When you explore the political, media, and marketing landscape surrounding EVs, you’ll find plenty of focus on environmental topics to encourage their quick and widespread adoption. But does that approach line up with what people actually care about?

We used Predicta’s Amplified Intelligence tool to compare the perceived importance of environmental topics to more traditional vehicle topics. We aggregated environmental facets like climate, emissions, pollution, sustainability, renewable energy, and “green” into one all-encompassing category to compare it fairly to topics like quality, value, and performance.

Here's a list of topics that are top of mind to EV buyers, along with the percentage of time that they mention the topic in a vehicle review:

Quality (69%)

Value (63%)

Driving Performance (56%)

Battery Range (53%)

Charging (52%)

Environmental Impact (23%)

Display Screen (22%)

Driver Assist Features (20%)

Environmental topics – all of them combined! – show up in less than a quarter of vehicle reviews. That’s on par with driver assist features or hooking your phone up so you can listen to music. Now we can expect this from Tesla buyers because the company has taken an “awesome car that happens to be electric” approach from the start. But this same trend largely holds true for non-Tesla buyers as well.

While environmental concerns do play a role in purchase behavior and societal EV adoption, they only come into play if all of the other basic questions are answered. (Will this thing keep me safe? Can I afford it? Will it do what I need it to do? Can I rely on it?)

Our friend, Buzz Smith “The EVangelist”, recently said it best: “Stop focusing on the environment, since a large number of our fellow citizens don't believe or care about it. To drive adoption (pun intended) focus on the main reasons most people buy cars: styling, acceleration, handling, ride, low cost of ownership, high MPG(e)…”

What would you like to know about how people perceive EVs? DM us or put it in the comments below, and we’ll see what our AI engine has to say about it!

Predicta automates competitive product intelligence using deep learning AI techniques. Gleaned from thousands of sources, Predicta delivers Amplified Intelligence to marketers less expensively and more quickly than traditional market research. For more information email info@predicta.com.