Inside the Ancira Kia dealership on the Northwest Side, adorned with giant red and green Christmas bows, a few models of the South Korean automaker’s electric vehicles sat alongside their gas-powered counterparts on a recent afternoon.
But as boxy Kia Souls pulled in and out of the dealership’s parking lot on Bandera Road, customers weren’t looking much at the electric vehicles, such as the EV6 Wind. While car shoppers often ask about EVs, as they’re called, they mostly choose hybrid vehicles instead, said John Paul Rivera, a sales manager at the Kia dealership.
“There’s definitely a lot of hype, a lot of interest” around EVs, Rivera said. “People still love their trucks, SUVs. The other thing too is (EVs) are really expensive. Not everyone can buy a $50,000 car.”
So far this year, electric vehicles represent almost 7 percent of all U.S. car sales, more than double the rate two years ago, as motorists in California and along the East Coast rush to pick up one of the multitude of new electric offerings from automakers such as Ford and Tesla.
READ MORE: San Antonio’s interest in electric cars is surging. But is the city’s infrastructure ready?
But in Texas and other states in the middle of the country, the market isn’t quite so charged. In 2022, just 4.3 percent of cars sold in Texas have been electric models, compared with 19 percent in California, according to data firm Atlas Public Policy.
Electric vehicle sales are rising in Texas, as they are everywhere. But convincing Texans to go electric is particularly difficult, car dealers and advocates say, mostly because many electric vehicles can’t travel more than 200 miles without a charge and many Texans consider driving a few hundred miles in a day to be part of life.
“Mostly, there’s two different trains of thought here. There’s the client who finds an EV a novelty and wants to be a part of it, but if they want to drive to Dallas or Amarillo, they’re not going to take their EV. They tell me that,” said Chris Poulos, who owns three car dealerships in Houston and Sugar Land and sells electric Hummers. “The other says, ‘No way, no how I’m never going to buy an EV.’”
Range anxiety
So-called range anxiety is a problem for electric vehicle manufacturers all over the world. In addition to electric charging stations being few and far between, it commonly takes up to an hour to fully charge a vehicle — a difficult hurdle for motorists used to filling their gasoline tanks in a few minutes.
It’s a particular problem in Texas, where even people who don’t regularly drive long distances consider the ability to do so a necessity, said Tom Smith, executive director of the nonprofit Texas Electric Transportation Resources Alliance.
“The No. 1 concern I hear is about range,” he said. “Texas is such a big state, and people are concerned they can’t get from one side of the state to the other.”
In San Antonio, there about 11,000 electric vehicles on the road, an increase from 4,400 registered EVs here in July 2020, according to CPS Energy. By comparison, there were 1.6 million vehicles registered in Bexar County last year.
CPS expects that a decade from now, EVs will account for about 80 percent of the vehicles on San Antonio roads. But today, the roughly 275-mile drive to Dallas or the 250-mile drive to the Rio Grande Valley that many San Antonians make are barriers to adoption for car buyers.
“Everything is at that 250-mile threshold, and it’s like ‘Am I going to make it?’” said Rivera, the Ancira Kia sales manager. “I think what’s really stifling (electric vehicles) is the charging.”
The Texas Department of Transportation is hoping to ease some of that anxiety with plans to build fast charging stations every 50 to 70 miles along Texas interstates over the next five years, using more than $400 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law approved by Congress last year.
The hope among advocates is that investment will spur construction of many more chargers, which — along with better batteries that last longer and charge faster — will create a surge of new EV buyers, mostly in urban areas to start but eventually in rural areas also. Currently, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin account for 90 percent of electric vehicle registrations in Texas, according to the Dallas Fort Worth Clean Cities Coalition.
Not everyone is convinced that technology and infrastructure are keys to enlarging the pool of EV owners, not only in Texas but also in middle America at-large. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, pointed to the massive upswing in sport utility vehicle sales that began in the 1990s as a sign there isn’t always logic to consumer behavior.
“We moved to the SUV because Americans decided they were a better thing to drive,” he said. “How do we get the average American in the state of Texas excited about buying an electric vehicle?”
Prepping for EV future
Despite the challenges of EV adoption, CPS Energy is preparing for a future of electrified transport. The utility offers a monthly rebate to customers that allow CPS to throttle back their car’s charger when demand for power is high, and CPS incentivizes customers to charge their EVs overnight when electricity is abundant, said Drew Higgins, senior director of products and services for CPS.
That way, as EVs become more common, the utility will be able to avoid overloading the power grid with too many vehicles charging at the same time that households are using the most electricity for other needs.
“There is additional demand with EVs, but it’s not at peak demand, so we can schedule and work around that and fit it into our portfolio,” said Ana Lozano, strategic research and innovation manager at CPS.
But even an EV acolyte such as Higgins, who said he’s driving his third electric vehicle, acknowledged the range limitations.
“If you do 95 percent of your driving in San Antonio, an electric vehicle is probably a better choice for you already,” he said.
U.S. automakers are hoping to generate excitement with hundreds of new electric models set to be released in the years ahead.
Ford has already released a electric version of its F-150, the best selling vehicle in America, drawing long waiting lists at dealerships in Texas. And Chevrolet plans to begin selling an electric version of the Silverado pickup next year.
Darren Whitehurst, president of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association, expects that the new offerings and more charging stations would inevitably increase market share for electric vehicles but he’s not sure how quickly.
Dealers in Texas already are hearing concerns from electric pickup truck customers that hauling trailers or boats will reduce the distance EVs can travel on a charge, he said.
“The average user buys them because they look cool. They’re not hauling hay,” Whitehurst said. “But people that hear stories, like if you run your AC or heater it’ll deplete your battery, they’ll think twice.”
Rivera, meanwhile, sees mass adoption of electric vehicles as probably five to seven years away, assuming they become more affordable.
“Once that technology can get down to $20,000, or $15,000,” he said, “oh my God, it’s going to take over.”
james.osborne@chron.com
diego.mendoza-moyers@express-news.net
