Why Americans are not buying more Electric Vehicles

“We are just not producing the EVs the consumers want at a price point they want.”

Van Jackson, previously an official in the Obama administration and now a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, says electric cars still need to fall in price if the market is to grow substantially.

“How do you bring workers along and increase their wages, and have a growth market for these products, given how expensive they are?” he asks.

“I’m an upper-middle-class person and I cannot afford an EV.”

He is skeptical about whether shutting the world’s dominant producer of EVs and related components out of the US market will reduce the price of the cars and encourage uptake. “The tariffs are buying time,” he says. “But towards no particular end.”

Millions of Americans opting to continue buying combustion-engine cars over electric vehicles, despite President Joe Biden’s ambitious target of having EVs make up half of all new cars sold in the US by 2030. Last year, the proportion was 9.5 per cent.