Women are less likely to buy electric vehicles than men
19thnews.org
19thnews.org
Early charging stations in the United States have been placed in inconvenient places, too. Andrea Colomina, the sustainable communities program director at Green Latinos, said one of the first locations to get a charger in New York City was the parking lot of a zoo.
“The first generation [of charging stations] was really not holistically thought out. As usual, because men were making most of the decisions, they were not walking through the scenarios,” she said. “You have to think through what is the experience of every potential user.”
What is obviously missing from this discussion, is that economic factors and available space drive decisions like this. It's not simply that men are not thinking about women. Colomina is quoted as some kind of expert, but she is just offering bromides and commonplaces, nothing specifically related to factors that drove the early placement of charging stations.
And that's the problem!
You can't just focus on economics and space, you also need to consider the users. Placing the stations in "inconvenient places" will definitely hamper use. People, especially women, don't like going into potentially unsafe locations either. I have known people who avoid certain gas stations at night because they're dark and look dangerous.
Destination charging has been part of the EV vision since forever. It's perfectly reasonable for anyone who values safety or convenience to hold off until the infrastructure is mature enough to suit their needs. It's a bit silly to blame men for not building everything yesterday, though. It's doubly silly to frame this as a failure of imagination. Contractors and landlords don't take payment in imagination.
Likewise, lower price brackets have been the goal of the EV vision since forever (Tesla Master Plan, 2006). However, as with any technology, the users who are willing to tolerate more bugs and higher prices have to come first before the money/experience gleaned from them can be used to address the broader market. It's perfectly reasonable to hold off an EV purchase until EV manufacturers put out a competitive offering in your price bracket, but again, it's a bit silly to blame men for not building everything yesterday. These things take time.
It's not "men" - as much as it's not "women" that mess things up or do things wrong.
It's such a cheap cop-out. Maybe people should be more informed about what an electric car entails before buying one, realizing it's a pain to charge it, then blame an entire population segment instead of blaming themselves and their lack of research.
1. clickbait title that ends in "here's why" cliffhanger.
2. top comment leads with "pretty sad article".
I guess I can skip it and go on with my day...
> What is obviously missing from this discussion, is that economic factors and available space drive decisions like this.
Of course gas stations were placed with similar concerns and are sometimes similarly out of the way or in depressed areas, but there are a lot more of them and some better-located ones exist, due to history / path-dependency.
Proximity to amenities, to neighborhoods with high ev ownership, distance to the nearest charging station, traffic etc... Dozens of factors.
Meanwhile of course: will women (~50% of the population) be willing to use this is itself an economic consideration.
These are all factors that can be readily encompassed under the heading of economics and available space.
The best situated, safest, cheapest and most desirable locations for fueling vehicles are already occupied by gas stations. There is nothing that women can do about that, just by looking at the situation differently -- that's the nonsense underlying the expert's commentary.
You're thinking about it wrong, like it's some kind of blame. It's "if the primary decision makers were women this would have been a showstopping problem" with something completely different needing to take its place.
You're one decision too far in the logic, "given everything about the existing design of charging stations where should we place them" when it would have been, "good lord we're designing these things to be unattended and put in garages and parking lots. Yikes. A woman visibly broadcasting that she's immobile in an isolated location for 30 minutes at night -- good plan, I see no problems with this."
Seeing a problem and fixing a problem are two completely different things. Seeing a problem is a mental exercise, fixing a problem is an economic exercise. In this case, fixing the problem involves "just" buying, leasing, or otherwise occupying the most expensive premium public real estate. There's nothing "just" about this idea. It's expensive AF, and the person who wants more safety than current infrastructure can offer also wants lower prices than infrastructure can offer. How do you propose to square this circle? Where does the money come from?
Shouting "showstopper!" is not an answer, but fortunately the EV movement has a plan, one that will actually work. They plan to first address the needs of enthusiasts who are willing to put up with high prices and patchy infrastructure, and then use that money & mindshare to fill in the infrastructure to serve everyone else, both through destination charging (so you don't have to sit with the car) and through gargantuan factories that can drive the economics of scale to compete on lower price brackets.
