Source: Electric Car Pledge: is carbon the right reason to get buyers to switch?

The challenge is that environmental concerns are only one of four or five different purchase motivations for buying a plug-in car.

As described several years ago in research conducted at the University of California at Davis, electric-vehicle buyers include :

• Early adopters: who want to be the very first to have the latest, greatest, coolest tech, which for cars 10 years ago was a hybrid, but is now an electric;
• Greens: buyers who view reducing overall global carbon emissions and their personal carbon footprint as important;
• Energy-security hawks: who want to cut the influence of oil-exporting countries, and reduce the massive cost of sustaining the oil supply (military vets are big here); and
• The cheap: buyers who build spreadsheets of lifetime ownership costs and conclude that even a pricier electric car saves them money in the long run.