Destiny Miles & Jada Foureau | GNP contributors
Meghan Skelley loves her car so much she’s named it.
“His name is Rafiki,” the ECU student says of her 2017 Nissan Rogue, which got its unique name from her favorite movie, The Lion King. “My mom named her car Mufasa from the same movie, so I decided to keep going with the theme,” she says.
Skelley knows Rafiki won’t let her down like an electric car might. She likes “the assurance that my car isn’t going to randomly run out of [battery] power and leave me on the side of the road.”
Plus, she likes pumping gas, “as weird as it sounds,” she says.
Cameran Davan, also an ECU student, calls her car “Pearl,” after the color. “Peral” is her freedom, she says, adding that it would be hard to break up with Pearl for an EV.
Local nutrition specialist Matt Handshaw has 11 cars, combustion engines all, and he says he does “a lot of things that make [them] unique and fit me.” That involves modifying the exteriors and dressing up the engine bays in hopes of making them show cars.
That would be hard to do with EVs. They don’t have engine bays because they don’t have engines, at least not the kind people are used to.
Skelley, Cameran and Handshaw, like thousands of others, probably won’t be EV buyers anytime soon. They see their cars as a reflection of themselves, and that’s one of the hallmarks of car culture. It’s strong with Americans; they simply love their cars.
The Greenville News Project spent the past four months looking into what’s holding average people back from buying electric vehicles. Among the reasons it found are the high costs of EVs, “range anxiety” over EV battery life, and a lack of charging stations.
Cars as social status
Car culture—fueled by decades of advertising and sales pitches for combustion vehicles—plays on drivers’ self-esteem. You are your car, and social status can be bound up with it.
EVs can show social status too. That’s because they are “expensive toys with excellent performance," says Fabio Viola, a professor in the Department of Engineering at University of Palermo, Italy.
Viola knows a thing or two about that. EVs have been the focus of his research articles. Among them is 2021’s “Electric vehicles and psychology” in the journal Sustainability. His most recent work is a co-authored study about solar powered cars.
For EVs to take hold, people must “abandon the idea of [the vehicle] to show one's social status and simply [see them as] vehicles that take us from point A to point B,” he says.
However, EVs currently are not for the masses. They are very expensive and realistically, “a toy for the rich,” says Viola.
They’re also more appealing to women than men because of the “benefits to the environment,” says Lauren Dundes, a professor of sociology at McDaniel College in Maryland.
For Handshaw, his combustion cars are canvases upon which he paints his identity for all to see. He gives each of them a different presentation.
One of his favorites is “Princess,” so named because of the pink body covered in glitter stickers. “I like fast cars [too],” he says. “I like finding a platform that nobody has, like my car [Little Italian Stallion].”
He says he chooses cars based on his “perspective in life and the way [I] observe life.” And he doesn't care what people think of how his cars look. His wrist bracelets—one of them reads, “No *** Given”—say so.
Freedom is the car
The notion that cars mean freedom started in the 20th century when young drivers swept people away in an “automobile to help them escape from the supervision of parents and chaperons,” says Dr. Todd Bennett of ECU’s Department of History. The 20th century is his specialty.
Young people still do that, jumping in the car and ending up in towns over taking in a breath of freedom, he says.
Car culture started in the 1950s, and Bennett says it grew out of two things. On was mass production, which made cars affordable, and the other was federal government policy, which prioritized the quality of construction of roads. Cheap cars and good roads to drive them on.
Cars aren’t so inexpensive nowadays, and EVs in particular are hardly affordable, says ECU student Kyle Daniel. That's why “it will take [more] money” to change his mind on purchasing an EV, he says.
EVs are a hard sell
Besides the price tag, EVs are a hard sell because of “range anxiety” and a lack of charging stations. People fear running the car’s battery dry before they find a charging station, which are far and few between. Gas stations by comparison are everywhere.
ECU consumer behavior researcher Tiffany Blanchflower adds a few other barriers to purchasing an EV. There’s a lack of knowledge about EVs, she says, and “people don't understand the functions or benefits of an EV--there is no consumer education.”
Those barriers can be explained by a concept called consumer psychology. It’s about all the thought process people go through when making a decision to buy something and then engaging in the behavior of buying it.
Blanchflower says these psychological barriers could be lowered by adding “more infrastructure … to more rural areas, like Greenville.” She adds that the government should provide higher financial incentives, and sales pitches from dealerships should be more engaging. “Show how [EVs] can be relatable and beneficial,” she says.
Another barrier is the amount of time it takes to charge the car. People aren’t willing to trade a few minutes to fill up their vehicle’s gas tanks for waiting at least 30 minutes waiting for their EV to fully charge up. “That isn't really an equal trade,” says ECU communication student Kayla Dorfman.
“The unknown if I could charge my car causes a lot of concern,” she says. Fueling that is the lack of charging stations and range anxiety.
Pricey transition
ECU biology major Damaya Rosser says the one of the things holding her back from leaving her combustion car for an EV is price. “If EVs were more affordable, I would consider buying one,” she says.
Car dealers try to overcome that with discounts. Greenville’s Joe Pecheles Hyundai dealership is one. Sales manager Brianna Autman says EV SUVs on the lot are priced at about $48,000 to $56,000. That includes discounts “of about $1,900 to $2,200 off the original price,” she says.
Autman says she is honest with customers interested in buying EVs, “letting them know it is a commitment to owning an EV.” She also suggests planning ahead for long road trips to locate the most accessible charging stations along the way.
PlugShare, a website and app dedicated to electric vehicles and EV drivers, reports 43 charging stations in Pitt County. Nine of them are on the campuses of ECU.
Greenville Nissan sales manager Kent Perry recommends “apps and other technology to let you know the nearest charging stations.” He also notes the option of installing an EV charger at home for overnight charging.
North of the U.S. border, Canada’s Electric Vehicle Society in Canada aims to teach potential EV customers about EVs. “The methods we use is to educate people through their social media, websites and outreach programs,” says spokesperson Dave Vanalystyne.
The society emphasizes the benefits of cost avoidance because in the long run, an EV costs less to keep running than a combustion vehicle does. “EVs will save money from not paying high maintenance costs or gasoline,” Vanalystyne says.
EVs are ‘green’ machines
There are people interested in the good zero emissions EVs can do for the environment. “I would definitely be interested in how it benefits the planet though,” says Skelley, the ECU student.
“Combustion engines are also associated with harmful emissions…which isn't the case for EVs,” says Owen Bergquist, president of the ECU student organization ECO Pirates. EVs are zero-emission machines and because of that, “we can expect to see health improvements [in humans] and an improvement of air quality,” he says.
Still, there is still the issue of how disposing of burnt-out EV batteries will affect the environment.
ECU sustainability manager Chad Carwein says that over time, discarded EV batteries will eventually leach out the toxic minerals—cobalt, nickel and lithium—that that go into making them. One risk of that is contaminated drinking water, he says.
That can risk be reduced by reusing EV batteries and for those that can’t be reused, harvesting “those ‘precious minerals’ out of them,” says Carwein.
Reusing and recycling batteries could “bring down the overall cost of electric vehicles,” he says.
Miles and Foureau produced this story for the Fall 2023 course, In-Depth Reporting.
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