TTAC is no stranger to the topic of Peak Oil, but the theory has fallen by the wayside with the recent explosion in unconventional oil and gas. A study by the British think tank Chatham House argues that the biggest issue facing oil and gas producers in the coming century isn’t Peak Oil, but Peak Demand (summary here).

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Of all the persistent questions faced by the auto industry in these tumultuous times, perhaps the most pressing is: how many consumers would actually consider buying an electric car? There’s no single answer to this question, but we do have one new perspective on it today, courtesy of a study by Deloitte [PDF] which analyzed potential EV demand around the world through some 13,000 survey respondents. The major takeaway?

The reality is that when consumers actual expectations for range, charge time, and purchase price (in every country around the world included in this study) are compared to the actual market offerings available today, no more than 2 to 4 percent of the population in any country would have their expectations met today based on a data analysis of all 13,000 individual responses to the survey.

That assessment is well in line with other studies we’ve seen, most of which estimate global EV demand at somewhere between one and five percent of the market. But because potential EV demand has a lot of moving parts, from government regulations to the state of EV technology, there’s more to the study than that conclusion alone…

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U.S. auto sales will probably come in lower than 13 million this year, Ford’s CFO  Lewis Booth told Bloomberg. That’s below the low end of Ford’s estimate. (Read More…)

Carmageddon? What carmageddon?

Germany’s auto industry has a huge problem: Way too many customers. “We have that fattest order books of all times,” said Esther Bahne of Audi to Germany’s Spiegel magazine. Result: Customers have to wait months for their cars. Sometimes longer than ever before, says Der Spiegel. (Read More…)