One report by a market research firm estimates that if imports of Chinese cars to the U.S. were allowed, they would take around 10% of the U.S. market over the next decade.

…according to market research firm Mobility Global, if restrictions were eased and China-based automakers were allowed to do business Stateside, they’d be selling as many as 1.7 million vehicles per year by 2038, Bloomberg reports. That translates to about 11% of the world’s second-largest automotive market (right behind China itself).

I find this a little hard to believe. I’ve seen Chinese EVs on the road while traveling in Southeast Asia, and they appear to be just as good as Japanese or Korean cars on the road (there were very few U.S. brands in evidence aside from a few pickups, but even there Toyotas are popular), and they are vastly cheaper. So it seems silly to me to think that U.S. consumers won’t choose something that is equally good and vastly cheaper, if not better and cheaper. And if there are no laws preventing government and corporate fleets from investing in these vehicles, I can’t see why they wouldn’t.

I think autonomous vehicles are going to take over quickly once legal and policy barriers finally fall, probably reaching critical mass in a couple years if I had to guess. And the reason EVs haven’t taken off, in my view, is the pathetic lack of accessible, convenient charging infrastructure. Autonomous vehicles are likely to remove that barrier because they can just drive off and find a charger somewhere that a human driver would not have the patience to deal with. I can’t imagine why entrepreneurs wouldn’t fill underused, out-of-the-way parking lots or warehouses with EV chargers. You can pack a lot of cars into a small space when infinitely patient robots are doing the maneuvering. It would be more like a port operation than a parking lot as we think of it.

You can say the power grid is not up to this, and that is probably right. But the increasing demand for electric power generation and transmission will drag that industry kicking and screaming into the present at some point. That is my understanding of how supply and demand work.