The deals also helped fuel an aggressive price war led by market leader Tesla as it sought to defend its market share. That helped boost sales, but also reduced the value of used electric vehicles.
Jessica Caldwell, chief insight officer at Edmunds, said that with more people looking for deals due to the rising cost of car ownership, heavily discounted used models flooding the market would likely act as a “gateway” to electric vehicle ownership.
Average U.S. gas prices topped $4 a gallon this week for the first time since 2022 following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, while the average purchase price of a new car is at near-record levels. Analysts attribute weak overall sales in the first quarter of this year in part to growing concerns about affordability.
Against that backdrop, Duncan Aldred, president of GM’s North American business, said this week at an automotive forum in New York that the Detroit auto giant had seen “a spike of interest” in electric vehicles among buyers over the past month.
However, analysts said it was still too early to predict whether high gasoline prices would translate into a significant increase in sales of new electric vehicles, pointing to lingering concerns among mainstream consumers about their ability to make long trips in a large country with inadequate charging infrastructure.
Manufacturers such as Ford and GM have announced plans for a new generation of more affordable electric vehicles to be launched in the coming years. Meanwhile, Caldwell said, buyers would probably be surprised at how much used electric models had improved since they last shopped.
“In 2022, the last time we saw a gas price increase, you would have been looking at vehicles from around 2019, when electric vehicles had not yet reached that level,” he said.
Mike Murphy, co-founder of the lobby group EVs For All America, added that many of the obstacles to electric vehicle adoption were being quietly addressed, noting that construction of charging infrastructure in the United States had accelerated last year despite slowing electric vehicle sales.
“The dream of mass adoption of electric vehicles here in the United States is not dead yet,” he said.
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