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?'"
I don't have a car now but if I were to buy one I would give serious thought to an EV. The biggest problem I would face is that I live on the third floor of a brownstone in DC. I have a parking space but no way to plug it in at night.
You can charge off a normal wall outlet too, but those can also be hard to come by depending on your parking situation.
There are schemes in the works to put standardized public outlets on streetlamp posts and utility poles. That will be nice when that's working.
And if you have a dedicated parking spot it's not a big stretch to install an outlet for it.
Some neighbors even have installed one on a post in front of their house while they park on the street.
There will come a time when having a parking space without a charger will be unthinkable, and it's coming soon in my view.
Based on what? There has been no plan proposed by anyone to even start doing that. It's not economical for commercial players to add that level of infrastructure.
Having an EV be an option is very much a privilege of having a secure SFDH.
Not true. There are schemes in the works to put standardized public outlets on streetlamp posts and utility poles.
Then BYO charging cord and plug in.
When EVs and plug in hybrids are a significant enough portion of the road fleet, people will not want to rent a park without one, and building owners will be forced to either install them, or have their parking building sit empty.
That's great, but I'm talking about people making car buying decisions today.