Electric vehicles

IDTechEx is currently in Silicon Valley having spent over a week in Tokyo at EV clients and events. Both are a bellwether of what is really happening on the ground with EVs because they have a relatively large number of early adopters.

Old electric vehicle reports are useless: the subject is moving too fast. IDTechEx is the only analyst with 18 current reports forecasting sales of electric vehicles and their key components and they are kept up to date. Information is fed into these documents continuously as the PhD level IDTechEx analysts tour the world's companies, research institutes and conferences to spot the many changes in technology and business success and interpret them.

We have entered 2012 with an electric vehicle scene that is very different from that which was envisaged not long ago. There are now six key enabling technologies not three and vehicle makers increasingly make some of them, so suppliers increasingly have to compete with their largest potential customers. Precious metals in EV components are being removed remarkably rapidly.

Energy harvesting comes to the fore with electric vehicles because the price they pay for being environmental and exhibiting many performance advantages is that they have limited energy available.

Those designing electric vehicles have much in common, whether they are hybrid or pure electric, on-road, off-road, on-water, underwater or in the sky.

In understanding EV markets and trends it is absolutely vital to realise that their adoption is not usually for the popularly understood reasons such as saving the planet or getting a government subsidy.

Contrary to popular understanding, people have been making money out of electric vehicles for over 110 years. Unfortunately there have also been bankruptcies in the electric vehicle business in most of those years. The primary difference lies in market positioning not brilliant inventions, working long hours, automation of production, matching the size of your operation to the amount of business you can realistically gain - avoiding over and under-investment - and other aspects that come to mind. Those are sometimes important but always secondary. In market positioning, the two key factors are avoiding excessive competition, including rigged markets, and making what will be wanted in the years to come.

In this article we share some of our research for the new IDTechEx report, Electric Motors for Electric Vehicles 2012-2022.

Over the next decade, the most vibrant Wireless Power Transmission (WPT) markets will be the contactless charging of portable and mobile equipment, in particular consumer electronics and electric vehicles.

This year, the world's largest event on printed electronics, "printed Electronics USA" will reflect the widening government support for printed electronics. Beyond the burgeoning programs at universities and government research centers, this is particularly evident in military and electric vehicle work. The US Army reflects this in two presentations. One is an overview of materials printing capabilities and prototype development for US Army applications and the other concerns direct write approaches to nanoscale electronics.