Range Anxiety Is Very Real, New J.D. Power EVs Survey Finds

What car buyers want has always differed from what they need. A small economy hatchback works just as well for commuting to and from work as a full-size pickup, but many trucks are found in corporate parking lots.

The same applies to electric cars, as shown in a new survey from J.D. Power: the 2021 Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Ownership Study. It’s one of three EV-focused surveys coming from Power this winter.

The factor most cited in deciding what EV to buy is the range—or how far the car can travel on a single battery charge. Once an EV driver has the car, its ability to match the maker’s rated range is equally important.

It’s the Range, Stupid

In both cases, it’s about the owners’ “peace of mind,” said Brent Gruber, J.D. Power’s senior director of global automotive. The importance of range was a bit of a surprise, he said.

Gruber noted some carmakers suggest lower-range EVs are perfectly fine to meet the needs of the average consumer. After all, the average U.S. vehicle travels less than 40 miles a day, so an EV with, say, three times that range (120 miles) should be adequate for most uses.

It’s “unfortunate” carmakers take this tack, Gruber said, because the Power survey indicates what anyone who talks to buyers knows: higher ranges are better and put customers more at ease.

Among mass-market EVs, the three entries that scored above average on the Overall Customer Satisfaction Index were the Kia Niro EV (239 miles of EPA-rated range), the Chevrolet Bolt EV (259 miles) and the Hyundai Kona EV (258 miles). Among luxury entries, the Tesla Model S (334 or 387 miles) and Tesla Model 3 (315 or 353 miles for 2021) did better than the average satisfaction score.

Electric cars with lower ranges had customer satisfaction below average, including the Audi e-tron (222 miles) and the now-discontinued Volkswagen e-Golf (125 miles).

Fun-to-Drive Matters

Another surprise to the Power researchers was the importance to EV owners of driving enjoyment. An electric motor produces maximum torque (power) from 0 rpm, so EVs prove surprisingly fast away from a stop. They’re smoother, quieter and calmer once underway, and most offer some form of “one-pedal driving,” wherein lifting off the accelerator slows the car through regenerative braking.

Added together, all these factors can make EVs more enjoyable to drive than cars with combustion engines—and the EV drivers proved it.

In the mass-market segment, in fact, they told Power that driving enjoyment was actually more important than the cars’ quality and reliability. While that result was expected among luxury-car drivers, Gruber said, his company hadn’t necessarily expected it among the mass-market buyers.

Supercharger Systems Boosts Tesla

Available public-charging infrastructure was the third key factor in EV enjoyment. While charging and range are often the biggest worries about EVs among non-owners, those who actually operate the cars quickly learn the vast majority of their miles come from overnight charging at home or charging at work during the day.

Here, a Tesla effect came into play: owners in the luxury EV segment were a whopping 235 points (on a 1,000-point scale) more satisfied with public charging than were mass-market (non-Tesla) EV drivers. That’s due entirely to Tesla’s prescient decision to set up its own, dedicated, nationwide network of Supercharger fast-charging stations—a step no other carmaker has taken, even eight years after Tesla’s initiative.

Tesla owners were able to take road trips of more than 1,000 miles and even drive their EVs cross-country as early as 2014. But slower fast-charging speeds and a mishmash of different networks handicapped any non-Tesla EVs until very recently.

That’s starting to change, but there remains no question that the Tesla Supercharging system remains more consistent, more pervasive, and considerably easier to use than public fast-charging for any other EV.

Lower Cost to Operate EVs

The final aspect of EV customer satisfaction, according to the Power survey, is the lower operating cost of running the car. EVs are still pricier than comparable gasoline cars, but their per-mile cost is lower—and for those with low electric rates, much lower.

In a 25-mpg car using gasoline at $2.50 a gallon, it costs $10 to go 100 miles. That same distance can be covered in an EV for $3 to $4 if a customer pays the national average of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, depending on how efficiently the EV uses battery charge.

Many hurdles remain before electric cars will offer viable alternatives to gasoline vehicles in every segment. For one, only about half of U.S. households have access to dedicated off-street parking, which allows an EV charging station to be installed for overnight recharging. For another, the nationwide fast-charging network (except for Tesla owners) remains a work in progress. Support for more public EV chargers is part of the Biden administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

But the current decade will see a profusion of new EV models launched, with longer ranges, in vehicles that range from compact crossover utilities to full-size pickup trucks. They will all offer ranges of more than 200 miles—in some cases close to twice that—and the same driving enjoyment and lower operating costs that owners prize in today’s EVs.

Will they succeed in displacing greater numbers of gasoline vehicles, as must happen if we are to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from personal transport substantially? If the overall satisfaction of these EV early adopters is any indication, they will.

Even among owners on the low end of the satisfaction scale (600 to 750 points), more than three-quarters (77%) say they “definitely will” buy another EV. Fully 95% of the most-satisfied drivers (more than 900 points) say the same.

Power-PlugShare Partnership

J.D. Power is well-known for its many surveys of automotive customer satisfaction, measured in a slew of different ways. Usually Power works with manufacturers to survey their registered owners—randomly selecting from customer files provided by the carmaker in those states where that’s legal.

Tesla, however, virtually never gives Power access to its customer files. With Tesla making up roughly half of the EVs on U.S. roads, another approach was needed.

In this case, Power formed a partnership with PlugShare, which claims its app for locating EV charging stations is the world’s most popular, with more than 1 million downloads globally. The company also maintains a research panel of EV drivers, called PlugInsights, who are open to being surveyed about their electric cars.

About Power EVX

The Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Ownership Study released today summarizes the attitudes of almost 10,000 electric-car owners, from model years 2015 through 2021, who are part of the PlugInsights panel. That volume of responses, Gruber said, ensures a negligible margin of error in the company’s ratings.

The survey pool was weighted to reflect the actual sales percentages of different EV models, meaning Teslas and a handful of other vehicles, like the Chevy Bolt EV, made up the bulk of the vehicles owned.

It remains to be determined whether the experiences and attitudes of EV early adopters accurately reflects those of the more cautious buyer pool that must soon start buying EVs for the technology to spread into the broader market.

If this first Power survey shows anything, though, it’s that EV owners almost never want to go back to gasoline cars—which should make the world’s automakers both optimistic about the future and scared about their legacy products.