Blaming men for not building this all yesterday is a bit silly. It'll happen. It's been the goal since 2006. There was no way to make it happen yesterday, but it will happen tomorrow. Patience.
Like it's not hard too imagine a world where the rollout was to partner with gas stations and 24 hour convenience stores/restaurants where there are lights, people, and cameras.
This is a roll-out; women are just as proficient with difficult finance decisions as men even when those decisions don't make initial conditions ideal for women.
The women described are making rational choices here. Safety is paramount. The market isn't currently for them, and the people who have created the status quo have done so foolishly, because there weren't enough women in the room when these decisions were made.
* The desirable, safe, &c locations for fueling cars are for the most part already occupied by gas stations, so it might be that there are only a few locations available that 100% will use. It is rational to obtain those few and then add locations that 50% will use to reduce load on the locations that 100% will use.
The idea that women in the room would have changed this is not plausible, because the constraints are not any different for women planners in this situation than for men planners.
That being said, (as a dude) there are gas stations I won't stop at for even 3 minutes, let alone 30.
If anyone figures out how to align the incentives you'll have a customer base basically immediately.
Now read some stories from women who've also made that extra effort and then some, having more experience and knowledge than the mechanics trying to rip them off, and still being given the runaround more often than not.
A shady mechanic will be shady to some degree to everyone to the degree they think they can get away with it. No amount of self-education on the part of women lets them escape the shadiness.
A lot of things are different, walking at night alone, going for a run in a secluded place, asking random people for direction/a light/&c, ...
Even the idea of being "bothered" while filling gas suggests a certain social norm that varies based on which social norms you subscribe to.
Yet those are where most 1st gen chargers were placed, and are the same places the quoted woman in the article is complaining about.
Yes they're less convenient, but so is charging an EV (compared to refueling). Until charging only takes 5-10 mins, the best way to offset inconvenience of time is to place chargers in places where you can multitask.
If approximately half of the population is at all afraid to exist in public, then maybe your feelings getting hurt about sweeping statements is a little less important in the grand scheme of things.
It's called empathy, look it up if you need to.
Are you often sexually harassed in public spaces?
An un-housed person asking you for cash at a gas station doesn't put your experience on par with what women experience every day.
I knew the answer in the article was safety before I read it. We live in a society where women feel unsafe in normal situations us men never even consider.
Be better.
As to how this relates to the overall discussion, I'd suspect that men and women have similar safety concerns, but men are just more likely to lie about it on surveys.
Talk to more women, I'd say.
I have been scared in my life, and I have known many men I would describe as being generally-fearful people, but I have never met any man who spent as much of their life considering physical safety as one of their highest priorities every single day of their lives, and I have talked to many women who describe that feeling in different words.
I think it's good to acknowledge that men can be, and sometimes are, scared. But I think you do a disservice to both men and women when you look at "violent crime" stats (skewed heavily by gang activity most of us will never encounter regardless of gender) and believe that men and women are generally equally concerned about safety. That flies in the face of the experiences of nearly everyone, I think.
Put another way: there are some neighborhoods in which I would not like to walk alone at night, but I have never once worried about being attacked while walking for exercise in a tony suburb in the afternoon. Any time I've encountered a woman while doing so, they would cross the street, be holding keys in their hands, or both. I don't think I'm a scary-looking guy, but as an unknown man they encountered, even in a tony suburb in the afternoon, concern for their safety prompted them to take action.
You don't have to believe me, and I can't convince you. But if you ever listen to women, read women, or even believe the comments you see on this page from women, you might just understand life a little more.
This illustrates my exact point - you are basing your opinion on the number of people who have opened up to you about their feelings. Men in general don't do that, especially when it involves fear and vulnerability.
