EViF white paper: Dramatically divergent forecasts for US BEV sales in 2024

How many new BEVs will US customers buy in in 2024? It's a pretty key question for a large array of stakeholders on the global automotive industry.

If you believe a December forecast from consultancy S&P Global Mobility, BEVs will take a market share of 13.2pc of an overall US market of 15.9mn sales. that equates to 2.1mn in all-electric units.

And that's a hefty 88pc jump from the almost 1,116,000 BEVs that the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory recorded as sold in 2003 — albeit S&P record it is a slightly more subdued 66.4pc year-on-year increase.

Getting from les than 1.2mn to 2.1mn in sales would represent a transformative year for the US market. Leaving aside 2021's outlier when BEV sales rebounded after the pandemic (and even that was not much higher than 88pc at 92.6pc), the US would not have seen a bigger year-on-year percentage jump higher since 2018.

But that was going from c,100,000 to c.200,000. The jump that S&P sees is ten times that magnitude.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some other forecasts are less bullish. What is more striking, though, is by just how much.

Consultancy Bloomberg NEF (BNEF) takes an almost entirely contradictory view. It has revised down its forecast of US BEV sales this to just 1.2mn. That is 900k less than S&P.

That would be annual growth of 9pc, not almost 90pc. And the BNEF analysts, having a slightly lower 15.8mn view of the overall US market in 2024, have produced a number that would see BEV market penetration advance only from a 7.2pc to a 7.6pc slice of the pie.

Who is right? Well, yet another consultancy, Cox Automotive, goes somewhere in the middle of the two, at 10pc market penetration.

The EV inFocus view:

— examines on a granular the US BEV sales trends we have seen historically and in 2023 in particular

— considers the factors put forward by the forecasters to support their very different views of the world

— looks at what industry figures like Elon Musk and Jim Farley are saying

— and, in particular considers what the announcement of reduced F-150 Lightning production might be telling us on whether the bears or bulls are most credible.

Download our free white paper to read the analysis in full.