{"id":11326,"date":"2024-02-29T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-29T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=11326"},"modified":"2024-02-16T07:16:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T07:16:09","slug":"electric-vehicles-are-suddenly-hot-but-the-industry-has-traveled-a-long-road-to-relevance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/electric-vehicles-are-suddenly-hot-but-the-industry-has-traveled-a-long-road-to-relevance\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric vehicles are suddenly hot \u2212 but the industry has traveled a long road to relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n \n
\n Everything old is new again.\n Simon Skafar\/E+\/Getty Images<\/a><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\nHovig Tchalian<\/a>, University of Southern California<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

In 2023, more than 7%<\/a> of cars sold in the United States were electric vehicles. In some parts of the world, such as Norway, the percentage was a whopping 20%<\/a>. In California, where I live, almost 60% of people<\/a> looking for a car in 2021 said they would at least consider getting an EV.<\/p>\n\n

This upswing in demand comes after years of flagging sales. As recently as 2010, fewer than 100,000 cars on U.S. roads were EVs. That number crossed the 1 million mark<\/a> in 2018, up more than 80% over the prior year.<\/p>\n\n

What explains this seemingly unexpected surge over the past few years? <\/p>\n\n

The key word here is \u201cseemingly.\u201d And the answer reveals an interesting history<\/a> that most people are completely unaware of.<\/p>\n\n

I teach entrepreneurship<\/a> at the USC Marshall School of Business, and I\u2019ve been studying the EV market for more than a decade. When I ask students, \u201cHow long have EVs been commercially available?\u201d most of them will answer five years, or 10, perhaps 20. One person might point to an EV launched by General Motors in the 1990s<\/a> whose name they can\u2019t seem to remember. <\/p>\n\n

But occasionally, a precocious person \u2013 usually in the back row \u2013 will raise a hand and answer, \u201cSince the early 1900s.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

That\u2019s almost the right answer. <\/p>\n\n

Electric vehicles and the long road to adoption<\/h2>\n\n

EVs are a new old technology. Most people don\u2019t know that they\u2019ve been commercially available since as far back as the 1890s<\/a>. Back then, there was a fight over how best to power a car, or what business professors would call a battle for \u201cdominant design<\/a>.\u201d The options were internal combustion engines, electric and \u2013 as unlikely as it sounds \u2013 steam. Yes, that\u2019s how long it\u2019s been since that battle was first fought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost 40% of vehicles on the road in the early 1900s were electric<\/a>. But after Henry Ford\u2019s first Model T, which used an internal combustion engine, left the production line in 1908, they all but disappeared. EVs have been trying to make a comeback ever since. Like the precocious person in the back of my classroom knows, they\u2019ve been the \u201cnext big thing\u201d for more than 100 years.<\/p>\n\n

So, what factors help explain why EVs lost the battle for dominant design back then \u2013 and why do they appear to have a fighting chance today?<\/p>\n\n

The \u2018cool factor\u2019 \u2212 but so much more<\/h2>\n\n

Those who point to the Tesla Roadster as the first modern EV point to its reputation as fun, sporty and cool. And they\u2019re right: The Tesla Roadster did make EVs cool<\/a> \u2013 if expensive, at over US$100,000 dollars at its launch in 2008.<\/p>\n\n

But there are many more factors that explain the rise in demand and, more importantly, broad adoption of EVs. <\/p>\n\n

One reason for the rise in demand starting in about 2010 is better and more widely available charging infrastructure<\/a>. In the U.S. in 2009, there were fewer than 500 public and private charging stations nationwide; today, there are more than 100 times<\/a> as many. That has helped allay consumers\u2019 \u201crange anxiety,\u201d that nagging fear that you\u2019ll run out of \u201cjuice\u201d before you can get to a charging station.<\/p>\n\n

But many other factors are also at play: the right set of models and options made available by manufacturers<\/a>, improved battery and charging technology<\/a> and the right mix of government regulations and incentives. All have led to healthy consumer demand<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Technology adoption: It takes a village \u2212 and time<\/h2>\n\n

Apart from those technical and economic factors, current studies and my own ongoing research also suggest that the social conversation around EVs<\/a> \u2013 what everyone in the world says and thinks about them \u2013 has also taken a turn for the better<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Technology adoption is influenced by what\u2019s known as \u201cpeer effects<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the desire to compare oneself with others. That\u2019s because people engage in \u201csocial comparison\u201d by paying attention to what others like them are doing and, more importantly, how those other people might view their behavior. The same is true, for instance, of solar panel adoption, another technology that, like EVs, has both personal and social benefits<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

As I noted earlier, the coolness factor has a positive impact on EV adoption. Driving a cool car matters because that coolness is visible. And when a car has been uncool for so long, a fundamental \u2013 and positive \u2013 change in its public perception can substantially affect demand and adoption<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

My research and other studies<\/a> suggest that a turning point may have come in the mid- to late 2010s, when both public attitudes<\/a> and charging technology and infrastructure<\/a> began to improve. It takes a village to birth a market<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge of EV adoption is a reminder that many of our technologies aren\u2019t just tools or devices \u2013 they\u2019re ways of getting things done. Technology comes from the Greek word \u201ctechne,\u201d which means a practice, a set of habits and a way to accomplish a goal.<\/p>\n\n

Much of our technology, from early word processing software to today\u2019s streaming services, depends on collective social behaviors and how they change \u2013 or, in many cases, don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n

For example, the standard \u201cqwerty\u201d keyboard is not intuitive. But because it set the standard, it became the dominant design<\/a>. It\u2019s now too efficient, and too socially embedded, to allow for easy replacement.<\/p>\n\n

New technologies can\u2019t even look too different from what we\u2019re used to or they would make it too hard for us to adopt them<\/a>. That\u2019s why EV charging plugs look like \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 gas pump nozzles.<\/p>\n\n

In other words, cool technologies need to be in line with existing behaviors and customs, or they\u2019ll have to travel a long road toward establishing new ones. Without this alignment, new tech will sit on a shelf for a long time but never succeed \u2013 like EVs almost did.\"The<\/p>\n\n

Hovig Tchalian<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Southern California<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everything old is new again. Simon Skafar\/E+\/Getty Images Hovig Tchalian, University of Southern California In 2023, more than…\n","protected":false},"author":735,"featured_media":11300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[435,474],"class_list":{"0":"post-11326","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-engineering","8":"tag-electric-vehicle","9":"tag-the-conversation","10":"cs-entry","11":"cs-video-wrap"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/735"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11327,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11326\/revisions\/11327"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}