Become a member at to find out how EVs perform in our tests.
We recently published the results of a nationally representative survey of over 8,000 people, asking their opinions about EVs, and what concerns they have about purchasing one. Consumer Reports Senior Policy Analyst Chris Harto joins us to break down the findings, explain why the survey gives us a more representative data of the country as a whole, and reveal more surprising findings.
SHOW NOTES
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00:00 – Introduction
00:12 – Survey Introduction
01:33 – EV Survey Results
03:32 – Interest in EVs
04:20 – Financial Concerns
07:01 – EV Reliability
08:13 – Benefits of EV Infrastructure
09:05 – Charging Process
10:03 – EV Landscape in 5-10 Years
11:09 – EV Buyer Demographic
11:54 – Variety of Electrified Vehicles
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More Americans Would Buy an Electric Vehicle, and Some Consumers Would Use Low-Carbon Fuels, Survey Shows
Hot, New Electric Cars That Are Coming Soon
Smarter: Things People Wished They’d Known Before Buying an EV
Automakers Are Adding Electric Vehicles to Their Lineups. Here’s What’s Coming
Can Electric Vehicle Owners Rely on DC Fast Charging
Guide to Car Safety
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EV’s are ready as a second car assuming there is access to a charger. Not primary car yet
For those with $70,000 or more to spend,
EVs make an excellent primary car.
The tech has arrived, it’s more that most of us just can’t afford a good electric car.
EVs are great as a primary car as long as you have available charging at home or work. Otherwise, it’s a pain in the neck and not worth the hassle.
My Bolt will be saddened to learn it is not a primary car. What a disappointment.
Very good information, many thanks 😊
With the current ev premium over their ice counterparts, it’ll take approximately 15 years to break even at current fuel and electricity prices in Canada. Add in that they still have severe limitations, especially in rural canada with no charging stations and long stretches between towns…and they just don’t make sense yet, and that’s before winter range reductions and battery life are considered.
Personally I have a solar powered house and could charge for “free” at home. It still doesn’t make sense to pay $15,000 to $$25,000 (plus loan interest) over an ice of the same. That’ll buy A LOT of fuel and oil changes.
It has been shown once you go to below freezing, with snow, climbing mountains with AWD, when you need snow tires and not the high efficiency tires, you lose about half your range. Since I fit all those conditions, going from 250 to 125 miles is a non-starter (even from 400 to 200 is not great). Also not mentioned, some of the materials those batteries need? The majority of Graphite and a majority of the Lithium (two big battery components) come from China. Not mentioned by anyone, including CR.
China is already producing EVs art cost parity to ICS and the domestic market is rapidly converting to EVs because cost of ownership is far lover than ICDE cars. The reason Biden Administration is throwing up roadblock to imported EVs is that Chinese and Korean EVs are already disrupting auto markets and brands like BYD and Kia threaten the existence of legacy American and European brands. ICE conversions to EV are inferior to the clean-sheet EV designs from Tesla, Chinese & Korean OEMs.
@Unreliable Narrator 66 I agree. The cheap labor and pollution is great for the US. Keeps it out of sight for the greening of America.
A little askew on your survey results. The poll was to 8,000 people. Then 14% of those respondents said their next vehicle would be an EV. That doe not result in 36MILLION Americans.
I think scaled it up to be a representative 14 percentage of all Americans.
It’s actually 46 million based on the 2022 US population.
@73Av8r no because a lot of the population are children and senior citizens either too young or too old to drive. It’s probably about 5% of drivers in the US and he didn’t say if any of those 14% are already Ev owners just buying another Ev when their current one croaks.
@MikeyMay8 You guys must be vote counters if you think 14% of 8,000 poll takers = 36milion
My wife got an EV in Feb and we have already put 15,000 miles on it and avoiding driving our gas car and it’s amazing how much we have saved on gas and oil changes even considering how much it costs to charge the EV. I still have a gas powered vehicle but I will be trading it for an EV in the next year or so. We can’t wait to be free of dependence on gas and oil and all the things that service centers try to add on when we get our gas vehicle serviced. A gas powered car has about 2000 more parts than an EV and I hate having to deal with them. I would rather pay more up front and not have all those unexpected maintenance bills.
