Electric cars are suddenly getting hotter

By 2023, more than 7% of cars sold in the United States will be electric. In some parts of the world, such as Norway, that rate was a whopping 20%. In California, where I live, almost 60% of people looking for a car in 2021 say they will at least consider buying an EV.

This increased demand comes after years of weak sales. As of 2010, there were fewer than 100,000 EV vehicles on U.S. roads. That number increased by more than 80% over the previous year, surpassing the 1 million mark in 2018.

What explains this seemingly unexpected surge over the past few years?

The keyword here is “like.” And the answer reveals an interesting history that most people have no idea about.

I teach entrepreneurship at the USC Marshall School of Business and have been researching the EV market for over a decade. If you ask students, “How long have EVs been on the market?'' most will say 5 years, 10 years, maybe 20 years. Some might point to an EV released by General Motors in the 1990s whose name I can't remember.

But every once in a while, a precocious person (usually someone in the back row) will raise their hand and say, “Since the early 1900s.”

That's almost the correct answer.

Electric cars and the long road to widespread adoption

EV is an old and new technology. Most people don't know that it's been available commercially since the 1890s. At the time, there was a fight over how best to power cars, or what business professors call a fight over the “dominant design.” Options included the internal combustion engine, electricity, and, unlikely, steam. Yes, that much time has passed since that battle started.

In the early 1900s, nearly 40% of the vehicles on the road were electric. But they all but disappeared after Henry Ford's first Model T, which used an internal combustion engine, left the production line in his 1908. Since then, EVs have been making a comeback. As the precocious person in the back of my classroom knows, they have been the “Next Big Thing” for over 100 years of his life.

So what are the factors that explain why EVs lost the battle for dominant design then, and why they seem to have a fighting chance today?

More than just the “cool factor”

Those who point to the Tesla Roadster as the first modern EV point to its fun, sporty, and cool reputation. And they're right. The Tesla Roadster was expensive at over $100,000 when it was released in 2008, making EVs cool.

But there are many other factors that explain the increase in demand and, more importantly, the widespread adoption of EVs.

One reason for the increase in demand since around 2010 is that charging infrastructure has improved and become more widely available. In the United States in 2009, there were fewer than 500 public and private charging stations nationwide. Today, that number is more than 100 times greater. This helped alleviate consumers' “range anxiety,” the nagging fear that they would run out of “juice” before they got to the charging station.

But many other factors are also at play, including the right model and set of options offered by manufacturers, improved battery and charging technology, and the right mix of government regulations and incentives. All of this has led to healthy consumer demand.

Adopting technology: It takes a village and time

Apart from these technical and economic factors, current research, and my own ongoing research, focuses on the social conversation surrounding EVs, i.e. what everyone around the world is saying and thinking about EVs. This suggests that we may be heading in the right direction.

Technology adoption is influenced by the so-called “peer effect”, or the desire to compare oneself with others. That is, people engage in “social comparison” by paying attention to what others like them are doing and, more importantly, how others view their behavior. It's from. The same applies to the adoption of solar panels, for example. Like EVs, this is a technology that benefits both individuals and society.

As mentioned earlier, the coolness factor has a positive impact on the adoption of EVs. Driving a cool car is important because you can see how cool it is. And if a car remains uncool for too long, there can be a fundamental and positive shift in public perception that can have a huge impact on demand and adoption.

My research and others suggest that a tipping point may have occurred in the mid-to-late 2010s, when both public awareness and charging technology and infrastructure began to improve. It takes a village to create a market.

The challenges of EV adoption remind us that much of our technology is not just a tool or device, but a means to get things done. Technology comes from the Greek word techne, which means a practice, a set of habits, a way of achieving a goal.

Much of our technology, from early word processing software to today's streaming services, relies on collective social behavior and how it changes, or in many cases, does not change. Masu.

For example, the standard “qwerty” keyboard is not intuitive. But because it set the standard, it became the dominant design. They are now too efficient and integrated into society to be easily replaced.

New technology can't even look very different from what we're used to. If not, it will be very difficult for us to adopt them. That's why an EV charging plug looks like, you guessed it, a gas pump nozzle.

In other words, good technology needs to be consistent with existing behaviors and habits, or you'll have to go a long way to establish something new. Without this coordination, new technologies may sit on the shelf for a long time and never be successful, just as EVs were rarely successful.

Hovig Tchalian is an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.