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Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Struggle to Maintain Owner Loyalty, Reports Edmunds.com
Edmunds.com
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Hybrid and Electric Vehicles Struggle to Maintain Owner Loyalty, Reports Edmunds.com
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — April 21, 2015 — Car buyers are trading in hybrid and electric cars for SUVs at a higher rate than ever before, according to a new analysis from car-buying platform Edmunds.com. The analysis offers a surprising look at how today's gas prices are drawing hybrid and EV owners toward gas-guzzling vehicles at a much more accelerated pace than in recent years.
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In Q1 2015, 28% of people trading-in a Leaf purchased another advanced drive train (Hybrid or PEV) vehicle. Volt is 35% while Prius (liftback) is 52%.
Jessica Caldwell
Director, Industry Analysis
Edmunds.com
Well, Omar,
Few people like to publicly admit they have made an expensive mistake. However, when the time comes to actually buy another... The statistics seem to say they are not doing what they said they would. There is nothing wrong with PEV's, but they are currently as much of a vanity purchase as any sports car.
The EV community is very interested in how these numbers are parsed out in context. You kindly mentioned Q1 stats of 2015. Would you be willing to disclose a wider time frame, like a full year, say 2014? I would also like to point out that as the families of EV owners have grown bigger (like mine), few plug-ins have branched out into SUV territory. Could your data really be suggesting the need for a mass market "advanced drive train" SUV?
Joe
Portland, OR
Also, do you really genuinely think that you're going to get good data for people trading in old EVs when modern EVs have been on the road for like 4 years now?
This is disingenuous reporting at best, edmunds. You're better than this.
I'd be happy to provide more numbers for you.
In 2013, 44% of Leaf owners traded in their Leaf for another advanced drive vehicle (Hybrid or PEV.) In 2014, that number was 41% . In 2015, it's fallen to 28%.
In 2013, 38% of Volt owners traded in their Volt for another advanced drive vehicle. In 2014, that number was 41%. In 2015, it's fallen to 35%.
In 2013, 64% of Prius (plugless) owners traded in their Prius for another advanced drive vehicle. In 2014, that number was 59%. In 2015, it's fallen to 52%.
I chose to share these vehicles as they represent the most well known and best selling vehicles of the three different advanced drive systems.
You bring up a good point and I do think there is interest in a mass market SUV EV for growing families like yours but with SUV size comes additional weight which presents challenges for EV efficiency. Also, the problem is scale. In 2015, market share is a actually down for PEVs. In Q1 2014, PEVs made up 0.6% of the market. In Q1 2015, it is 0.5%. That might not seem like a big difference but the assumption was once there were more vehicles available and better infrastructure sales would grow incrementally. Some forecasts called for hockey stick like growth adoption.
Automakers are also struggling to make these a profit on these vehicles. Just yesterday, Ford laid off 700 people at their Wayne, Michigan plant:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/ford-to-lay-off-700-workers-at-plant-making-small-cars-hybrids
Lastly, I agree with another poster that is is still early days for loyalty data for these types of vehicles but we will continue to monitor this activity. When loyalty and market share for PEV changes, we will be sure to report that as well.
Jessica Caldwell
Director, Industry Analysis
Edmunds.com
I show I commute 200 miles a day in my i3... no need to argue on the superiority of EVs compared to obsolete gasoline cars. Better acceleration, no maintenance needed, better durability.
A disruptive kind will always struggle to establish itself but no more when it becomes superior by a wide margin to what it tries to replace.
I think that Ford doesn't have an EV agenda in fact for most car manufactures I think EVs are a headache. That being said Ford as a business must want to know the facts so it can better adapt.
Is it possible that the reason the results seem to contradict between the two surveys, is that if barely 5 years into mass market of EVs the people that are trading their EV they are more likely to be of those not satisfied and thus are a poor indicator as to the general EV owner sentiment.
"With the benefits of diesel being overstated, the market is now slowly beginning to turn against diesel cars, even in countries like the UK, where they had overtaken petrol car sales.
Combine this with the improvements in battery technology for electric cars and the slowly increasing trickle of electric car charging points and the odds begin to stack in electric’s favor – for many people at least."
VW’s diesel emissions revelations will help electric car makers like Tesla (thenextweb.com)
I am curious how the customer loyalty is measured in your analysis? Is it based on a single sell-buy transaction at a dealer? In other words, does it only identify loyalty within a single dealer sell-buy transaction? I understand that a Volt owner leasing another Volt gets counted as "loyalty", but what about a Prius Plugin lease holder turning in their cat at the end of the lease and leasing a Volt? Given that these are two separate transactions at two different dealers (sale of Prius, purchase of a Volt), would this transaction also be counted as loyalty in your numbers?
Thus, I am curious if you have access to data at plugin car ownership at a household level? This might be a better indicator of "plug loyalty" and a better identifier of whether owning one plugin car is more likely to result in repeat plugin car purchases. I am seeing anecdotal evidence that having one plugin car in a family increases the likelihood of having a second plugin car also so I am curious if the data actually supports this observation.
P.S. I also second the earlier comments about the need to exclude hybrid car sales from plugin car (PHEV and PEV) sales data analysis. The more relevant trend to observe is how plugin cars are doing as a category and not include hybrids into that grouping. They represent two different purchase segments and buyer preferences.