Electric Car Drivers: Demands, Desires & Dreams — #CleanTechnica Report Intro

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Electric Car Drivers: Demands, Desires & Dreams explores the preferences of current electric car drivers in North America and Europe regarding electric car models, classes, special features, range, battery options, and more. It also takes a deep dive into key consumer benefits of electric cars and respondents’ views on the best ways to promote electric car adoption.

The report briefly peers into the profiles of initial electric car drivers and potential drivers. It explores demographics of these early adopters (income, number of children, gender, etc.) as well as more niche topics like respondents’ use of solar power and energy efficiency measures.

The report segments responses according to geography (North America versus Europe) and also segments them based on the type of electric vehicle they drive. Given vast differences in range and charging capability, responses are aggregated separately for drivers of non-Tesla fully electric cars, Teslas, and plug-in hybrid electric cars. Respondents with more than one electric vehicle (EV) were encouraged to respond for each type of EV model separately.

One takeaway regarding regions is that Europeans appear to prefer full-size cars whereas Americans prefer SUVs. They also have more interest in compact cars.

Previous to our first report of this type, we had never seen EV drivers broken into all of these different segments for such a broad and deep study. Since we started publishing such reports, we have still not found others doing so. We find segmentations like this to be important to understanding the market since there are large differences between the cars, and our findings confirm the value of such an approach.

Responses were collected on the web via online surveys that were shared on CleanTechnica.com. In total, 2,089 unique surveys were collected from EV drivers and 1,185 unique surveys were collected from potential EV drivers.

It’s worth noting that there is likely to be self-selection bias inherent in the findings, due to the fact that respondents were not selected by random sample but found via an EV enthusiast website, voluntarily chose to open the articles about it, and were interested enough in the topic to take the time to complete the surveys.

That said, the respondent breakdown by EV model was similar to the market as a whole, indicating that the people who responded were fairly reflective of the broader population of initial electric car buyers and lessees. Additionally, several of the findings do match up closely with findings from other EV studies and publications, implying that the responses can be generalized to some extent.

Furthermore, core to this study was a focus on better understanding the preferences, insights, and user profiles of the most informed and experienced early EV adopters — since it’s expected that these are the consumers most likely to guide EV development plans, priorities, and policies in the coming years.

In total, we believe this report offers unique insight into the desires, demands, profiles, and collective experiences of different types of electric vehicle drivers. In this extremely fast-growing EV market, we hope that you will find the nuance and context as well as more generic findings of this study interesting and useful to your work and life.

To get the full report, head over here.


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

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