Musk: it takes 30 to 40 years for pure electric vehicles to replace all fuel vehicles

According to foreign media reports, at Tesla's shareholders' meeting in 2021, the company's CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) pointed out that it will take us decades to turn the world's vehicles into pure electric vehicles.

At present, there are about 2 billion cars in the world, of which pure electric vehicles account for less than 1 per cent. The number of cars in the world is so large that it takes a lot of time to replace traditional internal combustion engine cars with pure electric vehicles. Assuming that 100% of the new cars sold each year from now on are electric cars, with annual sales of 100 million, it will still take us 20 years from now to replace 2 billion internal combustion engine cars.

However, at present, pure electric vehicles account for less than 10% of global sales, so our current goal is to increase the market share of pure electric vehicles to 100%. So Musk believes it could take 30 to 40 years for cars around the world to be electrified.

Tesla is a company that produces only electric cars, while traditional car companies have not completely abandoned internal combustion engine cars, accounting for only about 10 per cent of their electric car sales. Some car companies say they will achieve 100% pure electrification by 2030, while others have set this goal around 2040.

To be clear, if we want to increase the market share of electric vehicles to 100%, we must reduce the price of pure electric vehicles to a low enough level so that consumers in some less developed countries can afford it. On the other hand, the speed of electrification can also be accelerated by automated driving. If new automated electric vehicles can be shared instead of buying cars, the number of cars around the world will also be reduced.

In the past decade, we have experienced a lithium-ion power revolution, and we will fight for it for decades in the future. At the same time, electrification will spread on a large scale in other areas, such as communication, aircraft and energy.