Liam Denning, Columnist

For Electric Cars, Focus on the Small Picture

Raw sales numbers are tiny, but growth is astronomical.

August 30, 2018 at 3:50 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Let’s get small.
Photographer: George Freston/Hulton Archive

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Electric vehicles, prized for their acceleration, are speeding up. Bloomberg NEF estimates the global electric vehicle market will this week pass the milestone of 4 million sold to date, according to a report published on Thursday. Having taken about five years to get to the first million, the last million were sold in about six months.

Four million vehicles sold in the space of about seven and a half years doesn’t sound like a lot; mainly because it isn’t: Light-vehicle sales worldwide totaled almost 590 million in that time.