While the American attitude toward car-making has often been "the bigger the better," in recent years U.S. car-making innovation has turned to electric cars, with Elon Musk’s Tesla leading the way from their Californian base, but are the U.S. citizens ready to set aside their muscle cars and big pickup trucks, and ready to adopt electric vehicles?
In August of this year, President Joe Biden made a big statement regarding the future of American motoring, as he issued an executive order pledging that 50 percent of new American vehicles will be EVs by 2030. However, some environmental groups did not think this was good enough as it is not legally binding, and therefore (they believe) the automotive industry will ignore the target. Although EV sales have risen by an average of 17 percent in the U.S. every year, this is far lower than the 60 percent in Europe and the 36 percent in China, and they are also lagging in terms of public charging stations.
The factors that were used at Zutobi to determine the most EV ready U.S. states are:
- The number of registered EVs and the percentage of all registered vehicles that are electric
- The number of public chargers
- The number of EVs
- The average number of miles there are per charging point.
By combining these, we were able to calculate a score out of 10 for all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.
Top three EV-ready U.S. states
1. District of Columbia: EV-ready score: 8.16/10
Although it is not technically a state, the U.S. capital district of Columbia is the most EV-ready state. This is largely to do with the fact that there is a public EV charger every 2.66 miles on average, far better than the national average of one charger every 121 miles. 0.68 percent of all vehicles registered in the district are EVs, and this is the fourth highest in the country for this factor.
2. California – EV-ready score: 8.16/10
California ties for the most EV-ready state with a score of 8.16. The Golden State is the only one with more than one percent of all vehicles registered are electric. They also have over 30,000 more public charging points than the national average. However, because there are so many EVs in California, the number of public charging points struggle to keep up.
3. Vermont – EV-ready score: 7.55/10
Vermont is the third most EV ready state in America. Vermont only has 2.68 EVs per charging point, which shows that their infrastructure is ready to cope with EVs. Furthermore, there is a charging point every 17.13 miles on average, much lower than the US average of 121 miles.
The least prepared state is North Dakota, followed by Alaska, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Montana.
Click here for the full list.
