The primary reasons for China’s EV market dominance are myriad and well-trod. China put serious government money behind EVs. It cut red tape, incentivized buyers, and provided cheap property. Homegrown companies with minimal or no experience building ICE vehicles saw the transition as an opportunity, not a chore, as many Western companies clearly perceive it. Yet one factor is as under-covered as it is important.
A far larger proportion of Chinese EV buyers are first-time car buyers. Many more had owned only one or two cars before. That’s key for one main reason: In China, EVs were free from much of the baggage still weighing them down here.
The average new-car buyer in the U.S., meanwhile, was around 51 years old in 2022, per Cox Automotive. Even the average used-car buyer was 49, and both groups had higher-than-average income. These are relatively wealthy people who grew up in a country dominated by cars. They were raised in internal-combustion cars. They were raised when air travel was far less affordable and popular, too, which means almost every one of them has a memory of a family road trip in a gas car. They’ve purchased gas cars for most of their adult lives, and relied on them for a vast majority of their travel.
Now, they are being told that EVs are here to replace them. But for the big, heavy vehicles most buyers are accustomed to, road-trip capability requires a huge upfront price premium, a suite of planning and charging apps and a longer, more arduous driving experience. They’re being told to buy a product sold by the company that has long sold them gas cars, in the shape of the car they know, for more money and with, on average, worse reliability.
So of course they’re pissed off.
I know I am. In seeking to replace a $2,500 Chevy Tahoe for camping duty, I leased a Chevy Blazer EV. I love driving it around town, but its eco tires limit its off-pavement capability. Its seats don’t fold all the way flat, so I can’t sleep in it when I camp, as I do in the Tahoe. When I took it on a 1,000-mile round trip to Utah, I lost hours of time charging.
I had to bail on the chance to see an awesome overlook in Bryce Canyon because of range anxiety, and because I had only one of the two necessary Tesla charger adapters. The one I did have allowed me to use Superchargers, but that required parking across two stalls, which made me look like a jerk. The real kicker: With prices ranging from $0.53 to $0.65 per kWh at many stations, I didn’t save any money over doing the trip in a gas crossover.
The experience sucks.
So if you’re approaching this from a gas-car paradigm, I get it, I really do. You think about road trips. You think about driving into the backwoods. You think about summer trips to Hilton Head from Cleveland, 14 hours away. You think about screaming kids at rest stops, and all the hassle of learning a new way to do something your gas car solved decades ago.
But an EV isn’t a gas car. It’s entirely different. That means it comes with a fundamentally different trade-off, which is well-covered: The current versions are either too expensive or bad at road trips.
Those two problems are linked. Because when you release EVs from the expectation of road trips, everything else fades away.
Take the Blazer. What I’ve described in vivid detail covers three total days in about eight months of ownership. They spanned the edge of my edge case. A 1,000-mile trip to rural America. That’s the dream of the American road trip many of us share. Yet it’s nothing near the primary utility of our car. I’ve lived in California for about three years now, and it’s only the second time I’ve ever gone more than 500 miles on a trip. My far more frequent trips to Joshua Tree National Park and Anza Borrego Desert State Park are well within the Blazer’s easy reach. Even these, though, are outliers.
Despite all of the ads showing mountain trails, despite the marketing onslaught for towing, or performance, or “finding new roads” or conquering the Great West, that’s maybe one-tenth of every mile your car drives. In reality, it takes you to work. Or school. To visit friends. The city next door. It shuttles you from one place to another, with no real heroic adventure involved.
For all of those cases, an EV is a far better solution. Yet our focus on the alternative case—road trips—has dampened that advantage. EVs require almost no regular maintenance, with sealed motors and far simpler drivetrains. Yet when you force an EV to fit into the road-trip paradigm, it must be heavy, which means you spend more on tires. EV simplicity means they should be cheaper to produce, too. Except, you guessed it, that giant-ass battery makes it $15,000 more expensive than the gas version.
I know, I know. You need to take that road trip. Though it happens once a year, it is vital, for whatever reason. Trust me, I am not coming for you. I’m making the opposite point: Let gasoline handle these duties for the time being. Offer extended-range EVs, and hybrids and even full gas powertrains to those who frequently travel long distances. Gas trucks are incredible machines, and it’ll take a while before any EV can fully replace the Ford F-150 for the same price. Leave road trips to the fossil-burners. Lord knows they can handle it.
That’ll free up EV designers to focus on the actual advantages of this transition. Automakers are already choosing to make range-extended EVs with small batteries and gas powertrains for further endurance. As an alternative, they’ll offer a more expensive pure-EV play, with hundreds of miles of EV range.
Flip that script. Offer the same, small battery pack on both options. Give the EV a 150-mile range and make road-trip capability the upsell. Hell, offer range-extender rentals, or the ability to rent more battery modules. Dealership service centers will surely be looking for new ways to stay busy as EVs quickly eclipse ICE reliability.
Offer us low-range EVs that are actually exciting, too. Buyers may have scorned the Nissan Leaf and Mini Cooper SE, but did planners ever consider that Americans won’t buy hatchbacks regardless of propulsion? Offer a city SUV, with enough space and range to take your mountain bike to the woods, but a $30,000 asking price before credits. If Chevy can offer a 319-mile Equinox EV for $35,000, even greater savings seem possible.
Make a luxury version, too. I’d be happy to keep my beat-up gas truck forever if my daily driver was a leather-wrapped electric pod with the best speakers and seats I’ve ever had. With small motors and a small battery, the simplicity of the design means luxury trimmings should be more accessible than ever. Make an electric Ford Ranger, too, and tell anyone who wants road-trip range to get the hybrid. The EV is the cheaper, simpler, smoother option, not a 1:1 replacement for a product that’s already nearly perfected.
This is an opportunity for reinvention. But it requires us to ditch the binary of EVs being better or worse than gas vehicles. It requires us to stop approaching these as cars with batteries, and instead as a new transportation option. It will not replace gasoline in every possible scenario, at least not yet. But for the lives we actually live, for 90% of the miles we actually drive, this is the ideal solution.
EVs aren’t gas cars. That’s a good thing.
