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?’”
Everytime ev’s come up everyone’s a fur trapper in the himalayas that needs to make pilgrimage over 500 miles every other day.
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.
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.
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.