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?’”
Fun fact: Tesla isn’t the biggest EV maker in the world. BYD is. Americans haven’t heard of them because Trump’s 25% import tariff on Chinese EVs made them untenable to import.
American automotive companies are scared shitless of companies like BYD because they can come in like Toyota & Honda did in the 1980s and sell an EV sedan at a cheaper price than any American automaker can.
Elon even admitted it today: https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-global-economy/elon-musk-says-chinese-ev-companies-will-demolish-competition-without-tariffs
I didn’t realize we had a tariff that high on Chinese EVs. It’s looking like Biden even wants to increase it https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-administration-explores-raising-tariffs-chinese-evs-wsj-2023-12-21/
I remember when Trump did his trade war on China and people were screaming bloody murder about impeding free trade, but apparently democrats are all about it too. They’re more alike than people want to admit, at least when it comes to trade.
2002 called. They want their stereotypes back.
China caught up on developing and producing quality products themselves, while many western companies lacked innovation and just payed out dividends instead of investing into the future.
I agree their capability has increased a lot, but i seems to me like most stuff I buy thats made in China is designed to fail.
They make a lot of stuff in general. Chances are if you’re looking at the label for country of origin it’s not because it’s working fine.
In general, they sell a lot of stuff that breaks fast because they have a lower price floor, so if you want to make cheap garbage, you can pay less for it in China.
If you want something perfectly decent, it’s still cheaper because of the balance of trade, but it’s not as drastic.
That can be the case for some products. It should not get us to relax in hubris until it is too late to stay in competition.
