On the 1st of December 2019, The first case of Covid 19 was discovered in Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, a province in China. Within three months it had spread to virtually every corner of the globe. How did it spread that fast? The answer is the “S-curve”. The S-curve is a mathematical function that describes processes that start off relatively slowly but after reaching some critical point begin to accelerate greatly. The graph below depicts the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid 19 in Scotland:
Source: Joint UNIversity Pandemic and Epidemic Response (JUNIPER) modelling consortium UK
Please note that the graph depicted above is a projection, not the actual spread. It was made when Omicron made up less than 2% of the cases in Scotland. The actual spread would later be shown to match this projection.
Formally speaking, the S-curve is known in mathematics as the “Logistic Growth Function”. The Logistic Growth Function has many applications. It is heavily used in demography and ecology for modeling population growth; it is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the design of Neural Networks (Neural Networks are AI software applications modeled after the human brain); it is used in psychology for the construction of scholastic achievement tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) taken by American students planning to enter university, and also tests for determining personality types that all those fancy companies like to use to determine whether you will be a good fit; it is used in medicine for modeling the growth of cancerous tumors, in linguistics for modeling how languages change over time (Who would have thought that you could apply mathematics to english??); in agriculture for modeling crop response to change in growth factors, and it can be used to model….technology adoption. The following graph shows the adoption patterns of those technologies that have done the most to shape modern life:
I cannot at this time, explain why the S-curve applies to the spread to disease epidemics like Covid and all those other applications but I can explain its applicability to technology adoption. Technology adopters can be divided into two groups; innovators and imitators [1]. The innovators are those that make their purchase decisions independently while the imitators make their purchase decisions only after interacting with previous buyers. The critical point where relatively fast adoption begins, is that point where imitators begin to buy.
Now, information that I recently came across, suggest that electric car adoption in the major car markets of the US, Europe and China (particularly China), have recently reached that critical point, the critical point being, according to Bloomberg analysis, 5% of new car sales. For a number of European countries and China (possibly as high as 26% in China), the figures have crossed 10% [2]. The US, Europe and China together constitute roughly two-thirds of the global car market.
So has China reached the tipping point? Take a look at this graph:
While I feel that it is still too early to say, looking at the graph, it sure does look like it. According to the graph, Electric Vehicles (EV) accounted for 26% of all cars sales in China in the first quarter of 2022, up from 3.5% in the first quarter of 2020. While it is noted that the figure includes hybrids, it has also been noted by industry watchers that China mostly skipped the hybrid phase and went straight to fully electric. Here is another one:
Now this graph makes for scary reading. Not just from China, from everywhere. In the first half of 2022, the sale of EVs in China grew by 113% compared to the first half of 2021, despite the fact that the overall car market shrank by 1.9%. Now the figures for Europe may not look too impressive, sales just grew by 9%, but you have to take note of the fact that the overall car market shrank by a whopping 15.2%. The scary factor ramps up again when you look at North America. EV sales grew by an impressive 49% while the overall car market shrank by 16.8%. That’s just mind boggling. Perhaps the scariest of all, In the rest of the world, EV sales grew by 77% while the overall car market shrank by 6.2% over the same period. Why I said that perhaps, the growth in the rest of the world is the scariest is because some time back, I read a newspaper article where Nigerian government officials felt that the growth projection for EVs in the West was too “futuristic”, and that even if true, that they will sell their oil to other countries [3]. If we can trust this data (The source is the Financial Times of London), I can’t help wondering “Sell to who exactly?”. I realize oil has other uses than fueling cars, but 90% of vehicular fuel needs are met by oil [4], so in the event of EVs going mainstream, the loss of revenue is bound to be substantial. I will readily concede that even if we have truly entered the stage of the rapid growth of the S-curve, it will still take at least, a couple of decades for EVs to go mainstream.
However, it doesn’t take EVs fully going mainstream for us to experience serious pain, the global oil glut of 2014-2015 should have taught us that. The oil glut was caused by production of shale oil by the US and Canada reaching critical volumes, slowing growth in China and hence a fall in demand for commodities across board and perhaps most importantly, restraint of long-term demand as global environmental policy promotes fuel efficiency and steers an increasing share of energy consumption away from fossil fuels [5]. The uptake of EVs definitely keys into that.
