Moving past the early market: How to get battery electric vehicles to the mainstream

It usually takes time for new technologies to gain widespread acceptance. According to Everett M. Rogers’ Technology Adoption Life Cycle model, new technologies follow a five-stage diffusion path that starts with tech-savvy, often more wealthy “innovators” and ends with “laggards.” We saw this with radios, cable TV, and personal computers, and now we’re seeing it with battery electric vehicles (BEVs).

Between the consumers in the early market who embrace innovations quickly and those who hesitate lies a “chasm” that Geoffrey Moore identified as the most critical point for the successful diffusion of new technologies. In Europe now, the adoption of BEVs is right around the chasm, and that’s why the key enabling policies we’ll discuss below are so critical.

We’ll start with a bit of context. In Europe, the total number of BEVs registered in the first half of 2024 was just over 954,000, a 1.6% increase compared with the same period in 2023. (Here Europe covers the 27 European Union [EU] Member States, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.) The EU-27 alone had 1.3% growth rate in the first half of 2024 compared with the first half of 2023. The BEV share of all cars registered in Europe reached 13.9% in the first half of 2024, almost the same as the 14.2% in the first half of 2023 (in the EU-27 alone it was 12.5% for first half 2024 versus 12.9% for first half of 2023).

Still, the BEV share of all new registrations decreased in 16 out of our 31 European countries from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024. Of the three largest European passenger car markets by new registrations, Germany’s BEV share decreased by 3 percentage points, France’s increased by almost 2 percentage points, and in the United Kingdom, it increased slightly by half a percentage point. Malta, Denmark, and Belgium saw the largest increases in new registration shares, by 15, 14, and 8 percentage points, respectively, in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023.

Because the European markets are developing at different rates, some skepticism about the future of BEVs has emerged in media coverage in various regions, including Germany and the United Kingdom. We’ve seen such reactions to other innovations in the past, though. So, let’s use the Rogers model to put today’s BEV trends into perspective.

We’ll use full-year figures for 2023 to avoid the influence of any potential seasonal peaks. In the Technology Adoption Life Cycle model, market uptake follows a predictable pattern called an S-curve, as shown in Figure 1. The early market—innovators and early adopters—comprises about 16% of targeted consumers compared with the other 84% of the market.

We looked at the adoption of BEVs through this same lens in a 2016 ICCT report. Fast forward to 2023, and we see that China is leading among large markets with a 24% share for BEVs among new car registrations. That means that BEVs in China are reaching many of the early majority consumers in the mainstream market; the same is true in the State of California in the United States. Europe’s BEV share is at almost 16%, approaching the mainstream, and the United States overall has an 8% sales share, which means BEVs are still being purchased only by early adopters. However, in some regional markets in the United States and Canada, including Washington, D.C. and Québec, BEVs are moving toward the mainstream, and in Washington state and British Columbia the market crossed the chasm in 2023.