Myth Busting Time: Electric Cars Do Indeed Work As Primary Cars

Pulling more fun charts from a recent UK study (h/t Herman Trabish) as well as a chart from our recent EV owner & lessee survey, I wanted to spend a few minutes busting the myth that “electric cars don’t work as primary cars” — and the even more ridiculous one, that you can’t get by owning/leasing only an electric car. The latter point is so ridiculous (especially to someone who has lived car-free for 11+ years) that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it, but the first chart below is from our survey, which showed that about 21% (192) of the 920 respondents had only one car… meaning they had only an electric car.

Moving on to the issue of an EV being a “primary car” or not, one big issue here is subjectivity of language — what is a “primary car,” exactly? I’ll leave that to you to decide or discuss, but I’m taking it to mean the car you drive the most. As you may remember, a Consumer Reports dude who loves the Tesla Model S and led the crew that ranked the Tesla Model S P85D the best car it had ever tested commented in an interview that the car didn’t work as a “primary car.” Ridiculous. Shocking. Completely untrue.

When looking at the results below, remember that the Model S has far more range than most EVs, and can use the convenient and widely spread Tesla Supercharger network.

In this simple chart, you can see that a whopping 82% of surveyed British EV owners/lessees who have more than one car use their EV as their main car. I would consider a “main car” to be a “primary car.” Anyway, though, these cars are not tag-alongs that sit in the garage half the time. These cars are the cars their owners are primarily driving.

We see a very similar story in Norway. 81% of EV households in Norway with multiple cars use their electric cars every day. Only 6% of those households use a gasoline- or diesel-powered car every day. If you add up everyday usage and usage 3–5 days a week, you get 97% for the EVs and 21% for the gasmobiles. Um, case closed.

By the way, here’s a reminder: If you haven’t answered our quick 7-question EV survey yet, please do so! You can also still complete our longer EV owner/lessee survey or wannabe EV owner/lessee survey.