Starbucks could solve a big problem for Tesla
In 2020, electric vehicle (EV) sales accounted for 2% of all car sales in the United States. That’s a big number,“ as roughly 19 million cars get sold in the U.S. each year, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of the total market.
EV sales have, of course, increased led by Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report hitting around 1 million in annual global sales in 2021. The rest of the pure EV industry has a long way to go. Lucid (LCID) – Get Lucid Group, Inc. Report and Rivian (RIVN) – Get Rivian Automotive, Inc. Class A Report have a long way to go until they can deliver tens of thousands of vehicles a year, let alone getting even close to a million.
And, of course, Ford (F) – Get Ford Motor Company Report, General Motors (GM) – Get General Motors Company Report, and the rest of the legacy auto industry have huge plans for their own electric vehicle sales. Eventually, EVs will dominate the market, but that’s going to take at least a few more years (or maybe longer) but there’s a huge roadblock to electric vehicle growth and Starbucks (SBUX) – Get Starbucks Corporation Report may solve it.
Electric Vehicles Needs to be Charged
The U.S. has more than 150,000 gas stations, according to the American Petroleum Institute.
That’s a huge number and anyone who has ever driven a car knows that it’s very rare you can’t easily find a gas station. Even very rural parts of the country have more than enough gas stations making it possible to fill up pretty much anywhere making running out of gas not a major concern.
Electric cars need charging stations and the U.S. does not have enough of those. That’s something that President Joe Biden wants to change.
In December 2021 U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg signed a memorandum of understanding to create a Joint Office of Energy and Transportation to support the deployment of $7.5 billion from the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build out a national electric vehicle charging network.
That sounds nice, but governments move slowly, and the U.S. has a very divided government. Biden’s Democratic party could lose control of Congress as soon as the mid-term election and recent history says that the bipartisan split will make building something as broad as a national EV charger network (despite there being a memo of understanding).