At the start of the year, executives at electric carmaker Polestar drew up ambitious sales plans for the UK. Within weeks, they had to tear them up.
Demand was rising so quickly that the new targets were a third higher. Today the Volvo-backed company runs around 1,000 test drives a month in the UK alone. Each week, new spaces are booked up within an hour of becoming available.
Until four years ago, Polestar specialised in tuning high performance combustion engines: now it has been transformed into one of the companies trying to tap the booming demand for battery cars. “This isn’t the niche market it was two or three years ago,” says Polestar’s UK boss Jonathan Goodman.
This extraordinary surge in demand is being felt right across the world, from Shanghai to Stuttgart, Tokyo to Toronto, and from new brands to the established giants of the industry.
FT series: the EV revolution
Features in this series will include: Part 1 Why the revolution is finally here part 2 How green is your EV? Part 3 Will Americans ever buy electric vehicles? Part 4 Batteries and China’s bid to dominate
It is particularly acute in Europe. One in 12 cars sold across the continent between April and June this year ran on batteries alone. If hybrid models that use both an engine and a battery are counted, this rises to one in three. Sales of electric cars in Europe have jumped from 198,000 in 2018 to an expected 1.17m this year.
Electric vehicles still only make up about 1 per cent of the global fleet of passenger cars, but sales are taking off rapidly. Within four years, one quarter of new cars bought in China and nearly 40 per cent of those purchased in Germany are expected to be electric, according to BloombergNEF. Global sales of EVs are forecast to reach 10.7m by 2025 and then 28.2m by 2030.
Until recently for many drivers, electric vehicles seemed a subject for the future: but now it is commonplace to imagine their next car being electric.