> But I think you do a disservice to both men and women when you look at "violent crime" stats (skewed heavily by gang activity most of us will never encounter regardless of gender)
Inter-gang violence is definitely overrepresented in murder and shooting stats, but I doubt it has much of an impact on general violent crime stats. Gang members typically don't call the cops when they are victims of crimes, and are unlikely to answer crime victimization surveys from the government.
> Any time I've encountered a woman while doing so, they would cross the street, be holding keys in their hands, or both.
That isn't normal. Either the women in your neighborhood listen to way too many true crime podcasts, or you are scarier looking than you think.
> But if you ever listen to women, read women, or even believe the comments you see on this page from women, you might just understand life a little more.
The condescension really is not needed or constructive.
You doubt, and you suspect, and you believe. More than three-quarters of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported[0]. Violent crimes involving injury, or murder, are reported by the medical personnel involved. When you rely on one set of statistics to negate widespread fears, and ignore all reports or statistics that support them, you don't end up with a clear view of things.
The experiences I describe are 100% normal in suburbs all around America. It's not just once or twice, and I'm not the only man to have noticed this.
If you don't want condescension, base your opinions on facts rather than counter-factual beliefs and feelings. I'm linking to statistics and reports, and you're parroting stereotypical generalizations countered by comments from women on this very page.
I am taking your statements at face value, but at this point it is starting to honestly feel like you're trolling, so carry on.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/251934/usa--percentage-o...
Agreed that this discussion is going nowhere useful though.
If you want to play red pill semantic games around it's not safe for men either, I pity you and the lack of empathy and understanding you have.
It's also very infrequent where the thought of my personal safety crosses my mind in locations like malls, rest stops and gas stations. I've never felt the need to carry pepper spray or a weapon. I've never used my keys as improvised brass knuckles to cross a dimly lit parking lot.
I stroll the world as a master with all the privilege afforded to six foot tall white male.
Good grief, most people simply don't act like this. Nor should they. Think about that.
About most people not doing it: first, it's a lie; there's a huge amount of rape hidden away in homes. Second: people don't do it because they are scared of the other people with guns and cages; which proves my point that might makes right in the real world.
I thought on HN intellectual honesty mattered...
In no way was my comment offensive, thoughtless or otherwise worthy of censorship.
https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politic...
Time and a place.
But if collectively, women are saying, no it is not most times and most places, you're in the wrong.
Look, it's really simple. If you want a better chance of meeting someone who might be receptive to your flirting, you do it when they're feeling safe and secure.
Men disproportionally buy electric cars because they disproportionately buy cars for reasons other than pure practicality.
But this isn't some "problem for women". Men who DGAF about electric cars and just want basic transportation also have the same problem: they are not yet competitive as basic transportation.
Yeah and they're also leaving out that the men typically buy electric because they are insanely fast, have low 0-60 times and is something new to modify and tweak on. The aftermarket parts and tuning options are currently exploding in popularity with the same consumer base even with the manufacturers locked down ecosystem.
Should we rip down tinkering? Should we rip down hacking?
There's a very large majority of the population NOT interested in either of above.
But for a huge portion of the US car-driving population, electric is more practical.
You're being intentionally obtuse.
There's a federal tax credit for electric cars. The Chevy Bolt is $27k. The VW ID.4 is around $32k after the federal credit. There are a whole bunch more.
Regardless, the original point is that EVs aren't practical, and that's not true except for apartment dwellers. The US is covered in suburbs of single family homes and the average commute distance is 41 miles round trip. Electric vehicles are practical.
I really want to buy an EV. I have a single family home. And my average commute is < 10 miles per day. I'm the perfect candidate, right? Well, I live in a cold climate, and I drive 150+ miles most weekends. And once per month I take a 300 mile trip, one way, with no charger at my destination.
It is possible to do these drives? Yes. I can get a Bolt and cross my fingers that the Electrify America charger I need is operational. But for the same or similar price I could get a Prius/Corolla/Camry/Accord Hybrid which would provide a better experience overall for that specific use case. And everything around the drivetrain is also well built.