Same experience here! I went electric in 2018 and was driving 18k/yr until the covid era (now I drove much less). Wife’s car has maybe a year left and then we’ll be replacing that with electric. IMO there is not a good reason to purchase a gas car for the vast majority of American homeowners, present day.
Just wait till those batteries start going out.
There are two charging world right now, the Tesla supercharger network and everyone else. It seems kind of unfair but Tesla drivers can use all of them but other brands of cars can’t use the Tesla chargers. That doesn’t matter if you only charge at home but if you travel with a non Tesla it’s hit or miss on finding a (working) charger and have it being at least as fast as your car can accept. I see a lot of reviews on new EVs that quickly turn into a charging failure video. We have taken three long trips of 2000 miles or more in our Tesla and the Tesla supercharger network seems to be really reliable and fast. The only bad experience was in Colorado Springs where the superchargers were inside a paid parking garage and there was a huge line, we didn’t get to charge and had to pay $1 just to get back out of the garage, so we went on to Monument where everything as out in the open and nice.
The future is electric. Any car maker that is not all in (Toyota and Honda) will have their own Nokia or Kodak moment.
You don’t really understand the power gird then… Toyota is sooo dumb? really?
Very interesting bonus episode! Keep up the great work CR!!
The biggest issue I see is time. If I forget to fill up on my way to work in the morning I can stop for 5 min and put 350+ miles of gas into my car. If I had a low battery before work because I forgot to plug it in then I’m not going to work that day!!
I’ve never forgotten to plug in my car. I literally walk right past the charger in my garage to get into the house.
5 minutes? Ha! It take me 10 seconds to plug in once or twice a week and I’ve got like 300 miles of range every morning. I can drive 70-100k miles a year just using the electricity from my garage. Doesn’t even count the free charging available when shopping at grocery stores/malls, or traveling at hotels.
You don’t have to charge every day. Most will charge around 2 or 3 times a week. Anybody arriving home without at least 50 miles on their car, and hasn’t plugged in, can’t moan about their own stupidity.
EV supporters are completely denial of batteries degradation which is almost 5% per year based on type of battery and weather conditions. They’re still a joke, specially EV trucks.
This is true but not because you forget to plug in but rather electrical glitches that occur overnight. It’s not often but some morning I wake to see the message “charging stopped abruptly at 2:23am”. This can be for a variety of reasons (car or house) but you’re still not going 300mi if you wake up to this.
One conversation that seems to be missing in a number of EV-related videos is future road mileage charges to pay for future State and municipal road infrastructure and improvements, otherwise paid by gas taxes. Apparently places like Oregon and Utah are lookin at starting this (or considering it). That could off-set some of the cost benefits of EVs versus buy paying taxes on gas for ICE vehicles at the pump. The other issue is availability and affordability for lower income people, particularly living in apartment buildings and/or having to randomly park their vehicles on the street where chargers largely will not exist any time soon. I read somewhere that the average EV buyer has average household income of $ 191,000. More equity is needed here.
Some states, like Washington, already implement an EV tax to replace gas taxes and also charge a fee to EVs + hybrids to pay for infrastructure.
In most, if not all states, very little of the gas tax goes to fixing roads anymore. This is a misdirection from Big Oil and the politicians whose election warchests are filled with Oil contributions.
First the two bills passed in Congress won’t help either of the problems. The $7 billion is for private companies to invest in buying and installing chargers and it only gives $15k of the $70k for each charger and almost nobody will take the $15k or install the chargers. With the tax credits only a very few Ev’s qualify, so both bills are a joke…. also the savings per year over an ICE vehicle will NOT over ride the upfront cost to buy an EV. That has been debunked as the average EV cost $16k more upfront and the savings is about $2k per year but after 8 years the EV will be worth less than the ICE vehicle in trade in/sale value….Also Ev owners are the most dissatisfied owners compared to owners of ICE. It’s just not worth the trouble.
