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zonavar68 Thankyou. Hard to pin down single factors just on those figures alone, but one does seem to be the types of vehicle available. Obviously the dealers will themselves buy what they know their customers want but the variety and ranges of the various battery and hybrid vehicles are increasing.
Well, variety for the moment. China is going all-out to destroy other countries' motor industries so it gains a monopoly likely only to lead to much smaller choices of a very few apparent makes.
By "exponential", I wonder what they mean? All too often the term is used merely to mean "rapid", which of course is completely wrong. It can be rapid and exponential, but by co-incidence not definition; and can describe decay or growth. So I'm always wary of the term.
Nevertheless, it does show overall a general drift away from purely internal-combustion engines. After all, the concept of electric cars of reasonable choice, range and capital cost for most motorists able to buy new, is still fairly young so we can't expect enormous sales quite yet.
One factor in the choice of liquid fuels is their relative cost in the country concerned.
For decades Diesel was much cheaper than petrol in the UK, until fears about the health problems from exhaust soot and nitrous-oxides encouraged a governmental about-turn, raising the tax on the compression-ignition fuel so it became a bit more expensive than petrol. Though it was probably still more economical than petrol to buy, by the engines' innate higher thermodynamic efficiency.
The manufacturers responded to this and wider environmental legislation by making the Diesel engine more efficient still and far cleaner - though the fact of this, and the method, seems incomprehensible to most politicians, journalists and certainly the most strident "green" campaigners. The last may be sincere but often seem ignorant even of the differences between fuel, energy and power.
UK sales of electric cars are increasing, slowly but at increasing rate helped more by China than America, and the present problems in the world may boost this.
Though we still have the problem those same politicians etc, also find incomprehensible, that at least a third of British motorists would need rely on public chargers, of which there can never be enough for universal demand.
No-one of course could have foreseen the present situation, due to two illegal wars and the growing threats in the Red Sea. These have distorted the UK retail fuel market by pushing up the prices, but disproportionately increading the gap between petrol and higher Diesel costs.
This even without, so far, Trump's proposal to ban US exports of Diesel-oil to try to hold down US fuel price rises he caused, ahead of their Mid-Term Election.
(I think that ban could rebound, by making the oil companies in the USA increase their domestic prices to compensate for the lost export revenue. Alternatively, I suppose they might cut the domestic retail costs drastically, to encourage sheer waste to both recoup the export loss and to reduce manufcaturing and storage difficulties.)
It's awful that so many hundreds of millions of people in so many countries are being affected, badly, by just a few men: a few nations' bellicose presidents and their cliques.
