# J. D. Powers Survey on EVs



## bwilson4web (Mar 4, 2019)

Source: https://www.jdpower.com/business/pr...ence-index-study-fueled-surveymonkey-audience

_Consumer confidence in future mobility technologies lags far behind automakers' plans to bring self-driving and battery-electric vehicles to the marketplace, according to the J.D. Power 2020 Q1 Mobility Confidence Index Study fueled by SurveyMonkey Audience,SM released today. The Mobility Confidence Index for self-driving vehicles decreases for the first time-to 35 from 36 on a 100-point scale-for American consumers and to 36 from 39 for Canadian consumers. For battery-electric vehicles, the index remains at 55 in the U.S. for the fourth consecutive quarter, while decreasing to 57 from 59 in Canada._​​_"Frankly, we're concerned for automakers," said Kristin Kolodge, executive director of driver interaction & human machine interface research at J.D. Power. "They're pushing forward with technology that consumers seem to have little interest in. Nor are they making the strides needed to change people's minds. Especially now, automakers need to reevaluate where they're spending money. They are investing billions in these technologies but they need to also invest in educating consumers. Lack of knowledge is a huge roadblock for future adoption."_​​_The quarterly study is the pulse of market readiness and acceptance for self-driving and battery-electric vehicles, as seen through the eyes of consumers and industry experts. The 2020 Q1 study includes insights from the United States and Canada. J.D. Power is joined by global survey software company SurveyMonkey to conduct the study in which more than 8,500 consumers and industry experts gave their opinions about self-driving vehicles and more than 8,000 about battery-electric vehicles. The survey was fielded in March 2020 before most stay-at-home orders went into effect._​_. . . _​
_*Consumers don't believe the technology is ready-or that society is ready*_
*Uncertainty about timeframe for public availability*
*Changing needs post COVID-19*
*Few consumers have any experience with battery-electric vehicles*
*Previous ownership doesn't guarantee future purchases*
_*Perpetual barriers remain*_
It is my fondest hope that the "powers that be" contact "Geno Effler, J.D. Power; Costa Mesa, Calif.; 714-621-6224; [email protected]" and get access to a detailed report on the survey. In particular, "Previous ownership doesn't guarantee future purchases" as this seems curious. Are we talking about 5%, 10%, or 50%? Where there enough respondents to have a statistical confidence level?

Bob Wilson

ps. I sent this e-mail:

to media.relations

Hi,

I read "Reality Check: Consumer Sentiment on Future Mobility Technologies Declines Even Before the New Normal Hits, J.D. Power and SurveyMonkey Find" and though many of the summaries agree with my experience, one is imprecise:

_Some who have previously owned a battery-electric vehicle won't buy again due to high maintenance costs, purchase price, limited range and performance in extreme weather. One consumer noted, "Absolute hoax, does not provide enough heat to clear windows in cold weather. Car is cold to ride in in the winter."_

A retired engineer, I would like to know the sample set that made this claim. I live in Dixie so we seldom see more than frost or wet snow that melts right away. But seeing the sample size and associated numbers would help.

Can we get a formal report from the survey with more details than the press release?

Thanks,
Rober J. Wilson, retired engineer


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## JasonF (Oct 26, 2018)

I think the behavior of the market (i.e. lots of Teslas and other EV's driving around everywhere) disagrees with the results of the survey, and JDP should have investigated where it went wrong.


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## garsh (Apr 4, 2016)

_"Absolute hoax. Can't keep going on grass found at the side of the road. Gets easily stuck in ruts on muddy roads. Can't get me home safely when I've been out drinking. Will never replace horses."_


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## MnLakeBum (Mar 17, 2021)

The only design/functionality weakness is that my 2015 85D is lousy at heating/defrosting when it hovers around zero degrees or below, as it did for almost 2 weeks in February. Luckily my Tesla only has to get one more MN winter afterwards it will be in Florida. The newer Model S Teslas are better as I've had loaner vehicles that didn't have the same problem. I'm sure the Model 3's are better as well. At my age, I do have several buddies that own high-performance sports sedans(AMG, Audi RS) and aren't interested in an EV as they love the sound of high-performance ICE vehicles. Every time ponder/shop for what I'll be replacing my 85D with in the next year, I always go back to an EV mostly because I've gotten used to never having to go to a gas station, and I'm not too fond of expensive maintenance and repairs. I priced out an A7 RS at the Audi dealer last week, and it was $130k options out, and the 5-year ownership cost over a Model S Plaid would be at least $15k more. I tend to drive cars well over 100k miles and I have so many nightmare stories of $5k-$9k repair stories from buddies on their higer mileage german sedans right before they sell them. 

