Will you stick with the same car brand when you buy electric?
Just received some follow-up data to a post I wrote back in December 2010 about top electric vehicle brands. The research, cooked up by Zpryme Research & Consulting with funding from Airbiquity, offers a slightly different twist on past numbers because one of the main things it looks at is who plans to stick with their current car brand when they swap from a conventional engine technology over to an electric car.
Turns out the bigger winner if you look at things this way could be Toyota, despite all the recall black eyes it has suffered in the past two years: the survey showed the 57 percent of Toyota owners would prefer buying a Toyota electric vehicle. Here's how things stack up for some other players:
- Honda (54 percent)
- Ford (48 percent)
- Chevrolet (43 percent)
- Nissan (43 percent)
- Hyundai (28 percent)
- Dodge (25 percent)
- Chrysler (22 percent
- GMC (18 percent)
Of course, this assumes that those brands will have electric vehicles available when people are ready to buy.
There's another stat, which might be especially handy for automakers seeking to get people to switch. This one gauges the likelihood that a current owner of the brand in question will buy an electric vehicle sometime in the next two years. The answer here may surprise: Hyundai owners were the most likely to make this sort of purchase, with 45 percent of them expressing intent to buy. Here's how the rest of the big car brands pan out:
- Nissan (43 percent)
- Toyota (43 percent)
- GMC (35 percent)
- Honda (36 percent)
- Ford (35 percent)
- Chevrolet (35 percent)
- Chrysler (30 percent)
- Dodge (27 percent)
One of the things that this last stat says to me loud and clear: GMC better get its act together when it comes to electric vehicles, or it might see a migration of its owners to other brands over the next several years.