(ANTIMEDIA) — On May 5, Anti-Media reported on a recent study that predicts gas-powered car ownership will plummet 80 percent by the year 2030. The reason for this, researchers laid out in detail, is the rise of electric vehicles. From that study:
“We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transportation in history. But there is nothing magical about it. This is driven by the economics.”
Two weeks later, Anti-Media again reported on the study, as it took analysts a bit of time to truly grasp the profundity of what researchers were saying. Once they did, however, the explosiveness of the data took hold. Consider this opening paragraph from a May 14 article by The Telegraph:
“No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.”
In the study, titled “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030,” researchers make the case that the market for electric vehicles (EVs) is simply growing too fast — and for good reason. EVs are cheaper to produce, require almost zero maintenance, and can now outperform their fossil fuel-based counterparts.
A primary obstacle to the development of the EV industry has been a lack of infrastructure. But it may not be an obstacle for much longer.
Chargepoint, the company that maintains the largest network of EV charging stations on the planet, published a press release Thursday announcing it had just secured $43 million in funding from Siemens, a corporation Chargepoint calls a “global powerhouse in electrical engineering and electronics.”
The funding comes in addition to money provided by other investors with a stake in the game and brings the total for this latest round of Chargepoint’s financing to $125 million. Further demonstrating Siemen’s confidence in the field of EVs, the corporation also revealed in the release that the CEO of its Energy Management Division is joining Chargepoint’s board of directors.
And that’s not all. In an article titled “Car-charging company is on a tear, buying GE stations, securing investments,” Ars Technica reported Thursday that Chargepoint just purchased all of General Electric’s EV charging stations. That acquisition brings the total number of the company’s independently owned spots to over 36,000.
All of this points to rapidly growing confidence in the market for electric vehicles. As a taste of what EV infrastructure could one day look like, last year Chargepoint completed work on two corridors — one from Boston to Washington, D.C., the other from San Diego to Portland. Charging stations on the routes were spaced 75 miles apart.
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