Claims that electric vehicles don’t have enough demand may be overblown.
A new study from GBK Collective, published Thursday, found that half of the more than 2,000 US car consumers they interviewed were considering either an electric or a hybrid car for their next vehicle purchase.
This far outweighs the current ownership trends found in the study. Only 14% of those surveyed already own a plug-in or hybrid vehicle of some kind. It’s another piece of evidence of a huge opportunity for EV manufacturers to home in on the needs of these green car-curious consumers.
“These are not the same kind of customers who created the initial EV market,” GBK President Jeremy Korst told Business Insider in an interview.
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“These are later adopters, and because of that, they’re not as driven by innovation or even design,” Korst said. “They have more functional needs, and they’re much more pragmatic and thinking about the total cost of ownership both in price and in effort, like, ‘how do I charge so what’s that going to take? How much time is it going to take me?’”
It’s not that you need 500km every day, it’s that you need 500km often enough to make the average affordable ev with a 150km range impractical. Until there is a reliable charging infrastructure in place, people need a vehicle that can accommodate their longest trip, not their average trip.
150km is the unreasonable part. The AVERAGE affordable EV, especially not Tesla, will easily do 250-300km on a charge. My ID.3 does 340km on a full charge (100% to ~10%) and I’m spending a third on “fuel” per month vs the Fiesta, even though I can’t charge at home.
Btw, I also don’t think twice about driving from Amsterdam to Disneyland Paris 2-3 times a year - that’s 550km each way easily. 2-3 charges, every 2-ish hours, depending on the season and Paris traffic.
People are just afraid to change. Right now, some cars get excellent deals to get sold. Once everyone starts wanting these, kiss those deals g’bye.
Ehh more like a 90km daily commute (+10km wiggle room for errands). However, the 150km advertised range turns into 120km actual range, which in turn gets reduced by 30% in the winter. Suddenly, a new EV (which I can’t afford btw) has a range of less than what I need, meanwhile, old ones which I might afford (and are still waay more expensive than a used ICE) have nowhere near that amount of range.
Exactly why I have a PHEV. Battery for daily driving, gas for longer trips.
So, a train?
Yes, we definitely need more trains, but the average person isn’t really in a position to build a rail network, so using the infrastructure currently available, cars are a necessity for most travel.
Fair, but it is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, in the sense that public transportation will only get more funding when there is a demand for it. So if people are used to being able to drive 500km in their cars, they will see no reason to push politicians for better funding. And conversely, when good public transportation exists, people will not see a <100km range as a problem.