From Macquarie:
Electric car sales are booming and will soon enjoy a large market share. This will soon have major implications, negative and positive, for a whole range of commodities. Such is the received view, although our analysis of monthly sales data, which we have compiled for all of the major markets, suggests that while growth has been very strong so far this year full-year growth might ease off into year-end. In this note we look at global sales developments and summarise commodity market implications.
In the last few years electric vehicles (EV)1 , for long the stuff of science fiction, have seen near spectacular sales growth. In 2015 China, North America, Japan and Europe, where the vast majority of such cars are purchased, bought 664k such vehicles, more than double 2014’s 320k. In 2016 between January and October we estimate YoY growth was another 48%. If that growth rate is maintained for the rest of the year, as shown by the dotted red line in Fig 1, total EV sales in 2016 will be just shy of 1m vehicles.
