Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about in these terms, and learned about in Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World: we are witnessing peak ICE. Sales of cars with internal combustion engines peaked in 2017. That’s highlighted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who track such things in their annual Electric Vehicle Outlook.
As the graph shows, sales of electric vehicles have boomed in the last five years. Electric cars are a bigger segment of overall sales each year, meaning the highest year for petrol and diesel car sales is now behind us.
The graph above includes plug-in hybrids, so the phase out of fossil fuels isn’t happening quite as fast as it looks there. Nevertheless, other trends will follow the sales peak. Demand for petrol and diesel for transport will also peak and begin to decline. Trailing the sales peak by a few years will be the peak in the number of ICE cars on the world’s roads. So this statistical moment is a forerunner of a much wider transformation.
It might not feel like it where you are. After all, half of the world’s electric cars are in China, and it is the boom in Chinese EV sales that underlies this global trend. But the change is coming. As affordability, range and charging infrastructure all improve, petrol and diesel cars will fall further and further behind in the rear view mirror.
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