Conversely, the more ignorant you are, the more likely you are to have a knee jerk negative reaction to a clean energy vehicle.
Among Americans who said they expect their next vehicle to be new, 38% said they would at least seriously consider getting an EV if they were to get a vehicle today. This however highlights a significant gap between consideration and actual purchases, as only around 7% of new vehicle purchases in 2023 were battery electric vehicles.
Deeper analysis of the survey findings showed that overall consumer experience with EVs is very low. Consumer Reports developed an EV experience index on a scale of 0 to 4 based on answers to a series of four survey questions, ranging from whether they have seen an EV in their neighborhood to whether they have driven one. Only 5% of Americans score a 4 on the EV Experience Index, meaning they had had all four experiences we asked about, while 64% of Americans score a 1 or less.
CR’s analysis also shows that willingness to get an EV increases as EV experience scores increase. This relationship remains statistically significant even when controlling for demographics and EV ownership history. Among Americans who scored a 4 on the experience index, 71% said that they would at least seriously consider getting an EV if they were to get a vehicle today. Conversely, only 13% of Americans who scored a 0 on the experience index said they would at least seriously consider getting an EV today.
“Right now it appears that lack of experience with EVs may be acting as a bit of a brake on EV adoption,” says Chris Harto, senior sustainability policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “However, the data seems to be showing that once more consumers get some first hand experience with EVs, demand could accelerate swiftly.”
And, as in so many topics these days, the more ignorant you are, the more likely it is that you are a Republican. With all due respect folks. I don’t make the polls.
As Green Car Reports has explained many times before, EVs used to exist as a potential that stood for energy independence and the smart use of innovation, both of which appealed to fiscal-hawk conservatives.
Surveys as recently as 2019 showed that EVs weren’t really so polarizing, and several polls since then have still found bipartisan support among Americans for policies supporting EV adoption. However the elected officials representing them have indicated otherwise.
Anti-EV rhetoric started taking root in the GOP more than a decade ago. In a 2012 presidential debate, Mitt Romney called Tesla a “loser” company, implying that EV manufacturers couldn’t survive without government support. Tesla proved that wrong, and it was not a position that GOP party members stood behind in rank and file. But later in the decade, Trump’s derision of EVs became a perennial talking point and speech fodder.
So when did Republicans turn so strongly against EVs? GCR asked Murphy.
“I think it is all part of the tribalism that has eaten our politics,” he told Green Car Reports this week. “The minute the Democrats began politically defining themselves as the green energy party there was a growing knee-jerk response from the GOP: ‘if they are for this stuff, we are against it.'”
“Now EVs, which were initially sold by the industry as an environmental statement have become swept up in all that, and in the Trump era the whole feedback loop has been amplified,” he added. “Now EVs are no longer seen simply as vehicles to much of the GOP faithful, but instead as Biden/Democratic proxy-mobiles.”
EVs aren’t the only thing to receive government funding in the hope of fostering energy independence. As Murphy pointed out in the State of Charge podcast, from GCR alum and charging expert Tom Moloughney (see below for the full episode), the ethanol industry has also received substantial government support far greater than EV support, for example, with some Republicans having no issue standing behind that. But all the spending under Biden likely didn’t help the situation with Republican voters.
That said, it’s puzzling why the Republicans in the Battery Belt, in the Southeastern states, have been seeking to block EV mandates that are bringing manufacturing jobs to their region. Meanwhile, EV adoption is becoming more polarized by state—partly because of a series of policy choices made by Republican lawmakers.
If it all seems hopeless, Murphy did point out that some of the old pragmatic conservative values may remain beneath all the toxic talk. Last year, when 18 GOP state governors authored a letter allying with car dealers in protesting Biden EV targets, neither Georgia governor Brian Kemp nor Tennessee governor Bill Lee were a part of it. Biden EV policy has been a boon to jobs and the economies in those states, and that may be the best hope that the tide will turn.
Money, it turns out, speaks a language even Republicans understand.
The toxic talk is accompanied by the beating of some very old political war drums:
The “Strategic Metals” riff once used to raise fears of a Soviet resource war has been dusted off to warn of a coming electric car battery crisis because of limited supplies of supposedly rare metals.
The reality is that though labeled “rare earths” in Napoleonic times, the lanthanide metals are anything but- there’s more neodymium in the earths crust than tin or nickel.
Which is why China’s supposed monopoly is something of a hoax- prices are falling:
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2024/02/markets-whack-newsmax-wind-power-bears.html
got any other citations besides Wattsup?
That is two v’s at the start of that url, not a w.
The trouble with ‘rare earths’ isn’t their rarity, but the messy process of refining them. They’re so chemically similar to each other, they can only be separated by a slight decrease in the ionic radius, with a lot of byproduct solvents. The Chinese are taking the environmental hit for us, messing up theirs so we don’t have to.
Western radiophobia had some part in it too. Many rare earth ores also contain thorium, which is very weakly radioactive. It’s not soluble like uranium, and the radon it releases from natural decay is both lower in quantity (from the 3x longer half-life versus U238), and of far shorter duration – about a minute half-life, versus four days.
Yecchh – messy solvents! Such a pressing issue compared to what is it? 145 million tons of coal ash residues (which contain contaminants like mercury, cadmium and arsenic) dumped every year.
I’d much rather hear about the pristine production, iron-clad safety, and glorious economic future of the nuclear power industry than those messy solvents associated with wind and solar.
One of the “laws” often cited on a political blog I frequent:
I’m not sure if there’s a difference between what Cleek’s Law describes and oppositional defiant disorder, except for the explicit calling out of vindictiveness.