The view may sound like "the check's in the mail" response to many who purchased the first wave of electric only cars.
Boulder, Colo.-based Pike Research projects that by 2017 "more than 1.5 million locations to charge vehicles will be available in the United States, with a total of nearly 7.7 million locations worldwide."
About a third will be home-charging units.
Pike Research President Clint Wheelock and senior analyst John Gartner say electric vehicles are coming. "It is only a question of how many plug-in electric vehicles that tap into the grid for power will be driving alongside their internal combustion engine counterparts," they write.
While the electric and hybrid market remain less than 2 percent of new vehicle sales, numbers are expected to increase steadily. Going-electric.org says the most pessimistic forecasts predict that sales of electric cars, including plug-in hybrids and fuel cell vehicles, will reach 3 percent of all new cars while the most optimistic show the market segment growing to about 15 percent.
The site did predict that sometime during the next decade EV and hybrid sales "will rapidly rise to a near 100 percent." For more on the topic, go to this previous post.
Pike says the Asia Pacific region will lead charging-equipment sales. It attributes the prediction to strong government incentives and directives in China, Japan and Korea followed by increasing private sector investment.
Configurations of for-profit stations weren't discussed in the study's free executive summary, but Pike says the business model will evolve and grow as operators create new services. It also says prices for charging systems will drop by more than a third in the next six years.
Photo: Courtesy Pike Research.