Evolution (regardless of field) is always a step by step process. A long process. The fact that Electric Vehicles could become harder to sell in markets where the price of gas is very low, should come as no surprise.

Speaking during the DLD-15 conference in Munich, BMW’s head of sales and marketing, Ian Robertson, said that sales of zero-emission cars will probably go down depending on the market, and that “there are some short-term changes that will occur in some countries” and that bigger-engine vehicles could make a slight comeback.

This isn’t at all counter intuitive, since there’s always been a slight general public resistance towards electric vehicles – especially from petrolheads or people who were just uninformed. In the US, gas prices have dipped as low as $2 per gallon, and people are pumping at the fastest rate we’ve seen in the past 30 years. This is excruciatingly bad.

Even though the EV movement is inevitable, because of the low prices people are basically in a hurry to exhaust this limited natural resource since there’s literally only so much fossil fuel you can drill for.

The price of oil has went down 40% in the past 12 months and consumers are feeling more relaxed about these numbers yet again, meaning they’re going to turn away from (unfortunately) more expensive eco-friendly cars, and looking towards bigger models with bigger engines and appetites.

Last year, sales of hybrid and EV totaled 570,475 units in the US alone, which isn’t a bad number except for the fact that it’s down 3.7% compared to the previous year. As for BMW, their i-models accounted for just 0.8% of their total sales in 2014.

However, Robertson assures us that this short term shift will not change their strategy at all saying that “The legislative framework in the US and Europe, China and Japan is clear and it’s not going to change. The advent of zero-emission cars is coming, so our strategy remains on that track.”

It’s safe to say that car manufacturers around the world won’t be swayed at all by the slight dip in eco-friendly car sales and that during the next few decades we’ll make the transition from conventional propulsion systems to completely clean units.

Story references: Bloomberg

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