By Ron Lamberty, chief advertising and marketing officer, American Coalition for Ethanol | March 03, 2022
In the event you’re a retail station proprietor who watched this yr’s Tremendous Bowl, someplace between the fifth and seventh electrical automobile business, you’ll have damaged out in a chilly sweat, questioning why you haven’t observed all these automobiles and vans and the way you’re going to pay for the gear you’ll have to “refuel” the autos of the longer term – since they look like quickly turning into the autos of the current.
In the event you went to do some analysis considering you didn’t perceive the advertisements appropriately, you may need wound up on the U.S. Division of Power’s web site, the place you might discover chart 1, exhibiting gross sales of all of the various kinds of electrical autos (EVs) from 1999 to 2020. Your search would additionally flip up loads of articles touting 2021 as the perfect yr ever for plug-in electrical car gross sales, growing 80 % over 2020!
The highest pink line on chart 1, which represents complete new car gross sales, might have been sufficient to ship you over the sting. Good Lord, look how tall all these blue, inexperienced, and yellow bars are! They’re virtually touching the pink line. How did you not see all these electrical autos out on the highway?
Come to consider it, why haven’t you seen them? The place the hell are they…? The pandemic made it robust to find out what quantity is “regular” anymore, but when that many individuals have been shopping for that many EVs, no less than just a few of your prospects would have stopped by to ask whenever you’re placing in a charging station, wouldn’t they?
You haven’t missed something. A better take a look at chart 1 reveals the bars and pink line are being weighed on very totally different scales. EVs are measured within the 1000’s, and that complete gross sales pink line goes by thousands and thousands. Placing them on the identical scale appears like chart 2: The blue, inexperienced, and yellow bars are nonetheless there, you simply may need to faucet your display screen a pair occasions to make them large enough to see.
That’s to not say EVs aren’t going to be THE automobiles of the longer term. However there’s clearly an effort to make everybody imagine that future is now. However the 80 % improve in all-electric automobiles and light-weight vans final yr was 435,000 autos — in a 15.5 million car market. The EV class additionally consists of hybrids and plug-in hybrids, which make up over 85 % of the full EV fleet, and importantly, nonetheless use fuel (though we’d prefer to see them use E85).
The excellent news is you have got time to resolve the way you and your station are going to handle the low carbon gasoline future, and the higher information is you have already got a lot of the gear you could supply decrease carbon gasoline like E15, and with some comparatively cheap upgrades, you might supply E85, which gives as low or decrease complete lifecycle greenhouse fuel emissions than almost each all-electric car on the highway at this time.
Possibly the perfect information is the U.S. Division of Agriculture will quickly have one other $100 million in matching grants retailers can apply for in the event that they need to improve fueling gear to promote ethanol blends above 10 %. Preserve your eye on flexfuelforward.com, and we could have the data on the right way to apply as quickly as it’s accessible.