Electric Vehicles at the Los Angeles Auto Show

I spent a few hours this afternoon at the Los Angeles Auto Show, checking out the displays of the carmakers that are in the process of rolling out EVs. This year, I went on a “public” (vs. “press”) day, to get a sense for the overall market appreciation for EVs: How many people are interested? Who are they?

Here’s an observation:

If you spend time at EVWorld or AutoBlogGreen, you may conclude that the whole world is beating a path to EVs. Of course, the vast majority of this super-skewed audience craves EVs, but they’re not at all representative of the typical car consumer; just a few seconds at today’s show served as a slap-in-the-face type reminder of this obvious fact.

At a certain point, I found myself standing in Nissan’s area — a bright, clean car lot of a half-acre or so in size, with many dozen gas-powered cars and trucks — and one lonely EV: the LEAF. I couldn’t help notice the swarms of people taking pictures of one another smiling in front of the sleek, shiny, GT-R sportscar — and the occasional tree-hugger asking questions of the lady assigned to the LEAF.

So let’s start with what we knew all along: the first EV adopters will be a slim minority with a decided commitment to eco-friendliness. The question then becomes: how quickly will everyone else follow?

Though I’ve written dozens of articles on the EV Adoption Curve, there’s no way to answer that question by performing some sort of survey or experiment. Yet I continue to think that the answer is that it will happen very quickly. Gas prices creeping up coupled with clever public service announcements (like these fantastic pieces from Plug-In America) – as well as ads for the Nissan LEAF, the Chevy Volt, the Mitsubish i-MiEV, the new plug-ins from Honda, Toyota, BMW, Volvo, Coda, Tesla, Fisker, etc. — and the positive word of mouth that is essentially guaranteed — will combine to move the car-buying public in this direction as fast as the automakers want to make it happen.

Ah!  So how fast do they want to make it happen?  That’s a question for another day.