electric vehicles

Chart of the Week: A Bumpy Road Ahead for Electric Cars

IMFBlog2019-03-13T15:17:55-04:00August 13, 2018|

August 13, 2018

Versions in عربي, 中文, Español, Français, 日本語, Português, Русский

Electric car charging station in Berlin, Germany: prices for lithium and cobalt—key ingredients in rechargeable batteries—are rising due limited supply and growing demand for electric cars (photo: Jens Kalaene/Newscom)

The surge in demand for electric cars has been fueled in part by the falling costs of lithium-ion batteries—driven by technological progress—which power everything from electric cars to smartphones. […]

Chart of the Week: Top 5 Charts

IMFBlog2019-03-13T15:56:44-04:00July 25, 2018|

By IMFBlog

July 25, 2018

People wait while their electric cars charge, in Xiamen, China (photo: Zhang Guojun/Newscom)

Rank has its privileges, the saying goes. This week our editors pull rank and pick their favorite charts from our Chart of the Week series. […]

End of the Oil Age: Not Whether But When

IMFBlog2019-03-15T16:17:00-04:00September 12, 2017|

By Reda Cherif, Fuad Hasanov, and Aasim M. Husain

September 12, 2017

Versions in ربي (Arabic), 中文 (Chinese), Español (Spanish), Français (French), 日本語 (Japanese), Русский (Russian)

Filling up at a gas station in California: demand for oil could plummet with the rise of renewable energy (Xinhua/Newscom)

A transportation revolution is underway that could completely transform the oil market in the coming decades. […]

Chart of the Week: Electric Takeover in Transportation

IMFBlog2019-03-25T11:07:57-04:00July 31, 2017|

By IMFBlog

July 31, 2017

An electric car recharges at a meter in London: The UK is the latest country to announce plans to end fossil fuel vehicle sales by 2040 (photo: Sasha Fox Walters/iStock by Getty Images)

The switch from horses to automobiles in the 20^th century paved the way for the rise of oil-based transportation and energy use. Today, electric vehicle ownership is picking up speed. Greater affordability of electric vehicles will likely steer us away from our current sources of energy for transportation, and toward more environmentally friendly technology. And that can happen sooner than you think.

Our Chart of the Week from a recent IMF working paper shows that the transition away from motor vehicles could happen in the next 10 to 25 years, based on parallel shifts in the 20^th century. Patterns observed in the early days of the horse-car transition closely resemble present-day electric vehicle adoption rates. Between 2011 and 2015, the average annual growth rate of electric vehicle ownership was 120 percent. This is, in […]