Significant advacements have been made over the past few years in electric car technology. Tesla already has multiple models that provide a range of more than 250 miles on a single charge, it has also deployed Superchargers that charge up its cars much more quickly and enable owners to take longer trips. Despite that all the efforts being made from traditional manufacturers, OPEC is still of the view that 94 percent of all cars will rely upon fossil fuels come 2040.
OPEC or the Organization Of Petroleum Exporting Countries has issued its annual World Oil Outlook report in which it predicts that electric cars will only make up a mere 1 percent of the global car market by the year 2040.
It has a much more favorable outlook of hybrids, which it essentially considers to be powered by fossil fuels since hybrids have internal combustion engines, estimating that they will account for 14 percent of the market by then.
“Without a technology breakthrough, battery electric vehicles are not expected to gain significant market share in the foreseeable future,” OPEC says, while predicting a similar fate for natural gas and hydrogen powered vehicles.
It expects oil demand to grow considerably over the next 25 years due to emerging mobility markets which include China and India, where owning a car is as much a status symbol as it is a mode of transportation.
Can the OPEC be taken at its word though? It does have an inherent interest in ensuring that demand for fossil fuels powered cars does not fall, and even if electric cars can’t rival their counterparts right now, given the rate of advancement one can expect the situation to be much different by 2040.
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