The 4.6% you mention is not only small but also not useful here as it includes hybrids as well, not just pure EVs. Remove the hybrids and the number of pure EVs plummets

Let's face it, pure EV adoption is a lot slower than we'd like to and lying to ourselves about it doesn't help.

Hybrids are a gateway. I view them as in the same category as pure EVs, only "earlier technology". I own a hybrid, and I'm 90% sure my next car will be pure EV (3 years from now). I don't know any hybrid owner planning to ditch the electric motor on the next purchase, and know several planning to ditch the combustion engine on the next car.

Yes, I agree with your point but this doesn't address your previous argument that a 4.6% market share in 2019 of hybrids and EVs combined out of which maybe 2% pure EV will result in a market dominance of pure EVs in 5 to 8 years. Such an exponential growth is no way possible in such a short time no matter how much you love EVs.

Hybrids are easy to justify buying as you don't depend on charging infrastructure or lack thereof but once you switch to pure EV that becomes your bottleneck which rules out drivers who don't have chargers available at their home or at work or who want to drive long distances on vacations with family or who don't have too much money to spend on a car.

I do not entirely disagree with you, I just don't have your certainty of the outcome. Predicting non-linear curves is next to impossible. A tiny movement in the beginning of the curve produces wildly different results. What I stated is different: 5-8 years for the market flipping towards EVs is _plausible_.

In other words, I can't prove with certainty that the market will flip, but I wouldn't bet on the contrary.

Is there reason to expect exponential growth? Seems a bit doubtful to me. What was the YoY increase for other recent years? With linear growth, you'd be looking at 37 years with these growth rates and start point.

It caps out at 100%, so of course it's not going to be exponential growth. It is likely to be a logistic curve though, and we are still in the roughly exponential leftmost portion of it. Once there's mid-double-digit market penetration it's going to slow down a lot to roughly linear, then eventually, asymptotic.

Yes, that's more what I'm picturing. That asymptotic phase makes 5-8 years seem unlikely unless a legal obstacle is introduced.

several battery breakthroughs that will dump the cost way bellow the holy grail of car batteries of $100/kwh that makes them on pair with ICE cars. Some estimates predict that they will go way bellow $80 in 2021-22, Means end of 2022 beginning of 2023 will be flooded with even cheaper comparing to Model 3 cars with better quality batteries. Good quality $25-30k electric car will be a new reality. Those segments attack bestsellers like Toyota Camry etc... I'm pretty sure the price war will push them even lower within 1-2 years. Means full line of EV's from very cheap to luxury by 2024-25 on a scale from multiple companies. As a result we will have cars on the market that cost the same, perform better, and cheaper in a lifetime from service and fuel perspective. Millennials and GenZ also very eco-friendly, which means younger people are eager to buy EV's. The only delay could be new battery terra-factories rollout lag. That might give an extra 1-3 years lifetime for ICE. After that the traditional car market will be shaking as never before.

great read on this topic - https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b.... As usual, more nuanced than I naively thought. "Put simply, something that looks like a future breakthrough today might end up simply being another point on the curve, by the time it is developed and engineered into a viable product and brought to market in a decade’s time."

It has held at exponential growth for ~5 years. It can't be exponential, it has to be a sigmoid, but I'd expect similar growth rates for a few years more.