By mid-2026, the electric vehicle is a common sight, but hardly the default. The charging stations are there, the options are plentiful, but the revolution seems to be happening in slow motion. It’s a useful reality check when looking back at the EV predictions from the late 2010s, a time of unbridled optimism.
Take Cathie Wood, who in early 2018 saw a future where “demand for EVs should be orders of magnitude higher than current forecasts.” She was, in a broad sense, correct. Global sales grew roughly 9x between 2018 and 2025, a significant jump that outpaced many legacy forecasts. But “orders of magnitude” implies a 10x-to-100x scale. While the market share of EVs hit a respectable 20% of new car sales by 2025, it wasn't the total market transformation that phrase might suggest.
That gap between a correct directional prediction and a flawed specific one is where forecasting gets tricky. Roboticist Rodney Brooks made a more concrete call, also in 2018: 30% of US car sales would be electric by 2027. He was not shy about the timeline. Yet with that date just around the corner, the numbers aren’t there. US EV sales reached just 8.9% in late 2024, and Brooks himself conceded in early 2025, “There is no way it can reach 30% in 2027. I was way too optimistic.”
Brooks’s willingness to update his own receipts is commendable. It also casts his longer-term forecast—that US car sales would be 100% electric by 2038—in a different light. While the target date is still more than a decade away, momentum has slowed, and the updated assessments suggest that even the more modest 2027 goal is now considered "at risk."
**What we're watching:** The early-adopter phase for EVs is clearly over. The next hurdle is winning over the mass market. We're watching to see if developments in battery cost, charging infrastructure, and the expansion of the used EV market are enough to accelerate the curve and get adoption closer to the bullish forecasts of the past.