The moving problem
What is stopping electric-vehicle growth now, and who can change it?
Electric-vehicle growth has been blocked by different things at different times. Expensive batteries, missing chargers, scarce cells, weak lease economics and slow grid connections each became the bottleneck in a different market.
What this covers. US and Chinese passenger-vehicle markets and US delivery fleets, roughly 2010 to 2026.
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The problem may appear in the car even when the solution lies elsewhere. The underlying cause tells you who can act.
For a household, the first task is to define the journeys the vehicle must complete.
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A household needs one vehicle to cover routine travel and the occasional journey that cannot be rearranged. Rated range alone does not answer that question.
The difficult journeys depend on public charging, a service carmakers had never provided.
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Charging became essential before any established industry was responsible for providing it across homes, cities and motorways.
While charging remained visible to drivers, carmakers encountered a different constraint in battery supply.
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The battery problem changed from high cost to scarce supply. Carmakers responded with long-term contracts, prepayments and equity investments to reserve volume.
When cell supply improved, US passenger sales encountered a constraint in the transaction itself.
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Vehicles remained available, but weak residual values, finance terms and changing tax support made purchases and leases harder to complete.
Delivery fleets faced a different operating job and a different constraint.
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A fleet could receive route-capable trucks before its depot received enough electrical capacity to charge them.
US passenger sales sometimes faced several constraints at once.
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Cell cost, platform investment and charging access could all slow US passenger sales. No reliable comparison shows which mattered most.
A constraint can stop being the main bottleneck without disappearing.
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A constraint can move, return in a new form, become routine or be solved for only one group of customers.
Do not keep solving yesterday's bottleneck. Ask what is failing now, why it is failing and who can change it.
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