Opinion | EVs have a Democrat problem
Jittery automakers have already started pulling back on their EV investments. Ford, which lost nearly $4.7 billion on its EV business last year, recently announced a delay in planned launches of two new models. General Motors said last fall that it would postpone adding a second factory for production of electric pickups. Apple has reportedly canceled its decade-long efforts to build an electric car.
More companies have entered the market, so EV makers are facing more competition and squeezed margins. But customer demand has clearly cooled, too. Early adopters bought their whiz-bang toys, and now mainstream America — or at least, the subset that buys new cars — must be wooed.
Unfortunately for EV sellers, more nonowner normies are rejecting their advances.
While the number of EV owners has risen in the past year, the share of Americans saying they would not even consider buying an EV jumped, from 41 percent in 2023 to 48 percent today, according to a Gallup report released Monday. That is, about half of Americans have written off ever owning an EV. (A separate YouGov poll, conducted in 2024 only, found a similar result.)
At my request Gallup broke down the responses by demographics for today versus a year ago. Turns out one demographic driving this trend is, unfortunately, among the more reliable, climate-conscious customers: Democrats.
To be clear, among political groups, Republicans are the least interested in buying EVs this year, but they were about equally disinterested last year. In fact, the shares of Republicans saying they already own an EV or would consider buying one rose a few percentage points.
Democrats also report slightly higher ownership rates of EVs than they did last year — but among those who don’t yet own one, the percent saying they would never purchase an EV rose 10 points. Other groups with relatively large declines were political independents and college-educated consumers, as well as lower earners (who infrequently buy brand-new cars anyway).
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt; survey data cut this finely has a larger margin of error. Still, the broader trends are troubling. As consumers have grown more familiar with these vehicles of the future — as they hear from friends and co-workers who drive them now — they’ve grown less enamored.
Maybe consumers have cooled on these cars because the selection of EV models available for subsidies has shrunk, relative to the years before passage of President Biden’s marquee climate legislation. Pre-Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Harvard researcher Elaine Buckberg tabulates, 26 different models qualified for the full $7,500 tax break; today, that’s down to about 12, and often only on certain versions of a given model.
That’s because the IRA imposed new restrictive criteria on the EV tax credits, related to such factors as price and where vehicles were made. There are also new income limits for buyers. There are some workarounds, but maybe the limitations have deterred potential buyers. So far efforts to make the tax credits easier to claim don’t seem to have helped.
That’s probably not the only issue. Elon Musk took his status-symbol Tesla brand and turned it into something tree-hugging liberals might feel queasy about driving. (Tesla’s new car sales dropped this past quarter.) Biden’s efforts to reduce gasoline prices might be popular, but they also happen to reduce the advantage of going electric.
But the bigger issue, I suspect, has to do with lack of charging infrastructure, which is feeding “range anxiety.”
Here government incentives have proved less productive than hoped. For instance, $7.5 billion set aside by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to build charging stations has resulted in just seven charging stations so far, offering 38 spots in the entire country. Meanwhile other stations have notoriously high outages and wait times.
“The most important thing right now is improving the reliability of the chargers that are out there,” says Buckberg, who previously was GM’s chief economist. That way, “when people are going to a charger, they’re likely to have a successful experience, rather than a failed experience.”
I agree: Rather than production mandates, or guilt trips, the factor most critical to accelerating EV adoption is making them easier, cheaper and more reliable to drive. I still believe that the transition toward electrification and cleaner, renewable technologies is inevitable, based on economics alone; that it’s a question of when, not if; and that our policy choices involve only speeding it up or slowing it down. But I’m increasingly concerned that Republicans don’t want to speed it up, and Democrats don’t understand how.
