The clean energy bill from Obama includes a $2,500 to $5,000 tax credit for the first 200,000 cars that are placed into service, but how long will that last?

President Obama is looking to put 1 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2015… six years, tops. That’s 166,000 a year… (I have a calculator) but, adoption isn’t going to be instant and linear, it’s going to pick up as the years progress looking more like a nice curve.

Let’s make some wild guestimates;

We’ve about 50,000 EV’s on the road today, so say the EIA in their annual energy review at the end of 2006, and we’ll assume a simple month on month growth to 1 million cars at the end of 2015; that looks like this:

If you zoom in; the 200,000 mark gets hit about May 2011… that’s a while away today. In reality though, if the waiting time for a Tesla Roadster is say, a year and a half, that means that you’d better get the order in by the end of the year to avoid disappointment!