What caused the meteoric rise of electric vehicles a few years ago?

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I understand it was always an appealing choice to a small subset of customers (have charging stations at home / work, only travel relatively short distances, etc) but all the disadvantages of EV that people are pointing out now were even worse a few years ago – like high purchase prices, range concerns, batteries underperforming in cold weather, lack of infrastructure, repairability etc.

What was the actual driver behind the massive EV boom?

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically, there was always a small market where EVs have no downside. The “meteoric rise” happened because vehicles that appealed to those people were made at the same time Tesla started building a charging network. Sales are fast when 100% of your customers don’t already have the product.

But if there were 5,000,000 people who could really use an EV, we’re probably nearing the point where 4,500,000 of them already have one. (I just made up the numbers, I’m sure someone’s eager to name the real figures.) That the remaining small portion hasn’t bought one yet means they’re probably waiting for cheaper ones, or ones with longer range, or some other thing that hasn’t been solved yet. Then there’s the rest of the car-buying market, who need to be *convinced* they want an EV. That’s tough. It costs money to attract those people. That’s a big factor in why sales are slowing: almost everyone who wants EVs already has one.

It doesn’t help that Musk has tarnished his brand in some peoples’ eyes. And it probably doesn’t help that there are a lot more makers of EVs today: a wider selection means the already smaller customer base is split between more makers. There is such a thing as “too many” EVs and we won’t know what that number is until some company folds from poor sales. It doesn’t help that Tesla’s still considered a “luxury” brand but many deliveries are stuffed with quality issues. It doesn’t help that the unbridled optimism of people from the early 2010s shifted to cynicism and pessimism over the late 2010s.

It also doesn’t help that despite carefully-chosen economic indicators showing that everything’s doing great, most consumers feel like they’re underwater and losing ground. That’s not an environment in which people take risks on fancy cars.

It also doesn’t help that Tesla created some of the problems you mentioned, like repairability. Part of how they cut costs is making decisions that hinder repairability. They brag about many assemblies being one part instead of many, but that can often mean after an accident or in the case of some mechanical failure the owner is left facing a very large bill because there’s no way to replace just the part that broke. The way so many of their pieces integrate with a proprietary computer means there’s just no way for people to tinker and do their own repairs.

Basically: everything smelled better in the early 2010s and people were excited about a lot of things. Now everything stinks and people are being more Utilitarian.

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