- Interest in electric vehicles grew substantially in 2024.
- According to a survey from CDK Global, 31% of gas-car shoppers plan to buy an EV. That’s up from 18% in 2023.
- There are still big misconceptions about the cost of EV ownership across car buyers, though.
The percentage of car shoppers who plan to buy an electric car someday shot up in 2024. But you wouldn’t know that based on the breathless coverage of EV demand “stalling.”
CDK Global, a company that provides software to car dealerships, surveyed car buyers and found that the percentage of gas-car shoppers planning to buy an EV in the future jumped from 18% in 2023 to 31% in 2024. For those considering hybrids, EV interest was even higher, which makes sense. CDK says that in 2024, 54% of those survey respondents said they’d go electric, up from 38% in 2023.
The findings confirm what we at InsideEVs have been observing for a while now: Although EV demand isn’t growing at the gangbusters pace it once was—or as quickly as the auto industry expected—this market is still growing.
Or, as CDK Global put it in the study: “The tide isn’t turning back to gas power despite considerable setbacks for EVs in terms of promised demand.”
In 2024, automakers scaled back their EV plans and reduced investments in the face of rocky demand. But we still notched a record year of electric car sales in the U.S., and experts expect that trend to continue. Last year, U.S. EV sales hit 1.3 million units, up 7.3% from the year prior, according to Cox Automotive. That’s despite a serious sag in Tesla’s deliveries, meaning other automakers, like General Motors and Hyundai, saw huge gains on the electric front.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
The Electric Mercdes G-Wagen.
There are headwinds, though. Broadly, they’re the same ones we’ve known about for years. According to the survey, car buyers hesitant about going electric want longer driving range and shorter charging times before they take the plunge. They also want a more reliable charging network, more options from their preferred brands and assurance their EV’s battery won’t deteriorate. (Mounting research on that last part shows that buyers probably shouldn’t worry about battery degradation in modern EVs.)
One encouraging finding for EV sales: Gas-car shoppers in 2024 showed a far better understanding of charging than before. According to CDK, 60% said they understood the cost to charge an EV, 48% were aware that an EV takes around 30 minutes to charge and 49% have identified local charging stations. Those figures were all up considerably from 2023.
But there was one big misconception about EVs that CDK identified. And that could be dragging down sales. Pretty much across the board, car buyers said they thought EVs had higher maintenance costs than other types of vehicles. In reality, studies have shown that electric cars cost far less to maintain over time than combustion cars, because electric powertrains have fewer moving parts.
“Every type of shopper we surveyed accurately identified the negatives of EVs but most also think EVs are more expensive to maintain—removing one of the primary benefits of going electric—outside, of course, their environmental benefits,” the study reads. “The message around the financial impact of going electric clearly isn’t busting myths.”
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