Scenario Overview:
Driving Disruption

In a world of strong economic growth and relaxed regulation, the cost of EV battery packs falls far faster than analysts thought possible, thanks in large part to Chinese-led innovation. New entrants dominate the most valuable segments of the EV market through integration of high-performance, relatively low-cost, and powerful self-contained automated driving features; established automakers struggle to keep up.

In This Scenario:

• EV market share grows much more rapidly than anyone expected as cheap, high-performance batteries flood global markets.
• Fierce competition and lack of government incentives keep margins razor thin, except in luxury and long-haul trucking segments, in which a few upstart companies dominate markets.
• Highest-margin EVs incorporate the most sophisticated automated driving technologies optimized around long-distance travel.
• Luxury automated EVs carry single commuters long distances in maximum comfort; highly automated electric commercial trucks allow lengthy uninterrupted periods of automated operation.
• Ultrarapid charging technologies with gas-pump-like performance deploy in a haphazard and chaotic fashion, with many mutually incompatible or proprietary standards.
• The ongoing focus on high-end—mainly suburban—customers, who tend to have access to at-home charging, limits the negative consumer impacts of perpetually overcrowded, brand-specific public charging stations.