Assessing progress and equity in the distribution of electric vehicle rebates using appropriate comparisons

To meet aggressive transportation-electrification goals, electric-vehicle (EV) sales must expand deeper into mainstream markets. To address equity concerns, EV sales must go beyond the mainstream to increase access to EV benefits. To support needed expansion in sales and equity, this research examined the characteristics of California consumers that claimed the statewide rebate for EVs purchased/leased in 2017–2020. It weighted n = 32,524 survey responses to represent N = 193,167 rebate recipients and focused on 2020 adoption, trends over time, and differences between consumers of battery and plug-in hybrid EVs. Importantly, incentive-recipient characteristics were compared using Market-Majority Metrics to those of California new-vehicle buyers as a more appropriate baseline. Results raise the possibility that findings about the equity of EV-rebate-recipient incomes based upon comparisons to Census data could largely and more simply be findings about new-car buying, rather than particular to EV-incentive recipients. Rebate-recipient incomes continued to progress toward the mainstream despite the dominance of Tesla consumers and COVID. The distribution of rebate funding by income is now roughly comparable to new-vehicle buyers. Indeed, fewer rebated PHEV consumers (52%) had household incomes greater than $100,000 than even new-vehicle buyers (56%). Except for age, PHEV consumers are more similar to typical vehicle buyers than BEV consumers are. The characteristics most distinguishing of EV consumers are now home ownership and male sex/gender identification. Market-Majority Metric “heat map tables” are developed as an intuitive but quantitative tool to highlight the length of the road ahead that EV markets must travel toward the mainstream and beyond to priority populations.