General Motors Sold Over 200,000 EVs In 2020
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General Motors wants to be part of the fight against climate change by “putting everyone in an electric vehicle,” over the course of the coming years. While the automaker still has a long way to go to achieve that vision, its EV sales are slowly ramping up, with the American automaker selling over 200,000 EVs globally last year.
According to GM’s 2020 Sustainability Report, the automaker sold a total of 202,488 electric vehicles in 2020. The vast majority of these EV sales were in China, unsurprisingly, as the country has expansive EV charging infrastructure, good government support for the adoption of EVs and relatively strong consumer sentiment.
The HongGuang Mini EV was the best-selling EV in General Motors’ portfolio last year, with the automaker’s Chinese joint venture selling 117,599 examples of the battery-powered city car. The Chevy Bolt EV was a distant second with 26,552 sales.
The Baojun E100 and E200, small electric city cars that are similar to the HongGuang Mini EV, were third and fourth overall with sales of 20,571 units and 14,359 units, respectively, followed by the Buick Velite 6 in fifth with sales of 9,034 units.
It’s worth noting that automakers count the sales of electrified vehicles as EV sales, so this annual sales figure also takes into account plug-in vehicles like the Buick Velite 6 PHEV and Cadillac CT6 Plug-In. That said, General Motors is shying away from hybrids in favor of pure EVs, so its 2020 plug-in sales were paltry compared to pure EV sales. Pure electric models represented 98.8 percent of its EV sales last year, while plug-ins made up just 1.2 percent. This is a big change from 2018, when 47 percent of the automaker’s EV sales were plug-ins.
General Motors is poised to grow its EV sales in 2021, with the automaker set to launch several new EVs in North America and abroad in the coming months. These include the 2022 Chevy Bolt EV and 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV, GMC Hummer EV pickup and Cadillac Lyriq crossover.
“As we add new EVs to our portfolio, GM has the advantage of a family of brands with vehicles across segments and price points,” the automaker said in its sustainability report. “We also have the benefit of scale, which will help us continue to bring battery manufacturing costs down. But getting everyone in an EV is about more than price. As part of the global vehicle development process, our portfolio planning team listens to customers to understand their needs in terms of vehicle size, body style, range and more.”
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Encouraging news. I look forward to GM selling millions of EVs per year by 2025.
Do the pants and sweater come with it?
Fight against climate change, mostly bull, but maybe if it does help ever so slightly, what about the impact of mining lithium and disposing of it once the batteries are depleted? First, electricity has to come from somewhere, and right now chances are it is coming from coal or natural gas fired plants. Not to mention all of the charging stations out in the sparsely populated desert areas that use diesel generators. So let’s just assume that electrical energy does edge out pollution from internal combustion vehicles, what about the environmental impact of mining all of the lithium required to produce these vehicles. Not to mention, so far we only know of enough lithium sources to source about a fourth of the need to go completely EV. We are assuming that we will be able to find enough to possibly supply about 3/4 of the demand worldwide, so where are you even going to get enough Lithium to build these vehicles. Then what happens when you have used up all of the available lithium to possibly reach a 75% saturation, and those vehicles need new batteries? Of course that brings up the next question, what will you do with the used lithium batteries? I have heard of plans to recycle them into other less demanding power sources, but every time these batteries get recycled, a portion of the lithium will have to be disposed of. Where are you planning to do that? Finally, the one blaring question that it seems not a single person has even thought of… You EV folks are so hellbent on banning internal combustion engines and going full EV within a relatively short period of time. We haven’t even figured out how to keep the electrical grid operational when it gets hot and everyone turns on their A/C at the same time in LA, how do you plan to provide enough electrical energy when everyone gets home at 5:30Pm and plugs in their EV for it’s required overnight charge so they can get to work in the morning? A/C draws around 7K watts at startup then around 4-5K watts to keep it running, A typical EV charger will require an average of 7.2K watts continuously during the charge cycle. If we can’t supply enough electrical energy to supply everyone with the required 5K watts to run their A/C how are we ever going to supply everyone with an ADDITIONAL 7.2K watts to charge their EV? There isn’t enough land in the entire US to install enough solar panels to charge an entire population of EVs.
You touch on some reasonable topics, but blow them out of proportion. Like, not everyone has A/C (I’d say <10% do in LA (and this is location dependent of course)) and you don't need to charge an EV every night, so just out of normal odds, not everyone will be charging every night. Elec companies will drive people to charge later in the evening through time of use plans, etc.
Then, do some more research into the amount of lithium there is and will be and the fact that as science progresses Lithium may not even be the material used in future batteries, or much less may be needed, etc. And look for more info on solar power, you may be surprised on how strong the sun is.
There will be needs for power at night (no solar, of course) so there will be grids of batteries, hydro, geo-thermal, nuclear, and there will be other ways.
Those LA people are using AC all night?