We are not at the point where we won't own at least 1 ICE vehicle and I have no visions of EV's capturing more than 15% of the U.S. market anytime soon as people are creatures of habit and the electric grid will take decades to upgrade to support widespread EV use. Good arguments can be made for ICE vehicles - We have a Range Rover diesel to tow our boats and it's great for long trips with its 600 mile highway range. Long term, I know my two college age kids want to buy Model 3's or some other EV when they graduate and many of their friends are thinking the same thing.


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## garsh (Apr 4, 2016)

MnLakeBum said:


> ...I have no visions of EV's capturing more than 15% of the U.S. market anytime soon as people are creatures of habit


Agreed. At least for some definitions of "soon".  
I still come across people who don't even realize that pure EVs exist - they think that all this talk about EVs is referring to "hybrids".



MnLakeBum said:


> and the electric grid will take decades to upgrade to support widespread EV use.


Most charging should happen overnight, when electricity demand is low. Electric companies can encourage this behavior by offering tiered plans to have lower rates during off-peak times.

Encouraging people to install solar would also help alleviate demand on the grid.


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## MnLakeBum (Mar 17, 2021)

garsh said:


> Agreed. At least for some definitions of "soon".
> I still come across people who don't even realize that pure EVs exist - they think that all this talk about EVs is referring to "hybrids".
> 
> Most charging should happen overnight, when electricity demand is low. Electric companies can encourage this behavior by offering tiered plans to have lower rates during off-peak times.
> ...


When we first started driving our Tesla to the small rural town near our MN lake, home 130 miles north of Minneapolis, I had almost daily questions about what kind of car I was driving. Some knew it was all-electric but had never seen one before, lol. Contrast that with one of my last visits to my golf club in CA 3 years ago; there were 4 white Model S parked next to one another in the parking lot and two others in different colors in a lot that had only about 35 cars total. 

California commonly has rolling blackouts already and their goal of switching all new passenger cars to EV by 2035 would require about a 25% boost in electricity production. This in a state that won't build any more dams/hydro-electric or nuclear plants.

Rooftop solar makes sense in places like CA partly because their electricity cost is double the national average, and we had a large rooftop solar system when we lived there that didn't pay for itself in the 5.5 years we had it. Still, it might have increased the final sale price of our home. In MN, the lack of solar radiation in winter, along with the fact that most utility costs are from cheap natural gas heating, the payback on solar for our home would be more than 40+ years. I did the math, lol.


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## JasonF (Oct 26, 2018)

I think one thing people keep missing about charging is that it's an _intermittent_ load on the grid. Unlike air conditioning, which runs all day at the peak of summer, EV's only charge for 30 minutes here, and hour there, maybe 2 hours, and then they stop. It's more similar to a clothes dryer.

That means unlike the tea time/tea kettle issue in the UK at around 4 pm every day, EV's aren't likely to hit the grid with a huge load at the same time every day. Especially if people use off-peak charging, or delay their charging in any way whatsoever.


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## MnLakeBum (Mar 17, 2021)

JasonF said:


> I think one thing people keep missing about charging is that it's an _intermittent_ load on the grid. Unlike air conditioning, which runs all day at the peak of summer, EV's only charge for 30 minutes here, and hour there, maybe 2 hours, and then they stop. It's more similar to a clothes dryer.
> 
> That means unlike the tea time/tea kettle issue in the UK at around 4 pm every day, EV's aren't likely to hit the grid with a huge load at the same time every day. Especially if people use off-peak charging, or delay their charging in any way whatsoever.


Charging is not a problem if you own a home with 150 amp or more of service, but a big problem in large cities such as San Franciso or LA is apartment don't have 50 amps for each resident to dedicate to charging even if it's off peak. My sister-in-law lives in San Francisco in a $1.2M condo, and she pays $500 per month extra for a tiny garage for her car(no option to add an EV charger), but most residents park on the street. I consider 50 amps a minimum for a home charger(35 miles per hour charge rate), but I prefer the 80 amp charging we have at our lake home. Lots of apartment/condo and older home dwellers don't have that.


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## JasonF (Oct 26, 2018)

MnLakeBum said:


> Charging is not a problem if you own a home with 150 amp or more of service, but a big problem in large cities such as San Franciso or LA is apartment don't have 50 amps for each resident to dedicate to charging even if it's off peak. My sister-in-law lives in San Francisco in a $1.2M condo, and she pays $500 per month extra for a tiny garage for her car(no option to add an EV charger), but most residents park on the street. I consider 50 amps a minimum for a home charger(35 miles per hour charge rate), but I prefer the 80 amp charging we have at our lake home. Lots of apartment/condo and older home dwellers don't have that.


There will be smart solutions to that eventually. The Tesla Wall Connector can share a single 50 amp load with a few different cars. If someone like Chargepoint offers a solution like that someday, it could give apartments the ability to keep a bunch of residents plugged in at once (maybe not all, but a lot), and the charging rotates throughout the night to a couple of cars at a time.


