Second energy crisis in five years breaks resistance to electric cars

Electric car sales have surged in Europe's main markets since spring, and manufacturers cannot keep up. "Brands do not have stock to meet demand," analyst Luis Valdés told EL PAÍS, with traditional carmakers still filling orders from March and April, when demand began to spike. Behind the queues sits the world's second energy crisis in less than five years — the first triggered by the war in Ukraine, the second by the war in the Middle East.

The bill is what moved consumers. The European Union spent more than €300 billion on oil and gas last year, and Jan Rosenow of the University of Oxford calculates that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz alone added another €50 billion to it. Pump prices spiked across the continent. The European Commission estimates electrification would reduce the burden by up to €260 billion by 2040.

The registration numbers trace where the money is going. In the Nordic countries, cars running on gasoline and diesel are already marginal. In Portugal and Belgium, one in two new cars is fully electric; in France and Germany, one in three. Spain trails the major markets with 400,000 electric cars on its roads. Outside the garage, renewable installations rose 15.5 percent worldwide last year — a record — and global electricity storage is set to double this year.

The purchase-price argument has also flipped. For years electric cars competed on total lifetime cost, with pump savings offsetting the higher sticker price for high-mileage drivers. In Europe, purchase costs of electric and combustion models are now virtually the same; in China, comparable electric cars are already cheaper than their gasoline counterparts. The biggest remaining burden, the battery, is falling in cost.

Oil producers read the same numbers. Bruce Douglas of the Global Renewables Alliance cites a 16 percent year-on-year drop in Chinese oil demand for transport — partly from driving less, partly a structural shift to electric — and calls it "the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era," a decline he expects to be gradual rather than sudden.

The chief executive of TotalEnergies, one of the world's largest oil companies, called the past six months of electric vehicle sales "spectacular" and named truck electrification as the next revolution.