Canada among new countries to pass crucial tipping point that triggers mass EV adoption

financialpost.com:

Convincing everyone to adopt a new technology can be a slog at first. The humble microwave oven, for example, took two decades of lukewarm sales to reach just a tenth of U.S. households. But then came the 1980s, and quicker than you could say “Hot Pockets,” microwaves had spread to nearly every kitchen.

That fast part of the technology adoption curve is happening now with electric vehicles, according to a Bloomberg Green analysis of adoption rates around the world. When we first completed this analysis a year ago, 19 countries had passed what’s become a critical EV tipping point: five per cent of new car sales powered only by electricity. This threshold signals the start of mass adoption, when technological preferences rapidly flip. Since then, five more countries have made the leap.

The newcomers — Canada, Australia, Spain, Thailand and Hungary — join a cohort that also includes the U.S., China and most of Western Europe. The trajectory laid out by these early adopters shows how EVs can surge from five per cent to 25 per cent of new cars in just four years.

Most successful new technologies — televisions, mobile phones, LED lightbulbs — follow an S-shaped adoption curve. Sales move at a crawl in the early-adopter phase, then quickly once things go mainstream. In the case of fully electric vehicles, five per cent seems to be the inflection point. The time it takes to get to that level varies widely by country, but once the universal challenges of car costs, charger availability and driver skepticism are solved for the few, the masses soon follow.

In the U.S., the EV tipping point didn’t arrive until late 2021 — relatively late for a country with its spending power. There were reasons for that delay. Americans spend more