Alternative vehicles are always in the news, yet data shows that they are a very small part of the overall transportation market as a whole.  Often described as “sexy” for headline grabbing, alternative cars are statistically nothing more than a marketing toy.  That is changing, but only slowly.

In 2008, the transportation sector consumed 27.92 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) of energy in the U.S.  Petroleum products (gasoline, diesel, not including natural gas) accounted for nearly 95% of those BTUs.  Combined, electricity and natural gas accounted for not even 3% of the total.

The good news is that petroleum is slowly losing share.  The bad news is that it’s slow.  In 2005, petroleum was 97% of transportation’s energy share.

Even better news is that once you look beyond North America, there are more and more fuel alternatives in the main stream.  Natural gas is the most common and accounts for only about 110,000 vehicles in the U.S.  In Pakistan, however, the number is just over 2 million and in Argentina it’s about 1.75 million plus almost that many in Brazil.

Since 2000, the largest growth markets in natural gas vehicles (NGVs) have been Asia-Pacific, soaring from near-zero to almost 6,000,000 NGVs on the road – most of those in the past four years.  Alternative vehicles in Latin America have also jumped, though not as dramatically, from just under a million vehicles to 4,000,000.  Europe is slower to adopt, but still well ahead of the U.S. with a few hundred thousand on the road in 2000 jumping to about 1.2 million in 2009.

The global NGV market has grown by over 20% per annum since 2000, with Asia fueling most of that growth.

Electrics are harder to measure, since the majority of the all electric cars on the roads are home-built units that likely aren’t licensed as being electric vehicles (EVs).  Nearly every factory-built electric vehicle that’s license-able (meaning not a scooter or low-speed vehicle) is a hybrid, whose adoption has increased dramatically in the past decade.

Most hybrids on the road are in North America with Asia not far behind.  The adoption of hybrids in the U.S. went from less than 10,000 in 2000 to 1.6 million vehicles in 2009.

While these growth figures for NGVs and HEVs seem big, they are tiny in comparison to overall vehicle numbers.  For instance, compare the 290,271 hybrid vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2009 with the 10,400,000 vehicles sold overall in the U.S. that year.   Hybrids account for only 2.79% of vehicles in 2009.

The good news is that adoption numbers for alternative cars are growing quickly.  Although they account for only a tiny sliver of the vehicle market as a whole, alternative vehicles are definitely coming on strong.  Automakers are seeing this and fueling it with more and more fuel alternatives in their models.  The future of transportation is changing right in front of us!

*All statistics from Wikipedia.org.

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