Drivers have been enjoying low gas prices for quite some time now, but if one report pans out over time, a portion of them won't need gas at all — because they'll be going electric.
A new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance on Thursday, as spotted by Fortune, claims that electric vehicles could account for over a third of all the new cars sold worldwide by 2040. In total, the report says that electric vehicles could make up 25 percent of the world's vehicles by that time as well.
What would be the reason for such a growth?
Well, the report says that sliding Lithium-ion battery costs combined with the United States, Europe and China giving buyers incentives for going electric, will result in a surge of the cars 23 years from now.
In the more immediate sense, the Bloomberg report claims that electric cars on the whole will be cheaper — due to the aforementioned reasons — in just six years by 2022.
At the same time, the minds behind the report say that, by 2040, oil prices will go back to $50 to $70 per barrel, giving potential car buyers even more of a reason to go electric.
The report's main disclaimer, though, is how battery technology might throw its projections off.
"The uncertainty of which of these technologies or developments will occur, and when, means the cost structures and learning rates we have illustrated below could significantly differ in real life in the long term," part of the report read, as cited by Fortune.
Currently, though, electric cars have plenty of room for gains and growth, as they only accounted for 450,000 of the 80 million cars sold around the world in 2015, as reported by Fortune, still making them very much the minority.
Those hard numbers aside, though, it does seem like there's a cultural and conscious shift to electric cars being welcomed by the industry.
Tesla drivers passed one billion electric miles last summer, and a report surfaced just earlier this week about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking Volkswagen to make electric cars in the U.S. as part of a way to help the automaker get out of the trudge of its emissions scandal.
