The Electrification Tipping Point: 3 EV Trends Engineers Can't Afford to Ignore

Vehicle electrification looked, in 2021, like a straight line: batteries improving, charging networks expanding, automakers racing to commit to all-electric futures. Five years on, the picture is uneven — some of it moved faster than predicted, some of it stalled. For engineering teams specifying real platforms, that unevenness is exactly what matters, and it's where EMB Power's own engineering work sits: not in predicting the future, but in building electrical architectures that hold up regardless of which way the market swings.

At a glance, here's what's actually changed since the original forecasts:

• Battery technology has kept every promise it made in 2021.
• Public charging infrastructure is well behind its own targets.
• Some corporate EV pledges were scaled back — others are running ahead of schedule.

1. Batteries: the steady winner, and where EMB Power's integration work fits

Battery chemistry is the one part of this story that hasn't hit a policy or demand headwind. Lithium-ion cells have kept getting cheaper and denser, and charge times keep falling. China alone now accounts for more than 70% of global EV production and around two-thirds of EV sales, which has kept battery supply chains scaling even as growth has cooled in some Western markets.

A good battery control strategy is only half the job — it has to be integrated into a specific vehicle's electrical architecture, high voltage or otherwise, without compromising the rest of the platform. That's EMB Power's end of the work: as the exclusive UK and EU partner for New Eagle's Raptor and OpenECU toolchain, we give engineering teams access to proven embedded control strategies, then apply our own decades of OEM automotive experience to design and integrate the system properly for the vehicle in front of us, not a generic reference design.

2. Charging infrastructure: behind schedule, which raises the stakes for vehicle-side engineering

Public charging is the trend that's changed the most. The US set a target of 500,000 public charging ports by 2030, backed by roughly $7.5 billion in federal funding. As of early 2025, only a small fraction had actually been built, and the program's funding was itself frozen by the incoming administration before a court ordered part of it released. The direction of travel is still toward more public charging — but "500,000 by 2030" is now a target under real strain, not a plan on track.

That makes the vehicle side of the equation more important, not less: a platform that depends on a fast-growing public network to be usable is a platform exposed to political and funding risk it can't control. This is where system design and electrical architecture work earns its keep. EMB Power designs and integrates EV-HEV control systems — HV and non-HV — built around New Eagle's OpenECU platform, so range, charging behaviour and thermal management are engineered into the vehicle itself rather than assumed away by an infrastructure rollout that may or may not arrive on schedule.

3. Commercial fleets: further ahead than the passenger-car story suggests

Corporate EV pledges from 2021 have had genuinely mixed results. General Motors' commitment to end combustion vehicle production by 2035 has been substantially scaled back, with the company citing slower-than-expected consumer demand and battery production challenges, and reintroducing plug-in hybrids into its line-up.

Amazon's commercial fleet commitment tells the opposite story. Its order for 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian is now roughly halfway delivered, with over 50,000 vehicles in active service by 2026, and Rivian has since ended Amazon's exclusivity to sell the same vans to other fleet operators. Commercial and off-highway electrification is proving more durable than some passenger-vehicle pledges — which tracks with where EMB Power spends most of its own engineering time: automotive, marine, commercial vehicle and off-highway platforms, not consumer passenger cars chasing headline targets.

Bringing a commercial or off-highway fleet into the electric era without compromising duty cycle, reliability or total cost of ownership is precisely EMB Power's engineering brief — combining our exclusive access to Raptor and OpenECU with our own embedded controls, system design and integration support.

Where this leaves engineering teams

The lesson from the last five years isn't that electrification stalled — it's that it moved unevenly, and the winners were the projects engineered around that unevenness rather than a five-year-old press release. EMB Power's role in that isn't supplying a single tool: it's the combination of exclusive UK/EU access to New Eagle's Raptor and OpenECU platform with our own embedded controls, system design, electrical architecture (HV and non-HV) and integration expertise, built on decades of OEM automotive delivery.

If you're specifying control systems or electrical architecture for an electrified platform — passenger, commercial or off-highway — get in touch with the EMB Power team to talk through how our engineering and integration support fits your project.