4.7M Charging Points On the Road by 2015

As electric vehicles become more and more part of our daily lives, several research institutes try to give us a better idea on how the world will look like in the near future, based on current evolutions and trends.

According to a study by Pike Research, the infrastructure required to operate electric vehicles will evolve greatly in the years to come, reaching as many as 4.7 million charge points installed worldwide from now and until the year 2015 (down from the original prediction of 5 million charging points). In parallel, there will be around 3.1 million EVs on the road by the same year.

“The success of hybrid vehicles in the 2000s gave drivers a taste for propulsion by electric power and governments around the world are now highly focused on creating the charging infrastructure to support the arrival of EVs in significant numbers,” senior analyst John Gartner said in a statement.

Pike Research took advantage of the new study to say that the appetite humanity has developed all of a sudden for electric vehicles will spun increasing competition on the EV charging equipment sector. Only in 2009 and 2010, several companies have joined the battle: AeroVironment, Better Place, Coulomb, ECOtality, GE, Panasonic, Samsung, and Siemens.

“The economics of selling a few kilowatt hours per charge are very challenging, and as such we anticipate that public charging station deployments will be driven mainly by government initiatives over the next several years,” added Gartner.