But if you still insist that my use case is silly, and most people can get around just fine in a Bolt, I propose this: Most people can get around just fine in a Versa/Accent/Rio/Mirage for $10K less than the Bolt, too.
I think you're missing the underlying point, which is that electric cars are arguably better for the environment, which is a problem for all of us, so if women aren't buying electric cars, that's an environmental problem.
The author: "Gender, climate and sustainability reporter"
"Fast forward to today, and despite the fact that consumer choices viewed as more environmentally minded are stereotyped as feminine, men actually make up the majority of electric car drivers."
I too will answer that I care about climate change in any opinion or political poll. However, I am currently emitting CO2 to heat my home, eat my lunch, and post this comment. I simply do not have the practical means to do otherwise.
I actually mentioned 3 sentences, including the categorization of the article above the title. Please stop being ridiculous.
Why do you think the author, and we, care about whether women buy electric cars? Because of the environment! Otherwise, I wouldn't care either.
So right now electric isn't worth the price difference for what it delivers. Men buy it because it is trendy, women don't care about tech trends so they wait until the technology is more mature.
I don't think it's nearly as clearcut as that, but rather, we are at an inflection point where preference patterns are being sorted out again.
Many women who have access to home charging already drive electric, but they tend to be much more well off and suburban. I personally know a some low to moderate income women who would like to drive an EV but can't afford one yet, new or used.
Many men are also trendiness-averse. A large part of it also has to do with social signaling, i.e. do you live in an area that is generally pro-petroleum or anti-petroleum.
This depends on what you value. As you illustrate with your explanation of why men buy it, which is one explanation among many.
If you prefer avoiding the mechanic, or want to pay less over the lifetime of your car, or you anticipate, while contemplating a long-term purchase, that the ICE infrastructure becoming more expensive and less reliable, or you want to reduce your personal carbon footprint, or most of your trips are local and you can charge at home, etc., electric cars are already worth the price difference.
Which is another way of saying, men buy it to impress women.
A comedian once said, all men would live in cardboard boxes, if not for the eyes of women.
Owning one you have to overcome the stereotypes of it being for insufferable tech bros and midlife crisis dad cars.
Maybe if you’re talking about the Model S or Taycan or other expensive EVs, but then you could say the same about ICE cars in the same price range.
It's pretty impossible to generalize about what impresses women, but the "drive a luxury car" method sort of lost its charm sometime around the turn of the 21st century.
That was my regularly scheduled reminder that, no matter how hard I try to keep other people's perspectives in mind, I still have blind spots. In retrospect it's obvious — there's plenty of service stations I can't imagine feeling safe at if I was a woman, alone and just waiting for my car to charge up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-...
And also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender
"A 2000 global study on homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that men accounted for ... 79% of the victims"
You would need to find statistics on sexual and non-sexual assault, theft, robbery and so on in quiet areas on above-average-income people, and compare the rates for men and women.
I don't want to spell it out for you, but women are disproportionately the victims of different kinds of crime than homicide.
In the SF Bay area, I regularly had to deal with dudes approaching me at the pump to beg for money, often berating me for turning them away.
Recently, there was a car-jacking at a local gas station. Again, utterly dull suburban USA.
Stuff happens all the time whether you experience it or not. Sometimes it's violent, other times it just feels like it could turn violent. Most times it's not recorded in any static.
However, on road trips, I've charged at lots of Tesla Superchargers where even I, as a CIS male, feel a bit uncomfortable. Eg, random mall / grocery store parking lots at 3am, where nothing is open, the lighting is poor, etc.
EDIT: The other consideration is that while you're charging, you have to get out of the vehicle to unook from the charger. Eg, the car will not go into drive while the cable is attached. So that does not leave you any options if an attacker approaches your car while charging.
Only for people living in Suburbia.
Not sure about the percentage of people owning a car and a garage / or at least private parking space close to a private outlet in the USA, but here in europe this is still a huge limiter for EV. If I need to charge my vehicule in only a handful of the available parking spaces with charging station available in my neighborhood, the EV proposal becomes substancially less attractive, both in term of practicability and financially.
