Less than half of all vehicle owners have access to a garage or carport with an electrical outlet.
If EV’s are to have mass appeal, how do you reconcile that? Most apartments have few (or none) EV chargers. I can barely get my apartment to follow through with maintenance requests, let alone install an EV charger.
Why bother with that hassle when my Honda Civic that already gets 35 mpg that I bought for $12k cash works just fine?
48% already have access to a charging outlet. You're right that's less than half, but that's pretty dang close to half. I'd say 48% of drivers being able to handle charging right now is mass appeal. I mean that's many millions of cars.
34 percent had private, off-street parking but no access to electric outlet. I wonder what percentage of that 34% could add an electrical outlet for <$1,000. That outlet will last 20+ years, not exactly a big cost over that time frame.
> I can barely get my apartment to follow through with maintenance requests, let alone install an EV charger.
Have you stopped to consider the majority of car owners don't live in apartments?
I'm not telling you to buy an EV today. I'm not saying EVs are a perfect fit for everyone. But they're a fine fit for a huge percentage of drivers today. And for a lot of people these hassles pointed out above are actually bigger hassles with ICE vehicles such as refueling time. It's a much larger market than just rich techies in Palo Alto.
You’re right, they are a good fit. If all you do is commute short distances, have a garage, own your home, and want to install an EV charger. And have terrible resale value and have a paper weight once the battery goes.
There’s a reason the used car market for EV’s practically doesn’t exist: people who want a car but don’t care if it’s EV or not see all these drawbacks. How else do you explain terrible EV resale value?
The people who are buying EVs are basing the purchase decision on the fact it’s an EV and don’t care about the drawbacks or differences, so they’ll buy new. These are not price sensitive consumers. An EV to them is more than a car, it’s a part of their personality and persona. Which is fine, to each their own.
> How else do you explain terrible EV resale value?
Does the data actually show that? I've got a 2021 Mach E Premium that was ~$54k new at the time I bought it (prices were all over the place). I got a $7,500 tax rebate on it. That's $46,500 cost. I see used ones listed for ~$39,000. That's 84% of it's value retained over soon to be three years. Is that really poor resale value? A lot of cars I've owned in the past had way worse resale value after a similar length of time.
And for the longest time Teslas had positive resale value, and the had some of the highest held value in the auto industry. It wasn't until Tesla started aggressively cutting prices this became untrue.
There's certainly some EVs of there with poor resale value, but they're also generally some of the worst EVs out there.
> If all you do is commute short distances, have a garage, own your home
