Here we eagerly await the arrival of the Chevy Volt and the ability to drive without gasoline. As well, nearly all the major automakers are placing their bets on electrified vehicles of several varieties. Very soon, Nissan will unveil it’s mainstream EV that it hopes to sell 50,000 of globally in its first year of production, and 100,000 per year in the US by 2012. President Obama has called for 1 million plugin cars on US roads by 2015, and Nissan predicts 10% of its sales will be electric cars by 2020.

Yet in spite of these ambitious expectations and our hopes for a world without oil, automotive forecasters are taking a more conservative view.

CSM Worldwide predicts that instead of the 10 million global EVs Nissan predicts by 2016, there will only be 2.9 million electrics and hybrids combined, with only 400,000 them being pure electric cars by that year.  This amounts to a paltry 0.5 percent share of the global market.

Famed forecaster JD Power concurs with that 0.5% prediction.

“10 million pure electric vehicles annually from 2016 would equate to approximately 12.5 percent of the global market, compared with our forecast of 0.5 percent (including plug-ins),” said Andrew Fulbrook, Senior Manager, European Powertrain Forecasts at CSM Worldwide. More