There is a potential outcome in the long-term, that is even more worrisome for me but before I get into that, I need to explain what car companies are doing to their production systems. Most car companies have plans to go fully electric or substantially electric between 2030 and 2040. If you want the details check out my book Why Africa is not Rick like America and Europe. To hit those targets, they are retooling their factories and reconfiguring their supply-chains to optimize for EV production [6]. The more they do this, the less they can produce petrol cars. It is not far-fetched to think that even we might be forced to buy EVs before we are ready (Unless you are optimistic that we will solve our electricity grid problems in 20 years). Given that most of the cars purchased in Nigeria are second-hand, the car companies have absolutely no incentive to keep producing petrol cars for us since none of the proceeds for second-hand sales goes to them. Practically speaking, from their point of view, the car market in Nigeria does not exist. I don’t know if by then the likes of Innoson might be able to ramp up production to meet demand. Of course petrol cars will still be in circulation a good while after that but at some point they must run out. So while our government officials talk about selling oil to other countries, we might be in the embarrassing situation of not being able to sell our oil to ourselves. Let me make clear that this is only a plausible conjectured scenario, not inevitability and only plausible in the long term.
I hope this makes clear that the lack of industrialization is our biggest problem. This is because non-industrial countries like ours are simply not in control of their own economies. It is possible that something could stall the growth of EVs. One could be not enough lithium deposits to make lithium-ion car batteries but there are potential long term alternatives, some are sodium-ion, lithium-sulphur [7], calcium-ion, and graphene (carbon) [8]. There could be problems with the sourcing of other metals like cobalt, nickel required for electric car production and for other uses in general. It is too early to say how the EV industry will fix all these supply-chain problems.
I wrote this piece not just to enlighten people about the emerging EV trend but more importantly, to show how science can be used to make sense of the world around us. The regularities that science uncovers in nature and in society if harnessed properly, can be used to make the world a better place for you and for me…How did I go from Covid 19 and electric cars to singing Michael Jackson??
BEFORE YOU GO: Please I would like to ask that you share this article with as many people as possible. Thanks and God bless…and by the way, Happy New Year!!
References
- Rohit Tripathi. June 2021 ‘Spread of infectious diseases, consumer goods adoption, and technology S curves’ www.the-future-of-commerce.com: https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2018/07/27/s-curves/
- Bloomberg Updated 10 July 2022 “US crosses the electric car tipping point for mass adoption”, auto.hindustantimes.com https://auto.hindustantimes.com/auto/news/us-crosses-the-electric-car-tipping-point-for-mass-adoption-41657428685389.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic+optin&utm_campaign=awareness&utm_content=20220715+econ+nl&mkt_tok=MTA3LUZNUy0wNzAAAAGFoA9Wozi5WhGTX_QQCtztHQlsrhh1ZUc8BGZ8u7FZFBVCueKgBoQ8AlSFYS9fArqovrUK–gWU7EuetBc3GPTLzD-oRenk69HKl3OsbkcR4Ih
- Kingsley Jeremiah. June 2021 ‘FG adamant on fossil fuels despite $13tr projected global losses’ guardian.ng: https://bit.ly/3irn8HA
- Petroleum article on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
- 2010s oil glut on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_oil_glut
- Bloomberg Updated 10 July 2022 “US crosses the electric car tipping point for mass adoption”, auto.hindustantimes.com https://auto.hindustantimes.com/auto/news/us-crosses-the-electric-car-tipping-point-for-mass-adoption-41657428685389.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic+optin&utm_campaign=awareness&utm_content=20220715+econ+nl&mkt_tok=MTA3LUZNUy0wNzAAAAGFoA9Wozi5WhGTX_QQCtztHQlsrhh1ZUc8BGZ8u7FZFBVCueKgBoQ8AlSFYS9fArqovrUK–gWU7EuetBc3GPTLzD-oRenk69HKl3OsbkcR4Ih
- James Scoltock 21 Sept 2022 “The Big Battery Challenge: 3 potential alternatives to Lithium” imeche.org https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/the-big-battery-challenge-3-potential-alternatives-to-lithium-ion
- Claudia Alemany Castilla 14 Oct 2022 “Calcium may make a better battery than Lithium” engineeringforchange.com https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/calcium-may-make-better-battery-lithium/
