YouTube auto personality and mechanic Scotty Kilmer has predicted that Teslas and other electric vehicles will drastically drop in price going forward into 2020.
The work of Tesla and other manufacturers in the electric car market have only seen their products become more common in the last few years, but Kilmer says even though they’re more readily available, you can’t force people to buy them.
With oil and gas becoming more expensive in recent years, some may have presumed more people would switch over to the less expensive option in electric cars, although Kilmer said many still seem to prefer spending money on good old gasoline-powered vehicles instead.
Sales of electric vehicles in China, where most of them are produced, were down 77% in the last 8 months, according to Kilmer.
“Now this is before the Coronavirus stuff,” the YouTuber clarified. “You can force someone to make something [electric cars], but you cannot force people to buy it.”
The Coronavirus’s potential effect on the price of oil is another problem electric cars may have to contend with, as it may actually fall in due course, on top of being an untested technology when compared to gas cars as well.
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“If oil is cheap, if gas is cheap, that’s even less of an incentive for people to go out and get electric cars,” the 66-year-old continued. “There’s less incentive for people to switch to an electric technology that really hasn’t proven itself.”
Teslas, and the likes, have also been mainstream for much less time than their gas-powered counterparts, which can make them less convenient to operate as well.
“There’s less infrastructure for it, takes too much time to charge the vehicles,” Kilmer pointed out. “Takes you two minutes to fill it up with gas, might take you 20 hours to charge up your electric battery.”
Top Gear star James May even said he had the same issue with electric cars, that they take too long to charge and it doesn’t last long enough, in a recent video, but whether or not the market for this type of product changes drastically as Kilmer seems to be suggesting remains to be seen.
If you hear all the potential problems facing electric vehicles and still decide you want one though, 2020 could turn out to be the year to pick one up.