After a period of rapid growth, sales of all-electric models in the U.S. have plateaued to around 100,000 a month for the past year and a half, according to The Wall Street Journal. Inventories are piling up, prices are coming down, but people are not flooding dealerships to buy electric vehicles (EVs).
"When we look at it, we see that the market that is in there for EVs is really saturated," Larry Behrens of Power the Future tells AFN. "Those are folks that are making more than $150,000 a year. They don't need to travel more than 100 miles a day, or sometimes even less in kind of urban areas, and so they have purchased their EVs, and the rest of us really don't want one."
According to registration in New Mexico, Behrens says less than 1% of all cars on the road there are EVs, and their owners are in concentrated areas of high-income and urban settings.
"They didn't really have to drive them that far, and they had a lot of disposable income to be able to spend on them," Behrens notes. "Once those folks have purchased an EV, a lot of them have a secondary internal combustion engine car that they use for the things that they really need to get done, and so, all that spells problems."
The lack of infrastructure is another reason why consumers are not getting EVs. The Biden administration has offered massive incentives to EV manufacturers and purchasers and has taken steps to increase the number of charging stations across the nation, but critics say that is a waste of tax dollars.
So despite the fact that the United States government has perhaps propped up this product more than it has done for any product before, Behrens thinks the future market is going to be "really troublesome for it."
