Team EV World

Throughout my career, I’ve been a vocal proponent of market research. “We need to develop a profound understanding of these market segments,” I’d tell my clients. “Research will enable us to keep our fingers on the pulse of the market, and let us know what keeps these people up at night.” Indeed, I like to think I was a fairly compelling spokesperson for market research in my day—and on balance, I believe I gave good advice most of the time.

But I’m rethinking the validity of research when I contemplate the most probable trajectory for EV adoption over the coming years. In particular, I had a grim realization at the Plug-In conference in San Jose the other day, where I sat in on a presentation rooted in such research. In a flash, I saw that the entire discussion, in which three esteemed panelists walked through their PowerPoint, had completely missed the point. But why? How? How is it possible that analyzing consumers’ response to questions about trade-offs in range vs. charge-time vs. cost vs. MPG in charge-sustaining mode could yield essentially no information of any real value?

Perhaps it’s this. What if I had asked you 20 years ago if you thought it was a legitimate idea to rid of your home telephone landline because you had a cell phone? What if I had told you that you’d have 5000 of your favorite songs on a piece of equipment half the size of a deck of cards, and asked you if you thought you might not need your car radio because this device could plug directly into your speakers?

You see where I’m going with this. Our culture takes on certain modes as technology offers us radical new ways of life, and, to a great extent, consumers can only respond to these modes when they actually arrive. Asking a mainstream audience about its interest in the features and benefits of EVs simply does not engage them in any meaningful way with the realities that will lie before them when EVs start taking to the streets en masse in a few years.

Here’s another, maybe even more fundamental reason the researchers seem to have missed the point: Purchasing motivations—especially regarding cars—have virtually nothing to do with the features of the product itself. We knew that—or should have known that—years before EV starting to come onto the scene. Cars may be about passion, or sex, or showing off, or the wish to appear affluent—but they are most certainly not about the features of the product itself. A few people in the meeting seemed to have some level of understanding of this, but the point was quickly glossed over, and we soon got back to our bar charts and standard deviations.

Look at it this way: Suppose that a car with the characteristics of the Chevy Volt were available today. Suppose there were a few people in Joe Mainstream’s local community who were zipping around town, commuting to work, chauffeuring their kids around, and doing the rest of their basic driving—almost all of which can be done within the 40 mile pure-electric range, providing them with near-infinite MPG. Here are people who will probably have plunked down a few extra up-front bucks, but:

1) Almost never need to buy gasoline
2) Have made a visible contribution to preserving the health of the environment and stemming global climate change
3) Are doing what they can to free our country of its dependence on foreign oil

How long do you think it will take for that to be noticed? Emulated?

I’ve got bad news for the Ph.D.s in sociology and statistics. There is no way that asking people about design issues and trade-offs in functionality will get you anywhere close to understanding the power that is about to be unleashed. When word of mouth and other forms of viral marketing start to take hold, we’ll see a cultural transformation that will smash our traditional car-buying paradigm to bits in a very short period of time.

Craig Shields
Cshields@evworld.com
www.teamevworld.com
www.evworld.com

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