A BIG Problem With The US Auto Market & EV Adoption

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Those of us who know electric vehicles well, and who spend a lot of time reading (and perhaps writing) about electric vehicles, and who have driven EVs for years, can talk at length about why it’s better to own an electric vehicle. Depending on what interests you — the enjoyment and ease of driving, tech, financial savings, the climate, air pollution, the convenience of home charging, etc. — there are many reasons to go electric. Unfortunately, many — or most — non-EV drivers still know nothing about these things, and when they go shopping for new vehicles, they aren’t necessarily looking to broaden their horizons — even if they are considering an EV!

None of that is really new to me, but a story I just witnessed in the “real world” made me realize how much of a challenge the current EV lineup faces in the United States.

We have a friend who was apparently tired of her old-ish, small Kia crossover and tired of it breaking from time to time. She and her husband were looking for an upgrade, and they were apparently on the verge of buying a Hyundai IONIQ 5. They had gone on a test drive and were enticed by a big $10,000 discount being offered on the vehicle. However, something changed their mind right before they decided to buy the vehicle.

They ended up deciding to buy a Hyundai Santa Fe instead. They determined that the IONIQ 5 didn’t have enough space for them, and if you’ve seen a Santa Fe, you can certainly see that it has a lot more space, including a 3rd row of seats. With just two kids and having gone from a much smaller vehicle, I don’t know what all the extra space is needed for, but I’ve heard this kind of explanation from another family of 3/4 (it’s complicated) and from others. Everyone always needs more space.

Where I drive here in Southwest Florida, there are behemoths of the road everywhere. There are so many super large vehicles. Apparently, everyone needs a ton of space….

SUVs of the 1990s look like clown cars compared to what’s on the road today. And, apparently, no matter what class of vehicles you’re shopping in, you need something BIG.

What’s this got to do with electric vehicles? Well, adding a lot of size and destroying the aerodynamics of a car means you need to add a lot more batteries, which means you need to jack up the price. So, there are large electric vehicles on the market — the Rivian R1T and R1S, the Cadillac Escalade IQ and VISTIQ, the BMW iX perhaps (if that’s considered big enough for you), the GMC Hummer EV — but they are expensive vehicles. The more affordable EVs out there are small or midsized crossovers. Yes, they have their buyers, but so many people just want more space. And the benefits of an EV, in their minds, don’t supersede the extra space of, say, a Hyundai Santa Fe. “The three-row, epically capable family SUV” isn’t even huge by today’s standards, but it’s significantly bigger than a Hyundai IONIQ 5 and still has a starting price of about $35,000 (but once they get you thinking about it at that price, the higher trims start at almost $50,000). And how hard is it to sell — “Look at all the space. Three rows!”

The Hyundai IONIQ 5 was one of the few EVs that had sales growth year over year in the first quarter in the US, thanks in part to those big discounts being offered, but it still shows a starting price of $35,000 on the Hyundai website, and it’s still notably smaller than a Santa Fe.

I’m writing this sitting in a car drop-off line at my daughter’s middle school. It’s one giant vehicle after another passing by. The “small” vehicles are mostly “small”/midsized SUVs, or Teslas. There are a lot of Teslas as well, but they broke through the auto industry norm in a way that is hard to replicate (just ask Ford). The brand got huge and sold millions of vehicles based on a high-tech, Apple-like image. Many people who want the latest, coolest tech got a Tesla. Otherwise, though, there would probably be far fewer sedans and small SUVs passing through the drop-off line and driving on the roads around me — because almost every other vehicle you see is larger than these. How many US buyers just see the IONIQ 5 as “too small?” How many see that you can get a larger Hyundai for the same price and think that must be the smarter way to go?

In the US, as long as an EV is offering less space and a less towering presence than a comparably priced gas-powered vehicle from the same brand, I think we’re going to struggle with EV adoption. I’d like to say otherwise, because of all the benefits EVs bring, but it just seems that size matters most here.

The good news is that lower-cost batteries are coming, and battery costs have been dropping consistently for the past decade plus. But if there wasn’t so much of a focus on very large vehicles, this transition would be much easier.

This article is also being published on our Substack channel.