电动汽车需要打动“另外90%”的消费者

Declining EV sales in the U.S. are triggering fear in the electric car community and panic in the media. The New York Times earlier this year declared that “the American EV has been crushed,” and ABC News suggested that the electric vehicle is rapidly becoming “a niche” product with a dwindling chance for broad appeal.

Much of the blame, of course, is aimed at the loss of electric car tax credits and the repeal of the Biden administration’s EV targets. There’s also a share of blame for U.S. automakers, which have backed away from earlier commitments to EVs.

But the unspoken solution to this sales dilemma is innovation. This should be obvious. In the U.S., less than 10% of new vehicle sales are electric. There’s a huge swath of the market that still won’t consider an electric car, largely for reasons of initial cost and practicality. Yet the pundits seldom cite innovation as a way of attracting the other 90% of the market.

That’s strange, because innovation is what brought us to this moment in history. Forty years ago, the electric car was a joke. Detroit engineers liked to say that no one quoted their 0-to-60 times because they couldn’t go 60 mph. Even Martin Eberhard, who later co-founded Tesla, referred to electric cars of the 1980s as “punishment cars.” They were for people, he said, “who needed to be punished because they weren’t riding bicycles.”

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Then came two Caltech-educated engineers named Wally Rippel and Alan Cocconi, who in 1992 started a company called AC Propulsion. Using power electronics, Rippel and Cocconi built a mobile inverter. Their inverter enabled them to use a brushless AC motor, which in turn endowed their electric car with speed—lots of it. Instead of struggling to reach 60 mph, their tZero electric car could go 160 mph. It zipped from 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, making it faster than a Ferrari, Corvette, or any other gasoline-burning vehicle.

When Eberhard drove the tZero, he was so impressed that he decided to launch Tesla Motors. Three years afterward, employing the basics of AC Propulsion’s powertrain, Eberhard and his co-founder, Elon Musk, showed off their first Roadster at a star-studded event at the Santa Monica Airport in California. The Roadster buzzed around the airport’s runways to the delight of celebrities, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Disney’s Michael Eisner. Within two weeks, Tesla had gathered 127 checks for $100,000 each, in expectation of Roadster production. No one would ever have believed an electric car could have such appeal, but here it was. Wealthy celebrities couldn’t wait to park one in their driveways.

It was a story of innovation in its purest form. At the time, there were no tax credits or EV mandates. There was only a non-existent electric car market and a nation full of skeptics. Yet Rippel and Cocconi, in a flash of genius, appealed to people who never dreamed they’d want an electric car. As Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning later said, some of those consumers didn’t care what fuel this high-performance vehicle burned. “If it burned baby harp seals, they would have been totally fine with that, as long as it accelerated like crazy,” he said.

The situation is not so different today. Yes, more than a million EVs are sold in the U.S. every year. But to appeal to the 90% who don’t buy electric cars, automakers will have to keep innovating. They’ll need that flash of genius. There are plenty of targets for it: faster charging, better infrastructure, and cheaper batteries. Getting there might take years; it might take decades. But short of an out-and-out ban on gasoline vehicles, it may be the only way to bring broader appeal to the electric car.

Recent history teaches us that consumers buy new tech products if they’re priced reasonably. Such was the case with the internet and the cellphone. Both came after the electric car. Both now serve billions of people, while the EV still attempts to struggle to its feet. The internet and the cellphone showed that consumers won’t reject a new technology if it meets a personal need.

That’s the challenge facing the electric car community right now. It can’t keep preaching to the choir. It can’t keep complaining about tax credits. It needs to appeal to the consumers who don’t yet know they want an electric car. There are plenty of them out there, just waiting to be wowed.

To succeed, the electric car community will need to innovate, just as Rippel and Cocconi did.

Charles J. Murray is the author of “The EV Guys: How Caltech Engineers Reinvented the Electric Car,” published by Purdue University Press.

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Charles Murray

Charles Murray is a journalist covering automotive for Design News.