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## MnLakeBum (Mar 17, 2021)

JasonF said:


> There will be smart solutions to that eventually. The Tesla Wall Connector can share a single 50 amp load with a few different cars. If someone like Chargepoint offers a solution like that someday, it could give apartments the ability to keep a bunch of residents plugged in at once (maybe not all, but a lot), and the charging rotates throughout the night to a couple of cars at a time.


I don't doubt that innovative solutions like this will meet the demand over the next decade or two. It will be interesting to see how soon EV's reach something like 20% of new car sales in the U.S.

Norway is small with only about 5 million residents but EV sales were 54% last year of all new car sales.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-electric-norway-idUKKBN29A0ZT


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## TomT (Apr 1, 2019)

MnLakeBum said:


> I consider 50 amps a minimum for a home charger(35 miles per hour charge rate), but I prefer the 80 amp charging we have at our lake home. Lots of apartment/condo and older home dwellers don't have that.


Except in special circumstances, I beleive that 30 amps is fine for the vast majority of people. I never saw the need for 80 amps and clearly Tesla did not either as they eventually dropped it.


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## MnLakeBum (Mar 17, 2021)

TomT said:


> Except in special circumstances, I beleive that 30 amps is fine for the vast majority of people. I never saw the need for 80 amps and clearly Tesla did not either as they eventually dropped it.


Now that they are replacing my HV battery and I'll have improved range, I won't need the 80 amp charging anymore. Last spring my safe travel range was about 150 miles and with our cabin 140 miles away, I had no option other than to charge as soon as I arrived. Sometimes I wanted to go to the golf course or run errands after arrival but I would have to wait about an hour for charging.

Im hopeful that the battery swap will give me a real range of 230 miles again which was what it was when new.


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## JasonF (Oct 26, 2018)

Some semi random thoughts on this entire subject:

Steve Jobs once said that consumers don’t really know what they want until you put it in front of them. And he was right - most consumers will favor something similar to what they have over something different when surveyed. This is why focus groups are awful, and consequently how manufacturers with brilliant concept cars end up dumbing them down to a slight upgrade from last year’s model. So of course surveys of gasoline car owners about EV’s is going to result this way. That is, until, one company like Tesla puts out something very different, and people can see it and touch it and drive it.

Let me tell you the damage focus groups/surveys can do. In 2004, Mitsubishi had a prototype Eclipse that was going to be sleek, have 4 electric drive motors at the wheels, a small battery, and a small diesel engine to charge the batteries. It would have been a breakthrough at a time when the Prius was the king of hybrids. But it went to focus groups which determined no one would be willing to pay $2000 extra for it, and the company decided instead to just throw a 4 cylinder gas engine in it. And the same thing happened again with the PHEV - it was built to be an EV, they did surveys, and decided to shoehorn in a gas engine and go hybrid instead.

I don’t feel like the survey is accurate simply because I can survey my neighborhood just by walking around and looking at the cars. My walks have told me that “everyone is driving huge SUV’s now“ is a myth, and that although 6 Model 3’s, one Model S, and one Model X isn’t a huge number of cars, 8 Teslas in one middle class neighborhood that’s NOT in California is a significant representation. And that doesn’t include the 4 plug in hybrids or the Chevy Bolt.

And the last random thought: Tesla eliminated the 14-50 head from the mobile connector with new cars. I don’t think they would have done that if they didn’t first determine that the majority of new customers were doing just fine charging slowly at 110 volts. I don’t know if it was a planned effect or side effect, but nudging people toward slower charging also helps balance the grid demand for EV charging. Most people won’t care if it’s less efficient as long as it’s good enough.


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## Long Ranger (Jun 1, 2018)

JasonF said:


> Steve Jobs once said that consumers don't really know what they want until you put it in front of them. And he was right - most consumers will favor something similar to what they have over something different when surveyed. This is why focus groups are awful, and consequently how manufacturers with brilliant concept cars end up dumbing them down to a slight upgrade from last year's model. So of course surveys of gasoline car owners about EV's is going to result this way. That is, until, one company like Tesla puts out something very different, and people can see it and touch it and drive it.


Yeah, I keep thinking that if things were flipped and EVs were the standard and the internal combustion engine was the new energy efficient technology, people would be complaining that ICE isn't ready.
Consumer: "Sure this ICE has great range and refuels quickly, but I can't fuel at home? I have to stand outside to fuel? Why is the transmission so jerky? How do I precondition the cabin temperature? What's with all this maintenance, I have to change the oil how often? How long is it going to last? Isn't gasoline really flammable and explosive? With that high center of gravity, what about rollovers? I can die if I'm in a closed garage and I leave it running? It's just too loud and smelly, no thanks."

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to add "Why is it soooo sluggish when I hit the accelerator? It costs how much for near-equivalent performance? And I have to use the brake pedal for every routine stop?"


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