[ad_1]
If you see someone drive out of a new car dealership in the Bay Area, there’s about a one-in-four chance they’re in an electric vehicle.
Nearly 27% of new cars registered in the nine-county Bay Area in the first half of 2022 were zero-emissions vehicles, according to county vehicle registration data from the California Energy Commission. The vast majority of those vehicles were fully electric, though some were plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
Within the Bay Area, there’s a great deal of variation among counties. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties more than 30% of new vehicles were zero emissions. Marin and Alameda were both just under 30%. San Francisco came in at 26% and Contra Costa at 22%. Those six counties round out the top of the list of zero-emissions new car sales by county in California. In Solano, Napa and Sonoma counties, less than 20% of new cars were zero emissions.
In San Francisco, 3,871 zero-emissions vehicles were sold in the first half of the year. Of these, 2,351, or 60%, were Teslas. The remainder were fairly evenly distributed among other carmakers. The second most popular carmaker is Volvo with 222 new zero-emissions vehicles registered in San Francisco, the majority of which were plug-in hybrids. The most popular fully electric model in The City not made by Tesla is the Polestar 2, which sold 86 cars in the first half of the year.
Electric vehicle adoption in the Bay Area is considerably above the rest of California and the United States. Statewide, just over 16% of new vehicles were zero emissions in the first half of 2022. In Los Angeles and San Diego counties, zero-emissions vehicles accounted for 16% of new car sales. In the Central Valley’s Kern County, home to Bakersfield, 6% of new vehicles were zero emissions. And in remote Modoc County in the northeast corner of the state, no new zero-emissions cars were registered.
A recent Bloomberg analysis found that just over 5% of new vehicles nationwide were electric in the first quarter of 2022. That’s significant, the analysis found, because the 5% “signals the start of mass EV adoption, the period when technological preferences rapidly flip.” If the United States follows the “adoption curve” of peer counties, a quarter of new vehicle sales are expected to be electric by the end of 2025.
In the United Kingdom and China, 16% of new car sales are currently electric. In Norway, the country with the highest share of electric vehicles, a whopping 83% of new car sales are electric.
California and the Bay Area have a long way to go, but we’re well on our way.
This article has been updated with accurate figures for the percent of zero emissions new vehicles in the Bay Area and California.
[ad_2]
Source link