It’s amazing how technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate, across a multitude of industries and market sectors. This is reflected by the evolution of high-tech concepts such as electric cars and virtual reality, which are now becoming mainstays of the consumer and in the case of the latter driving a marketplace worth $6.4 billion. 

These technologies have had to overcome major hurdles since their inception, particularly electric cars. In this post, we’ll look at how these challenges were ultimately mastered and ask what this means for the future? 

Battery Power and the Human Mind – The Challenges Facing the Adoption of Electric Cars

One of the primary challenges facing electric cars was its source of power, with primitive, lithium-ion batteries renowned for being time-consuming to charge and incapable of holding large quantities of power. Because firms wanted to lead the burgeoning market for electric cars, however, they were forced to adopt this battery technology without really enabling users to leverage its true potential.

These primitive batteries are also large and heavy, meaning that only a restricted number can be installed in any given car. Take the Tesla Model S, for example, which used to boast a battery pack that was two metres long and 1.2 metres wide. This offered a typical range of 300 miles (or 482 kilometres), at which point a sustained period of charging would be required to continue a journey and complete a return trip.

When aligned with a lack of charging points, this created a significant obstacle for the technology to overcome. The industry has managed this, however, with Ovo Energy revealing that electric cars now accounted for a record 4.2% of all new vehicle registrations. The brand also claimed that 90% of all vehicles in the UK will be electric by 2050, with lithium-ion battery technology having already been streamlined and alternative options also entering the marketplace.

What About Human Scepticism?

Another challenging facing the technology was the human mind, which is designed to be suspicious of new concepts and often unwilling to embrace change. This issue is not universal to electric cars, of course, and over time people have warmed to this notion as the underlying technology has improved and awareness has been raised concerning the state of the environment.

This is why electric cars will come to dominate the automotive marketplace over the course of the next 30 years or so, with some publications even claiming that petrol and diesel vehicles could become obsolete by the year 2040.