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.

“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?’”

    • Talaraine@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      And China’s about to hit the market hard. You know, if you don’t mind them scraping your data.

      • Lumilias@pawb.social
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        9 months ago

        If the 25% tariff on Chinese EVs went away, they would flood the American market just like Honda and Toyota in the 80s. We need a cheap sedan EV, and nobody is filling that segment in the US.

        • Lumilias@pawb.social
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          9 months ago

          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

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              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.

              • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                Yeah, I’m not sure outsourcing so much manufacturing to a powerful, authoritarian state was such a good idea. T

                Then again, the transnational corporations making the decisions only care about their investors. Supporting human rights and democratic countries was never important to them.