Republicans Don’t Want EVs
It has been assumed recently that EV sales in the US would be slowed by inconvenience. Surveys showed many Americans do not want to charge their cars for hours when they could fill a gas tank in 10 minutes. There are a few thousand charging stations in the US. There are 125,000 gas stations. An EV goes about 300 miles on a charge. Many gas-powered cars with small engines have ranges nearly double that.
The EV industry may have a bigger hurdle that cannot be cleared by better technology. According to a research paper titled “Political Ideology and U.S. Electric Vehicle Adoption” from the Energy Institute at HAAS, Republican buying habits represent a threat to a surge in EV market adoption. The study looked at new vehicle registrations by county from 2012-2022. The findings–” During our time period, about half of all EVs went to the 10% most Democratic counties, and about one-third went to the top 5%.” The researchers also stated the obvious. Reaching much higher levels of EV adoption in the US will be hard.
The financial sums at risk are staggering. GM and Ford have each put several billion dollars into EV R&D, production, and marketing. Each assumes more than half the passenger vehicles sold in the US will be EVs before the end of the decade. Each has started to throttle back on gas-powered car manufacturing infrastructure.
The US car companies are not alone. Every major car company in the world that counts America as an important market has made plans and investments similar to those of GM and Ford.
The forecasts for EV sales, which look like a hockey stick on most graphs, may be wrong altogether.
