Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if a perfect battery was introduced tomorrow it would still take at least 10 years before it made a serious dent in the car market. The Prius was introduced in the US in 2000 and it took about 11 years for them to sell the first million.[1] The vast majority of people don't buy a brand new car more than once or twice in their life. They simply don't have the money. The rest of the people buy a car used and drive…
> The vast majority of people don't buy a brand new car more than once or twice in their life. The adage has been that "Americans buy, on average, a new car or truck every 3 or 4 years."[1] That's like a dozen new cars in a lifetime. I was going to call bravo sierra on your assertion, but I decided to try a back-of-the-envelope calculation to check the plausibility: Roughly 10 million cars are sold each year in the U…
I think the numbers are heavily skewed by people who do buy those new cars every few years.
Also, I think the car rental companies - who would have massive annual turnover of vehicles - further skews the average[1]. The top 4 companies have ~2M vehicles and if they never have a car more than 3 years old (probably more like 2 years), then they buy ~700k/year or 7% of that 10M in annual new car sales.
1 - http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/07/13/surprising-...