The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) recently released a report on EV sales around the world. It’s a fascinating document with some intriguing insights. Were you aware that over one million electric passenger vehicles were sold around the world in 2017, that China led the way with over 579,000, and that most sales of such vehicles to date have taken place in China, Europe, Japan, and the United States?
Some of the cities with the highest passenger EV sales were Beijing, Shanghai, London, Paris, Tokyo and Kyoto, Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Chongqing, and Shenzhen. The top 25 cities each had 20,000 EV sales or more in 2017.
Of these cities, the world leader was Shanghai with 162,000 electric vehicle sales since 2011. Beijing had 147,000 and Los Angeles 143,000, so Shanghai was far ahead of both. For 2017, Shanghai had nearly 66,000 passenger EV sales.
Over 1.3 million electric vehicle sales have taken place in the top 25 cities for EVs, which have also been called the electric vehicle “capitals” by the ICCT.
Forty percent of the world’s public charging capacity is located in these cities, according to the document. Beijing and Shanghai have the largest number of public EV chargers, with 39,000 and 35,000 respectively. It has been estimated that Beijing could have 435,000 by 2020 and Shanghai’s total could reach 210,000 by the same year.
American cities lag far behind. According to ChargeHub, Los Angeles has 1,200 to 1,300 and San Francisco has 790.
China also excels in electric bus use, with about 385,000 of them, or over 99% of the global inventory according to the report. The city of Shenzhen has 16,000 electric buses, which is its whole fleet.
Amsterdam has 100 articulated electric buses and wants to transition the entire fleet to 100% electricity. Shenzhen has 13,000 battery electric taxis and wants to replace the existing 7,500 gas taxis with electric ones by the end of 2018.
The ICCT document contains 15 pages of information, so there is much more than what is mentioned here, but these insights were some that jumped out immediately.
