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?’”
Usually, you stop more often and charge for less time per charge, even if you can make it to another charger. Charging slows down as the battery gets “full”, so you get more charge per minute at the low end of the battery capacity and it slows as its charge percentage rises. I only charge up to 80-85% if I’m plugged in overnight. I try to operate in 10-60%.
I usually drive about 2-3 hours and stop for half an hour to charge. If you run the battery down to 15-20%, you can charge up to 60% in about 15-20 minutes… I tend to give it a little extra if I’m eating lunch or there is a park near the charger. I made it from Houston to Winter Park, Colorado over 2 days with a free charge overnight at a hotel. In 15 hrs of driving, there were about 4 hours of charging spread out to about 4 per day. If you’re in a big hurry, it’s not great. But I don’t really like driving for more than about 10 hrs in a day, so it works for me.
When I had a commute for work, I had a charger at the house. That was awesome. I never had to stop for a charge, never had any maintenance issues… I just drove it and plugged it in at home every few days. EVs aren’t for everyone… especially if you commute more than 200 miles a day and don’t have a place to charge at home, but I’m never going back to an ICE vehicle.