
While electric vehicles constitute a small percentage of the world’s vehicle sales and are just 1 percent of the on-road fleet today, sales in 2016 are up more than 1000 percent since 2010—a trend that IHS Markit expects to continue with the potential to make electric vehicles more than one-third of the new vehicle sales in 2040.