E&E News detailed the U.S.'s EV boom, quoting Ryan Gallentine on how automakers are adapting to the market. Read snippets below and the full article here.

Electric vehicle sales are booming in the U.S., with purchases nearly doubling over a year ago.

That trend is chipping away at the long-held narrative that drivers aren’t ready for electric cars, and it’s leading some analysts to recalibrate their predictions.

“We used to have a lot of very definitive forecasts,” said Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power, a global consumer intelligence company based in Michigan. “We’ve had to kind of blow those up because the rate of adoption is going much quicker.”

Last year, electric vehicles accounted for about 2 percent of all car sales. This summer, that number jumped to nearly 5 percent of light-duty vehicles like SUVs and sedans and more than 20 percent of all passenger vehicles sales, according to recent data (Climatewire, Sept. 24).

However, higher adoption rates of EVs could stall without stronger federal and state policies, advocates warn, hampering President Biden’s goal of decarbonizing the sector by midcentury. Still, the recent uptick in sales is notable, stemming, in part, from a proliferation of vehicle models across manufacturers, increased consumer awareness and government support.

“EV sales are pretty much going gangbusters,” said Ryan Gallentine, a policy director at Advanced Energy Economy. “You see automakers moving to start building EV-only assembly plants and announcing these new battery manufacturing facilities — to me that says they’re betting their business on EVs.”...

Tucked inside the reconciliation bill is a provision that would offer a $7,500 EV tax credit. An additional $4,500 incentive would be available for union-made EVs assembled in the U.S., while the infrastructure package includes funding for EV charging stations...

The road ahead for both pieces of legislation is riddled with obstacles. And even if the tax incentives survive unscathed, funding allocation and execution could pose additional hurdles, said Gallentine of AEE.

“We have a bunch of members who do physical goods distribution who want to electrify their fleet, and in a lot of states they just don’t have the framework to be able to do that,” he said. “So we’re starting to talk to state regulators and legislators about, ‘Do you guys have a plan for how you might spend this money; do you have programs in place to move this infrastructure money out the door quickly?’”

Read the full article here.