Electric vehicles close to ‘tipping point’ of mass adoption
I&#x27;m really curious to see how the used electric car market shapes up.<p>New cars (electric or not) are pretty expensive.  The average price of a new car in the US just topped $40k, which is out of reach of many car buyers.  The people who buy new obviously tend to be well-off, and are often older.  Then at some point down the road, those cars end up in the hands of (on average) younger, less-wealthy folks.<p>But younger folks might not want the same thing as older folks.  One niche example is the manual transmission.  Looking at a car like the Mazda Miata - something like a third of those are sold new with an automatic transmission.  The buyers (again, maybe older) don&#x27;t want to bother shifting their own gears, so they pay an extra $1k or so for an automatic.  But when those cars are affordable used cars, and the market is younger car enthusiasts, Miatas with an automatic transmission are worth quite a bit less.  The preferences of the new $30k convertible buyers aren&#x27;t the same as the preferences of the used $5k convertible buyers, even though those $30k cars eventually become the $5k cars.<p>With electric cars I wonder if we&#x27;ll see a similar divide.  I know a few people (software engineers who own their own single family homes) who have bought new electric cars.  Folks I know from less wealthy walks of life (daycare providers, teachers, grad students, etc) have not bought used electric cars.  Surely that&#x27;s at least partially because used electric cars don&#x27;t exist in great numbers, but I also wonder if those folks (people who rent, or move often, etc) might be less enamored with a car where they don&#x27;t know they&#x27;ll be able to charge it at home, or a depleted battery pack means less range or costly repair, etc.<p>I&#x27;m hoping for an electric future and I want my next car to be electric ... I&#x27;m just really curious to see if&#x2F;when middle- and lower-class Americans start adopting these in large numbers.