Automakers Face Test in Reaching U.S. Target for Electric Vehicles

The supply and production of other metals — including nickel, rare-earth metals, manganese and cobalt — must also increase to support a tenfold rise in E.V. sales.

On another front, the plants and assembly lines needed to produce millions of E.V.s every year don’t exist yet. While G.M., Ford and other manufacturers have plants under construction, they will have to produce twice or three times as many battery plants to hit their sales targets and those the Biden administration is setting.

Building and ramping up dozens of new plants will take years, and that process can be fraught. It took G.M. about three years to complete its battery plant near Lordstown, Ohio, and the start of production has been slow. In the first three months of this year, G.M. sold fewer than 1,000 E.V.s with battery packs from the Ohio factory.

Rivian and Lucid, two E.V. start-ups, have struggled for more than a year to get plants rolling at the expected pace. Even Ford, which started making its electric F-150 Lightning pickup a year ago, produced just over 2,000 of them a month in the first quarter of this year. Sales of another E.V., the Mustang Mach-E, fell 20 percent that quarter. The company’s goal is to be able to produce 600,000 E.V.s a year by the start of 2024, and to make two million a year by the start of 2027.

Established automakers also must balance how fast they increase sales of E.V.s with how fast they dial back production of the internal-combustion models that currently generate almost all of their profits. Ford recently said it expected its E.V. division to lose about $3 billion this year, although it forecasts that the unit will be solidly profitable by 2026.

Mr. Torrance’s issue with vehicle-charging and apartment-living highlights another obstacle. If tens of millions of people are driving E.V.s, an exponential increase in the number of public charging stations will be needed, especially of the DC-powered fast-charging stations.

Lastly, even with the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, E.V.s remain substantially more expensive than conventional vehicles.