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 had a 2014 Nissan Leaf. I bought it used in 2016 for $11k. I replaced the tires once. And filled the window cleaner fluid a few times. That’s about it. I charged it off a 110v in my garage. I debated getting the quicker charger installed, but seriously never even once would it have made a difference. My driving was about 300 miles a week. One of the few really solid purchases in my life that I have no regrets about.
I has an almost identical story, except the battery went from having mild degradation to suddenly erroring out the vehicle an putting it in turtle mode. (I believe we had 11/14 bars left.). Ended up spending almost $10k on a new battery. Honestly, it still has been a good deal for us over the course of the last 8 years, but not as great as we hoped. At least we have a new battery that should last a long time.
