It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events. My next car will be an EV not suggesting it’s a bad decision however I’m still blown away by statistics like this.

> It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events.

Recent events? Russia going rogue and the US going haywire both happened a decade ago at least. Those are two major suppliers of fossil fuel for Europe. The current trend was bound to happen, it only required time for the industry to pivot.

The thing is a lot of people might be right at the tipping point of buying an EV and then some news like this comes out and it pushes them over the line.

I feel EVs at this moment are right at the level of “I’m gonna buy a new car, but maybe I’ll wait for the one after before I jump into an EV”. Better batteries (solid state), better charging speeds and more fast charger availability seem to have a large group of people waiting.

It moves up people's purchasing plans. If you were expecting to replace your vehicle in the next two years because of performance degradation, and now your fuel costs are substantially higher, then a purchase today might make more sense than your original plan.

EVs have been better for ~90% of the driving most people do for a decade, but a lot of people held back because they fixated on things like epic road trips or needing to haul many sheets of plywood.

What a price shock does is force people to acknowledge how much money they’ve been spending on edge-cases, making many of them reconsider how much it’s really worth to, for example, go on an all-day drive without every stopping for more than a few minutes or whether the SUV/pickup truck aesthetic is worth paying 50% more every day.

"make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events" You have this all backwards. The fact is that for many decades petroleum is an unreliable energy source due to geopolitical factors, but people have been pretending that was not the case. What has happened in the last two months is people have finally realized the long-term truth.

I'm well aware things can change, but having my everyday commute costs generally decoupled from geopolitics seems nice

It's more like the recent events trigger people's awareness and learning about multi-year trends that are happening regardless of recent events.

EVs are a good deal in much of the world. They're more quiet, lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs, therefore lower cost of ownership and operation. And they have less volatile costs as electricity prices swing less than gas prices.

Long-term trends show electricity and gas prices decouple.

It's just that every time gas prices spike, people look into solutions and find out these truths.

I bought one because I had a feeling that the price of used EVs was about to shoot up

> based upon recent events

Climate change has been in the zeitgeist for decades now. Pretty sure many people are cognizant of this and want to move away from fossil fuels. This is just a boost to do so.

This also coincides with EVs becoming better and cheaper

> It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events.

Even wilder to project other peoples decisions so naively

Pretty frustrating that so many people have to face the actual crisis to actually react to it. And that’s the case in so many situations

I think this is people that were thinking of getting an EV anyway and they decided to do it earlier

Oil usage being subject to supply shocks is nothing new, it’s completely inevitable. Moving to renewables is an obvious upgrade, this recent crisis is just bringing that into the light for folk.

What is there to not understand. Given large enough population there's always someone ready to update.