My grandfather was quite intrigued with those horseless carriages. Here he is, with a big grin on his face, testing out a Model T back in 1913.
A few years earlier, Henry Ford had debuted his Detroit assembly line and began cranking out Model Ts – the world’s first mass-produced automobile. The rest is history.
Then, a hundred years later in 2010, Nissan (OTCPK:NSANY) became the first company to mass-produce EVs (cars powered only by electricity), the Nissan Leaf. Motortrend at the time noted that the Leaf “could be the most significant vehicle of the century.”
Red Tesla Model S (Image: T. Larkum)
Did the 2010 Leaf and does today’s Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Model 3 indeed herald a transportation revolution into EVs, much as Henry Ford’s Model T did into “horseless carriages” a century earlier?
Well, EV sales have soared from practically nothing in 2010 to an estimated 1.6 million in 2018 and are up 68% over 2017.
The surge in EV sales (growing 50-100% each year now) is primarily due to better and more affordable batteries and today virtually every major automaker plans on introducing electric cars, if they haven’t already, both hybrids and EVs.
Read more: Seeking Alpha