Why superior speed isn’t selling EVs

Electric vehicles accelerate faster than gasoline vehicles, and the fastest ones can now reach the highest speeds in the world. This helped make Tesla’s is one of the strongest brands in the automotive world and proves that EVs are more than golf carts. But sales data and insiders, even fans, say it’s no longer enough to sell them to Americans.

For a long time, performance was crucial to legitimizing electric vehicles to car buyers. This was very important for Tesla’s speech.

“This started when Tesla introduced the original Roadster in 2008,” said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry Insights. “At the time, people had this impression about EVs: golf carts, you know, not very fast, not very exciting. Tesla decided to use performance to really make it viable for electric vehicles, to show that we could make an EV that would go 250 miles on a charge and go from 0 to 60 in four seconds; that’s a little slow by today’s standards, but still.”

“Sustainable energy cars could be the fastest cars, they could be the safest cars, they could be the most amazing cars in every way,” Musk said at the 2021 delivery event for the high-performance Tesla Model S Plaid.

Other automakers followed suit: trucks that could accelerate in less than 3 seconds. Audi’s RS e-Tron GT is its fastest production model ever. More affordable EVs like the Kia EV6 GT-line can hit 60 mph in 4.5 seconds; This is something that once only sports cars could do.

EVs have won the battle for acceleration, speed and superior performance, but they still fail to account for more than 10% of new car sales in the U.S., or about half the global sales rate. Now that incentives are gone and automakers are pulling back production, insiders say the next battles remain: lowering prices and improving charging and range.

Watch the video to learn more.