In my opinion they are too expensive and auto maker delivery is frustrating. I think manufacturers Kia and Hyundai are simply absorbing the tax credits in the sticker price while allowing their dealers to add mark ups. The only sensible option in my mind is the Chevy Bolt and Bolt EUV. It’s the only option that doesn’t cost $45k+. Even then, it would be hard to spend $30-38k on a compact car with limited capability.
Who will be the first with an EV minivan?
VW is releasing the Buzz in Europe next year, an electric version of their classic bus from the 60s.
Well, THIS Baby Boomer would love to be able to afford an EV, but since I’m on a fixed income now, I have to pay more and more for food, utilities, and mortgage interest. In five years, I’ll be 67 so I won’t care about an EV because I’ll be broke! I DO have a 2022 Hyundai and when my lease ends, will probably be cheaper to buy the car (new loan) than turn it in and lease another car that is rising in price every 3 years.
First and foremost, I really like a lot of EVs on the market, but I simply cannot ignore electricity prices. We’re now up to 26 cents per kWh at my house, and threatening major increases here and for the rest of New England. I keep a spreadsheet of CR’s measured fuel economy with entry fields for the price of gas and electricity, and last month it got to a point where there was NO plug-in vehicle on the US market that had a lower energy cost per mile than a Prius. In fact, a Prius Prime would cost me more to plug in than to drive as a standard hybrid.
Now, to be fair, the Prius gets fantastic fuel economy, but the point remains that until I can get solar panels on my roof and a home battery, the energy cost savings just isn’t there for me and those in my region. Yes, I can save on oil changes and brakes and other maintenance, but as I do most of that myself, that’s not a lot of money.
I support EVs, but I’m concerned that they will continue to pull focus from hybrids. I’d love to see more ‘series hybrid’ cars like the Chevy Volt and BMW i3 REx, but both have no successors. At this point, my next car will be a hybrid, but I have no use for a plug-in anytime soon.
As a fire commissioner I had my house wired with a 240V 50 amp outlet. I will not consider an EV until they make the battery and charging safer. My nephew did buy one and he does park it outside and charges it 10 feet from the house. Too many cars and chargers catching fire. Up to six hours to extinguish car and garages are only one hour firewalls. They almost always take the house.
Insurance is rarely addressed. I found EV s more expensive to insure and I I wonder about the homeowners insurance. In Europe chargers are not allowed in multistory parking garages. Something to consider.
Sounds like something that will improve in time as electricians become more experienced. Likely more EV home charging fires are a result of inexperienced electricians. As I’m sure you’re aware, gas stations catch on fire too, and one or two dozen gasoline cars catch on fire every hour of every day in the US right now.
As a fire commissioner you should know that too many gas cars catch fire. My Nissan Pathfinder self-immolated in a parking garage downtown. USAA was not able to determine the reason for the fire but news alert for you, oil and gasoline are flammable.
@Anthony C yes, that is not news to me and most people. The answer is gas and oil is extinguished in short order. Lithium is not as it creates oxygen and you cannot break the fire triangle. Just science!
All these old people saying they’ll never switch to the new tech. It’s like they believe their grandkids want their old HiFi system with the 6-disc CD changer, or the 27″ CRT television they got from Circuit City cuz they paid so much for it. Sorry Gramps, your car is too slow and costs too much time and money to keep running.
Greetings from southern Ontario Canada I really enjoyed the video the draw back on an phev or fully electric I live in an apartment complex and my owners are saying that it would be costly to install the charging system
Seems like most of the naysayers in this comment thread have never driven EVs nor owned them. I was skeptical until I test drove some, and before my partner bought one (leaf). Now, I can’t imagine going back to gas vehicles.
I’m in the market for an EV, and am glad manufacturers are expanding their offerings, but I wish they’d give us something like a fully electric Prius – a smallish, affordable, roomy hatchback.