How bullish are Americans on EVs? It depends on where the nearest charger is.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
People who live closer to public electric vehicle chargers view the cars more positively, even when accounting for people’s party identification and the type of community they live in, a new analysis shows.
Nearly 40% of Americans live within a mile of a public electric vehicle charging station, and another 24% live between one and two miles away, according to a new analysis.
The proximity to a charger is important not just because it makes it easier for EV drivers to fuel up there, but also because people who live close to a charging station have more positive attitudes toward EVs than those that don’t, concluded the Pew Research Center, a polling and research organization.
“The vast majority of EV charging occurs at home, but access to public infrastructure is tightly linked with Americans’ opinions of electric vehicles themselves,” wrote researchers Samuel Bestvater and Sono Shah. “Our analysis finds that Americans who live close to public chargers view EVs more positively than those who are farther away.”
In fact, that pattern holds true even when accounting for people’s party identification and the type of community they live in.
People who live near EV chargers are more likely to own an electric or hybrid vehicle, to consider buying an EV as their next vehicle, and to support phasing out the production of fossil-fuel burning cars and trucks by 2035, the Pew researchers found. People with chargers in their neighborhoods are also more confident that the country will be able to build the infrastructure required to support a switch to EVs in the coming years.
“On the whole, the American public is fairly skeptical that the U.S. will be able to build the infrastructure necessary to support large numbers of EVs on the roads,” the Pew analysts wrote, with just 17% of U.S. adults saying they are extremely or very confident that the country will be able to complete the task.
But those attitudes differ starkly depending on where people live. While 20% of Americans living within a mile of a charger are confident that the country can build sufficient EV infrastructure, only 11% of people who live more than two miles from a charger share that view.
Pew found that 40% of U.S. adults favor phasing out new gasoline cars and trucks by 2035. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that goal for his state in 2020, and nearly a dozen other states have indicated that they would adopt California’s rules. Among the public, 49% of people who live within a mile of a public charger support the idea, compared with just 30% of people who are more than two miles from one.
Of course, California has the most EV chargers of any state. State regulators there initially tried to mandate electric vehicles in the 1990s. While that effort stalled, it prompted government agencies and private entities in the state to install more chargers, effectively giving California a head start compared to the rest of the country. California has more than a quarter of all EV chargers and accounts for more than 36% of all the registered EVs in the country.
The heightened interest in EVs in California means there could be longer lines for those publicly available chargers.
“Despite having the most charging stations of any state, California’s 43,780 individual public charging ports must provide service for the more than 1.2 million electric vehicles registered to its residents,” the researchers wrote. “That works out to one public port for every 29 EVs, a ratio that ranks California 49th across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”
Of course, people who live near chargers are more likely to live in urban areas than in rural areas. Nearly 90% of all EV charging stations were in urban areas as of this February, even as the federal government is spending billions of dollars from the 2021 infrastructure law to help states build chargers along key interstate corridors.
Rural parts of the country have seen a bigger uptick in the number of chargers being built, but deep discrepancies remain.
“Americans who live in cities are especially likely to have a public charging station very close to their home,” the Pew analysts wrote. “Six-in-ten urban residents live within a mile of a public charger, compared with 41% of suburbanites and just 17% of rural Americans.”
Because of that imbalance, the people who live near chargers tend to be younger and are more likely to have a college degree than the population at large, Pew found.
Nearly half (48%) of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic live near chargers, compared with just 31% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, the analysis found.
Pew’s analysis is based on online surveys of 10,329 U.S. adults from May 30 to June 4, 2023. The respondents were selected through national, random sampling of residential addresses.
Daniel C. Vock is a senior reporter for Route Fifty based in Washington, D.C.
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