Gary Zhou 
CATL, one of Tesla’s key battery suppliers, recently shared some bold estimates on the auto industry’s adoption of electric vehicles. According to a CATL executive, there will likely be no new internal combustion-powered cars on the market by 2030 or 2035 at the latest.
The comments were made by Ni Jun, CATL’s chief manufacturing officer, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland. “The trend is already happening,” the executive said.
The CATL executive’s comments are not to be disregarded. CATL, after all, has a front-row seat in the ongoing electric vehicle transition. Its supply deal with Tesla also gives the company a good view of the latest innovations happening in the EV industry. China plays a rather large part in this, as the country is the world’s largest electric car market.
China sold 3.5 million new energy vehicles in 2021, and the industry continued to grow in Q1 2022. The CATL executive noted that while car sales fell from January to April 2022 year-over-year, the production capacity of new energy vehicles has more than doubled. And so far, the demand for good electric vehicles definitely seems to be there.
Ni noted that from first quarter sales, China’s NEV penetration rate has effectively reached 20%. This will likely grow even more as China accelerates its aggressive adoption of electric vehicles.
It’s not just China, either. The European Commission proposed legislation last July that would ban the sale of ICE cars in the EU by 2023. In response to this initiative, Volkswagen has noted that it would stop producing vehicles with combustion engines by 2035. The European Parliament’s environment committee also expressed their support for the plan.
