One million EVs sold in US, and half of them in California

Californians have reached a major cumulative milestone in the shift to electric cars, crossing the half a million mark for numbers of electric vehicles sold in the state.

This represents nearly half of all EV sales in the country which reached the 1 million mark last month, and has been the result of soaring EV sales in 2018 – in fact, a third of all electric cars across the country were bought in the last 12 months.

In California, over 150,000 out of the total 500,000 electric cars were bought in 2018, with almost a third of those – 44,000  – bought in November 2018 alone, an increase of 164 per cent from the same time the previous year.

“Reaching 500,000 electric vehicles in California is yet another indicator that the future of transportation is electric,” said Veloz board chair David Hochschild in statement.

“And that future is approaching faster than ever,” he says, adding that he believes that at this rate California alone will reach 5 million EVs by 2030.

The figures have been gathered by electric car advocacy group Veloz against a backdrop of terrible air quality reports for the west coast state.

Despite its booming electric car market, California has still seen an unacceptable number of high ozone days in 70 per cent of counties according to the American Lung Assocations’ State of the Air scorecard.

The numbers, which have been steadily increasing throughout 2018, are encouraging but also not surprising considering there are now 43 electric car models available in California – the most popular of which is undoubtedly the Tesla Model 3, now ranked fifth most popular model of all cars, both ICE and EV, in the US.

Josh Boone, executive director of Veloz says this is only the beginning, and Veloz intend to continue their campaign “Electric for All” with a view to continuing the rapid uptake.

“Air pollution negatively impacts the health of all. That is why we need ‘Electric For All’,” he said in a statement.

Other shifts in the US electric car landscape also echo the case for continued uptake of electric vehicles.

American auto giant General Motors signalled a major shift towards electric mobility last month, backing down from a push against the US government to ease up on fuel efficiency standards and deciding to slash jobs, close factories and cut costs in order to streamline development and production of new electric car models.

With the competition welcomed – and even encouraged – by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an electric transport future is more or less now written in stone.