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?’”

  • Cornpop@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Hybrids are the clear choice. The new Prius prime is so nice. And of course the rav4 prime is awesome too.

    • willis936@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The primes are enticing, but not 20k more expensive enticing. The escape PHEV is near perfect (same beautiful transmission as Toyota) but is FWD only. You need to go up to the lincoln corsair grand touring to get AWD and then suddenly it’s 50k. wtf? Why will no one sell a sub 50k AWD PHEV?

      • ShadowRam@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Why will no one sell a sub 50k AWD PHEV?

        I mean you’re asking a lot for 50k.

        Escape = (Engine/Hybrid) + Battery(PVEH)
        Rav4 Hybrid = (Engine/Hybrid) + Extra Motors/Diff(AWD)

        But your asking for,
        (Engine/Hybrid) + Battery(PVEH) + Extra Motors/Diff(AWD)

        That’s a lot of equipment.

        • willis936@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I’m saying that the prime is not twice the car of the hybrid because it has a wall plug. It’s the huge motors and huge battery. There’s a middle ground.

        • ShadowRam@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          True that, which is probably why EV isn’t ‘taking off’ as expected.

          • The range issue is really limited to commuter cars only.

          • Not many people can afford to have a dedicated commuter car, so they have their primary as a commuter car.

          • Only those where 2 people need to commute, the commuter car needs to be dirt cheap (which EV’s currently are not)

          • These days, how many households have 2 commuters anyway with all the work-from-home being more common place.

          EV’s won’t take off unless

          1 - The range issue is solved, either through longer ranges, or faster charging at more available locations leading to people replacing their primary vehicle

          2 - EV’s become cheap enough that it’s a no-brainer to use those as the secondary commuter vehicles.

      • doctordevice@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        This is what my wife and I do except we just charge from a standard external outlet. It’s very slow, but more than enough for our needs.