What's the reason it needs to go up so much?

In my opinion, electric car production needs to seriously increase in order to meet our carbon targets.

There's a couple of reasons to that:

- Some cars like the leaf have Vehicle to Grid technology allowing the car to essentially become a trading machine, buy when cheap, sell when expensive. This massively helps the spread of renewable as you can let your car plugged and make money. Buy when production of solar is big (low price), sell at peak time.

- Car batteries are exceeding expectations in terms of lifetimes, which means even when the car is dead, or if the battery has been upgraded (like it's possible on the Renault Zoe and BMW i3) you can basically stack the old car batteries in a container and again, store and trade energy on the grid

So it really goes together with renewable, especially the ones that are less stable over time like solar or wind. The earlier the productions increases, the earlier the second market can be created for the batteries.

It's also worth noting that it's apparently cheaper to recycle a battery than mine the minerals, which leaves hope for large scale battery recycling.

There'll be ten times as many electric cars on the road? Less than 1% of the cars sold last year in the US were plug in / fully electric.