Why did you buy your Tesla or other EV?

[Fram]

Hello everyone,

I'm a final year geography student at University College London exploring the world of EVs. I'm trying to get some information from real world owners regarding their decision making process when it came to buying their EV.

I've created a single question poll and would greatly appreciate it if you could respond to it if you have a spare 3-5 seconds!

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://host1.easypolls.net/ext/scripts/emPoll.js?p=58662960e4b0423ec14f496e"></script><a class="OPP-powered-by" href="https://www.murvey.com" style="text-decoration:none;"><div style="font: 9px arial; color: gray;">survey software</div></a>

Unfortunately the embed isn't working but you can respond to my single question, 5 second poll at this link

I don't have my own EV yet but I took a BMW i3 for a test drive recently and was seriously impressed! You guys are living in the future

Thanks,

Fram

 

[Fram]

Thank you so much for the responses!

I've had some feedback that there's a bit of ambiguity with regards to the 'Cost' option.

To clarify,

When I say cost I don't necessarily mean the cost of the car but also other costs such as it being cheaper to run etc.

Cheers

 

[webbbcam]

Why a Tesla over anonther EV?

Range, range, range, range, range!

 

[NikeWings]

Design, technology, and functionality ...... in that order.

 

[animorph]

Instant acceleration and plenty of it.
Supercharger network for long distance travel.
Safety.
Those were my original reasons, but not quite enough to make me actually pull the trigger on a purchase.

"Autopilot" AP2 was what allowed me to justify the cost of a Tesla. Now I can travel long distances with an extra safety factor.

So I answered driving experience, which fit the majority of my reasons.

 

[ChadS]

Hi Fram. Going EV is indeed fun - I can't imagine going back. Good luck getting one; you won't regret it.

While it can be interesting to find the "most important" reason that people switch, I hope you don't take the results too seriously. A single reason can be misleading if other reasons trail very close behind (which you may not be able to tell from the results of a multi-choice winner-take-all survey - you may not get the real top reason, in a utilitarian sense, even if your second and third choices appear far behind). Or if some reasons (like national security) are not offered as a choice. Or if, for many, the fact that there are so many good reasons, taken together, are the real reason they make a purchase - not just the one "most important" one. And there are always people that try to please the survey takers, or "send a message" to impact future offerings, or look good by picking the most socially responsible choice, or have their own rationalizations masking their true emotional reasons. Or they simply forgot, since time has passed and they have come to appreciate other aspects.

Good survey design is hard. One big thing yours has going for it is that it is very short, which should improve the response rate! (Still self-selected from a very non-random audience, though).

Sorry, didn't want to be a bummer (though I know I am). I've reviewed a lot of surveys on EV topics and they often disagree because of differing designs, audiences, etc.

 

[Ampster]

My original reason was environmental. Now owning one, I would say the driving experience will be the most important factor. Our other car is a Fiat 500e and the assumption is we will never buy another ICE. The difference between the Fiat and the Tesla has amplified the driving experience. The only reason for a Fiat or our former Smart ED was the ease of parking and manuerving in our little beach town.

 

[Canuck]

Why did you buy your Tesla or other EV?

For my legacy.

I care about my children's future, and the future of all generations that follow us. I'm not so naive as to think that my buying a Tesla, and a Leaf, will make any dent in the future, since in my view we are circling the drain, but when I am looked back on by my children, and grandchildren to come, at least it can be said of me that I had two EV's when few people had one.

 

[McRat]

Voted.

The 'broken' aspect of the poll is that there is not "other". You are not collecting all the data since you force a choice that may not reflect the actual answer to the question. And ChadS is right, I would think the majority have multiple reasons. You might have 1 reason to buy a 15 passenger van, or a $500,000 sportscar, but EVs are seldom based on actual transportation requirements.

There is also a possible reason that folk will not easily admit to publicly.

You see it in the showrooms, in the advertising, in conversations, and the aftermarket.

Image. Fashion. Style. Class. Sex Appeal.

Ask any i-MiEV owner. They bought them to be sexy. Kidding.

 

[Fram]

Thanks so much for the responses! The internet is such a great place where a student in London can get access to a specific niche of people from all over the world!

I'm well aware of the shortcomings of this survey but I have chosen to do it this way for a few reasons which I'll outline for those of you with any interest

Not offering an 'other' option is to intentionally force people to choose a 'single most important' factor even though such a thing probably doesn't exist for most owners. It's mainly to see what different groups of people will identify as a single factor when forced to do so! For example, I've made it a point to only share this survey with users on EV forums which means that I have a sample of respondents with a particular bias. Many of you take environmental reasons very seriously and really enjoy the car as a car. By comparison, if you speak to most Prius drivers in London, they will say that they bought a PHEV purely for cost reasons (no congestion charge and reduced fuel cost). This in effect makes them 'inadvertent environmentalists'. This is great as it allows us to see what matters when it comes to trying to increase the uptake of EV purchases in different groups of society.

The results of this survey will be a starting point for some discussion and therefore I've tried to keep it quite simple without any of the 'To what extent on a scale of 1-10 do you agree with the following X statements' type questions- as someone pointed out it's brief survey that has had 100 responses so far!

Sadly I don't have the time to do proper in depth research into the topic at a level that I would really like to- examining the role of perception by others in material choices, marketing, etc. Unfortunately the downside of good qualitative research is that it is often very time consuming so quick quantitative methods often win out
I'm also fully aware that the reasons that you may buy one EV (a Model S P100D for example) may be completely different to the reasons that you buy a Leaf! Perhaps a bit silly of me to ask the question with regards to EVs in general but as I said, it's a starting point to get some discussion going!

Thanks so much once again for the engagement with this, it's really inspiring for me to see and I hope to get behind the wheel of a Tesla one day!

 

[Takumi]

Driving Experience

We bought the Tesla because the LEAF got us stranded in -4°F. EVgo CHAdeMO connector would not release the LEAF and had to call a relative to come pick us up on Christmas day (2016). That location is still down (1/4/2017) according to Plugshare.