Top Electric Car Predictions for 2022 by Scott Case, Inside EVs
It felt like 2021 was the year of the EV crossover. Tesla’s Model Y quietly dethroned its Model 3 sedan as the best-selling electric car in the U.S. Three new entrants jumped into the top five EV sellers: the VW ID.4, Ford Mustang Mach-E and the Chevy Bolt EUV. Perhaps it should not surprise us, because Americans love their crossover SUVs. But Americans love their pickup trucks more. I predict 2022 will be the year of the EV truck. Why? The top-selling vehicle model across 30 states in 2021 was the Ford F-Series, and the numbers we’re talking about are five times what the Model Y has done.
That makes the F-150 Lightning the most important EV introduction in history. This is a mainstream vehicle that will do more to establish—for better or worse—the reputation of EVs in the minds of most Americans. That includes my wife, who placed her pre-order for the F-150 Lightning months ago, after turning up her nose at every offering from Tesla to date. The Rivian R1T pickup truck and Tesla Cybertruck are interesting to watch as well, but they aren’t growing the EV buyer demographics and geographic reach in the same way as the F-150. This got me thinking about 2022 and what we should expect to see this year. To help us look to the future, I asked some of the smartest, savviest EV insiders I know to share their top predictions for 2022: Simona Onori is a Stanford University assistant professor of energy resources engineering and electrical engineering 18
Stacy Noblet is senior director of transportation electrification and a senior fellow with the Climate Center at ICF, a global consulting firm Sahas Katta is founder and CEO of Smartcar, a company that enables the integration of apps and services with connected electric cars. Esther Perman is head of product at Recurrent. Prior to this role, Perman co-founded a startup that focused on driving EV adoption and was on the founding team for Zillow Offers. Noblet’s Prediction: Used EVs Make Electric Mobility More Accessible One of the reasons EVs have not yet reached mainstream adoption at scale is because of the upfront costs associated with them. While EVs mean operational cost savings compared to fully gas-powered vehicles, the initial price tag is what gets most of a purchaser’s focus. Because of this, continued increase in EV adoption will rely on the second and third ownership market. In 2022, we’ll see more consumers seeking out used EVs, and EVs finding their way to more middle and low-income households. As supply chain issues persist, the availability of used EVs will help soften the impact of vehicle shortages and provide all of the benefits of new ones, but at a lower price point, making electrification more accessible for more consumers. Katta’s Prediction: Software and Connectivity Will Personalize the EV Experience EV owners are generally early adopters and ahead of the curve compared to other traditional vehicle owners. If you drive an EV, there’s a higher likelihood that you see the OEM app on your phone as an extension of the driving experience and you look for third-party apps to enhance it. Nearly all EVs shipped today offer connected services and, with 5G emerging, we’ll see faster connections and less latency. This makes it easier to enable more complex APIs to become available, opening the doors for developers to build even richer and more creative apps for cars and their drivers.
FEBRUARY 2022 AUTOBODY NEWS / autobodynews.com
Perman’s Prediction: New EV Shoppers Will Keep Demand for Leased and Used EVs High The next wave of new EV models adds more variety and options for early adopters, as well as the early majority. But for many of the “EV curious” shoppers, the perfect EV to match their lifestyle is still a year or two away. That won’t stop them from looking now, however; add in federal and state pricing incentives and increasing awareness of the environmental impact, and I predict shoppers—especially two-car households—will be willing to dip their toes into electric driving with leases and cheaper used models. Onori’s Prediction: LFP Bounces Back in a Big Way Major automotive players—Tesla, VW and Ford, both in the U.S. and China—will increasingly lean towards lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) for EV batteries, to replace the higher energy density nickel-cobalt-based counterparts (NCA and NMC). This will bring down prices
for the consumers and accelerate mass EV production worldwide. LFP is a dated technology invented in the 1990s with lower energy density than NMC or NCA, but 2022 will be the comeback year of LFP battery technology, as a push to reduce the amount of cobalt used in batteries—to decrease global reliance on supply from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and address human right issues related to child labor in mines. Reducing cobalt content could be done at the expense of higher nickel content, but that would be a recipe for thermal stability reduction and increased risk of explosion. LFP is cheaper, safer—higher thermal stability—cobalt-free, has less environmental impact, is fast-charge friendly and has a much longer useful lifetime. Drawback? Because of their lower energy density, they offer a slighter shorter range. In my opinion, a small price to pay to accelerate the race for sustainability! See Electric Car, Page 34
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