This seems like a lot, but 400,000 is only about 0.16% of the 250 million cars and trucks on US roads. About 75,000,000 cars are sold annually around the world, and there are about 1.1 billion of them already out there.

Electric cars are thus moving slowly to overtake gasoline-powered consumer vehicles, especially where the demand is growing the fastest.

One million electric vehicles per year would displace about 50,000 barrels per day of oil consumption; 10 million of them would remove 500,000 barrels from the market a day.

But even if we keep on replacing 10 million gasoline-powered cars with electric ones each year for the next 10 years, it will take a very long time to make a dent in the global vehicle fleet of 1.1 billion cars and trucks and the 100 million barrels of oil per day they consume.

This will not change unless developing countries take a lead in this transformation by starting to adopting electric vehicles en masse.