The Surprising Truth About EV Ownership and Reliability
Electric cars have received their fair share of bad press over the past year, from delayed deliveries, to slumping sales and disappointed consumers. And while that last item might be the most critical to EV adoption, the final word on consumer sentiment hasn’t yet been written.
With recent surveys highlighting a heightened number of issues when it comes to EV reliability, we decided to perform our own poll. Reaching out across the rapidly expanding electric car forum network on VerticalScope’s Fora platform we asked a simple question to actual EV owners: Are you disappointed with the reliability of your electric car?
Surprising Results
The results are shocking, but perhaps not how you might think.
Electric car owners (ranging from the Chevy Bolt to the Tesla Model 3 and everywhere in between) overwhelmingly responded favorably. In total 94.1% of respondents indicated that they aren’t disappointed with their EV reliability, meaning just 5.9% are!
Looking at brand and vehicle specific data, the three outliers are owners of Audi e-tron models, the Subaru Solterra and the very new Chevy Blazer EV - which has made numerous headlines recently for reliability issues. In total, e-Tron owners had the highest level of dissatisfaction at 20% while Subaru Solterra owners reported 14.8 percent agreeing with the statement that they are disappointed by the reliability of their EV. The Blazer EV was a close third with 14.3 percent indicating disappointment.
Both Tesa and Rivian scored slightly below average for sentiment at 6.5% and 7.1% respectively.
Few Complaints
As for the vehicles with the fewest complaints, owners of the Toyota bZ and Lucid Air both registered zero complaints, although the sample size was comparatively small to the other brands and may not be statistically significant. That said, the sample size for BMW i4 owners was significant (representing the second largest grouping in this survey) and they are an incredibly happy group with 98.2 percent satisfied with their car’s reliability.
For more information on this survey contact Colum Wood, VP Content cwood@verticalscope.com
Methodology
For this survey, AutoGuide polled just under 800 members across 15 electric car communities who are members of the Fora platform, which is home to over 1,000 unique communities and 55 million registered members.
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Curious why the bZ4X is at the top, but the Solterra is at almost at the bottom. Isn't the Solterra basically a 2-motor version of the bZ4X?