IF articles

Summary - Research on electric cars, whose first exemplars were built at the end of the 19th century, has never completely ceased during the last century, and it received a significant boost since the early ‘80s, when electric car was seen as a means to mitigate the problem of air pollution in urban areas. However the growth rate over time of the proportion of sales of electric cars to the total volume of car sales in Europe still remains very low. Thus the question arises whether the electric car will continue to play a marginal role in the car market, or whether the data collected so far belong to the first stretch of the S shaped curve of the diffusion of innovations, and they will then be followed by a leap in the proportion of sales. In order to answer this question, this paper presents a dynamic model of competition between two types of cars, one traditional and the other innovative, which has been applied to the study of the evolution over time of the proportion of sales of electric cars in Europe, using the data collected between 2011 and 2019. The study has shown that these data belong to an evolution process that has the S shape of the diffusion of innovations. Thus, if the characteristics of the process will remain unchanged in the next future, it is to be expected that the data collected so far will be followed by a leap in the proportion of sales, and electric car will tend to take a remarkable position in the car market.