Amendment of the Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas emission rules for passenger vehicles. The country has actively pursued carbon-reduction policies to encourage electric vehicle production.
Besides the political issue, there is a simpler reason why US adoption has stalled while electric vehicles in other countries have grown. “Historically, there were simply not enough charging points,” said Alyssa Altman, head of transport and mobility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at consulting firm Publicis Sapient. “Potential EV customers are worried about keeping their vehicles full for long trips, and for some U.S. journeys, the lack of charging stations makes this impossible. ” Publicis Sapient figures indicate that remains an issue, with the US distribution of 113,600 charging stations unevenly concentrated in areas with relatively high electric vehicle consumption, like California. “For me, the main bottleneck is infrastructure,” said Coco Zhang, environmental, social and governance analyst at ING. “Consumer perception is slowly changing due to the lack of existing electric vehicle infrastructure.”
It’s not that American consumers don’t want to use electric cars. When VW opened pre-orders for its ID.4 EV in September 2020, demand from customers was website problem. That they worry about getting stuck in their expensive electric cars. “While the current figures may seem bleak, there is still a lot of progress and more imaginative solutions emerging in the US that will fit the American way of life, such as providing provide charging stations at fast food and grocery stores,” Altman said. Ability Get a Taco Bell while charging your car might be an attraction for many Americans. Affordability is also a big issue, says Chintagunta, whose research has found that sales of electric vehicles increase dramatically if their adoption becomes less expensive.
China faces some of the same geographical problems as the US, including range concerns, but it has successfully adopted electric vehicles through what Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research in China Duisburg, Germany, calls it the “leap-up effect”: Its auto industry doesn’t have much experience in building internal combustion engines, so it can be easy to drop them when there’s an alternative. . That puts Chinese manufacturers in a strangely enviable position. Because it is not bound by a century of business experience with a model that powers a car that is about to be obsolete, the market can adapt more quickly.
The gap in approaches to electric vehicles can be seen through a single company that operates in both the United States and China: General Motors. Through a joint venture with SAIC Motor Corporation and Guangxi Auto CorporationTwo Chinese state-owned companies, GM, make the Hongguang Mini, an ugly low-end EV that Chinese people compare to a wheeled bread box, which retails for around $4,500.
Sales of that single model in China achieved 138,790 in the last three months 2021. The total number of EV models sold by GM in the United States during the same time period is 26. (GM declined to comment for this story.)