Hmmm.
[edit]
nm. As others have said, it looks like it's just the regular Section 179 deduction.
It's for EV commercial trucks, basically.
But now that the article mentioned it, it does make sense that people don't want to find themselves in this situation and plan trips so that charging happens during the day.
This seems like the biggest practical reason to me. With homeownership getting difficult due to skyrocketing prices and interest rates, having a gas car is just much more reliable compared to the hit-and-miss experience with electric.
As a concrete example, there is a ~40 mile gap between charging stations in the relatively well-populated area near me, and the same area contains about ten gas stations. I would not advise any friends of mine in the area to rely on electric charge being widely or safely available -- this just tends to get magnified for anyone who has more of a reason to worry about their safety.
I hear over and over again about the supposed complexity introduced, but Volt users who switched to the Bolt on reddit mention that they haven't seen big differences in maintenance costs.
The FUD about hybrids is insane. I've yet to read anything convincing enough to lead me that BEV is better than PHEV.
I have noticed that the more intense the issue, the more radicalize, high polarized, even lies, emerge.
People should be overwhelmed with joy, happiness, that people want hybrids, it gets those who literally cannot use pure electric, to use electric ... as you say, 90% of the time.
A win-win!
People even relentlessly shoot down h2, with all sorts of made up claims and anger. Yet h2 is better than these massive, heavy, hard to recycle battery packs.
There should be happiness at anything that is a line towards less pollution. But no. There are angry camps of "my choice is perfect, and I must deny you your choice!" camps.
Ah well. Humans.
Sorry - trying to find source.
the right stat to get would be people who can and want to charge and look at the miles electric vs gas.
Have photos of the charging station appear in the road planning interface? Live video stream?
Have bright lights at the charging station?
Resurrect that charging robotic arm that would plug without having people leave their car?
Bright lights won't protect anyone in the middle of nowhere where there will be no one around to see it go down no matter the lighting conditions.
And while it actually seems true that larger cars are safer to drive, it is pretty ironic that more larger cars on roads actually decrease safety among all drivers.
To have a discussion at all of any kind we need basic assumptions on communication protocol and logic is one of key ingredients.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Poland/Uni...
They are more expensive to manufacture, but cheaper to use, therefore I believe at this point all taxis / Ubers should be electric. Maybe if Elon didn't push ,,self driving'' so hard and just thought about all the needs of taxi companies (maintainance guarantees), we wouldn't have as many car sales, but the charge points and maintainance (which can have higher margins than traditional cars as it is cheaper) would make up for it, and air in cities would be much cleaner already.
This is Ruining Electric Cars
* If the pump at a gas station is broken they put up a sign and cover the nozzle.
* It works with every car without an adapter. These things should have a fallback to a wall-plug since every electric car has one. Yeah, it will take forever but it will work.
* The default experience assumes no account required and if there's an account it's a barcode scannable rewards card or phone number entry.
* If you don't have NFC payments you can use any credit card in existence and if that doesn't work you can walk into the shop to a human who can charge your card inside, take cash, or run a manual entry credit card by typing in the numbers and if all else fails just manually override the pump.
* The entire process of selecting your the kind of gas you want is standard physical buttons with a screen that displays the price and lights up to indicate that that's the next action.
* The transaction doesn't finish until you put the nozzle back so it's impossible to mess up.
It's truly amazing how the people who designed these horrible plastic atrocities learned absolutely nothing from the current state-of-the-art. Vending machines have better UX.
If you want to sell a handful of exotic cars then it is OK to target men. If you are going to make a mass-market vehicle that changes the world it has to have a broader appeal.
It is much more nuanced. It is about charging infrastructure and how undependable they could be, which adds to the anxiety manifold.
And poor charger upkeep. Seems to be a recurring theme for some providers.
Using the word anxiety specifically to target women seems especially sinister
EV chargers are always running, 24/7, however women won't be happy charging past sundown.
Seems like the solution is a panic button and security patrol for EV stations.