Forecast of Electric Vehicle Sales in the World and China Based on PCA-GRNN

Since electric vehicles (EVs) could reduce the growing concerns on environmental pollution issues and relieve the social dependency of fossil fuels, the EVs market is fast increased in recent years. However, a large growth in the number of EVs will bring a great challenge to the present traffic system; thus, an acceptable model is necessary to forecast the sales of EVs in order to better plan the appropriate supply of necessary facilities (e.g., charging stations and sockets in car parks) as well as the electricity required on the road. In this study, we propose a model to predict the sales volume and increase rate of EVs in the world and China, using both statistics and machine learning methods by combining principle component analysis and a general regression neural network, based on the previous 11 years of sales data of EVs. The results indicate that a continuing growth in the sales of EVs will appear in both the world and China in the coming eight years, but the sales increase rate is slowly and continuously deceasing because of the persistent growth of the basic sales volume. The results also indicate that the increase rate of sales of EVs in China is higher than that of the world, and the proportion of sales of EVs in China will increase gradually and will be above 50% in 2025. In this case, large accessory facilities for EVs are required in China in the coming few years.