Writing at The Atlantic, Andrew Moseman complains, “Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars.”
For the first time since the dawn of the automobile, the majority of new cars are not powered exclusively by gasoline: So far in 2026, electric vehicles and hybrids are outselling traditional gas-powered cars. As oil prices have gone up and up since the start of the war in Iran, drivers from Hanoi to Hamburg are picking up EVs like never before. According to the energy think tank Ember, 49 countries have broken EV-sales records this year. The prime minister of Thailand recently ditched his Rolls-Royce and commuted to work in an all-electric BYD Sealion.
Great! So what’s the problem?
And then there’s the United States. For all the angst over high gas prices, EVs accounted for just 6.4 percent of new-car sales in the U.S. from July to September. That’s a slight rise from January, before the beginning of the war with Iran—but just barely. The U.S. has long been something of an EV laggard, full of drivers (and a president) who are skeptical of battery-powered cars. But even as gas prices have jumped from $3 to $4.50 over the past year, drivers won’t budge.
In fairness, gas prices in the U.S. are among the lowest in the world. And most of us see the dramatic increase from the war as an aberration, not a long-term trend around which to revamp our lifestyles.
America’s car fleet was never going to flip overnight. No one forks over $50,000 for a Tesla the moment gas hits $5 a gallon. “If gas prices are higher for a little while,” Elaine Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and a former executive at General Motors, told me, “people say, ‘Oh, this is going to pass. I’m not going to go and change what vehicle I own.’” But when high gas prices linger for half a year or longer, Buckberg added, the direction of the car industry can shift. The shortages and lines of the 1970s helped kill the mid-century land yacht. In the 2000s, record-high gas prices tempered the craze for gas-guzzling SUVs and pushed millions of Americans to buy hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Now drivers have a real alternative to the whims of the world oil market. They’re just not taking it.
Indeed, my parents went from having a 1968 AMC Rambler station wagon to a 1973 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus to a 1979 Toyota Corolla, the last of which was almost entirely a function of the relatively sustained boom in gas prices owing to two OPEC embargoes. We went from paying 36 cents a gallon (I remember as low as 19 cents during the “gas wars” in Houston as a kid—and they threw in a coffee mug with a fill-up) in the early 1970s to over a dollar by the time we bought the Toyota.
Americans are not all gasoline loyalists who’ve forsworn battery power. In fact, most drivers now say that they are strongly considering an EV as their next vehicle, and the trend is even stronger among people under 35. Pre-owned EVs are surging, but they represent a sliver of the used-car market, because so few of them are out there. The biggest winner from the gasoline spike has been the plain old hybrid, the green-car solution of the George W. Bush years. Sales in the U.S. have jumped 27 percent over the past year.
To some degree, Americans aren’t making the leap for several long-standing reasons: EVs are too expensive, and the options are lacking. Because the U.S. effectively bans electric cars made in China, we are cut off from buying something such as the BYD Dolphin Surf, an electric sedan that sells for about $22,000 in Europe. Many of the models that drivers are familiar with still cannot be had as an EV. Toyotas such as the RAV4 and Camry now come only as hybrids; last year, Ford killed the electric version of the F-150 pickup truck, this country’s most popular vehicle, citing low sales. Ford is now hyping up a roughly $30,000 electric pickup truck, but that won’t arrive until 2027. Meanwhile, America’s only electric minivan is the struggling Volkswagen ID. Buzz, a modern take on the flower-power bus. And although Tesla’s cars have a lot going for them, plenty of Americans say they won’t touch the brand because of Elon Musk. In short, the EV market is full of holes.
The Biden administration had mutually conflicting goals: it wanted to move to green energy, which would seem to mean going all-in on electric vehicles, yet it also wanted to avoid subsidizing China. The Trump administration cares little about green energy, but wants to keep out cheap Chinese imports in the vain hope that American manufacturers will step into the breach.
But, honestly, hybrids are the best option for most Americans, given relatively long commutes and poor charging infrastructure.
That said, it’s hard not to look at tepid EV sales and wonder whether Americans have lost the plot on electric cars. The price gap between gas and electric cars is closing; more EVs are now available for under $40,000. Charging networks are expanding, and battery ranges are climbing. Compared with even just a year or two ago, buying an electric car comes with fewer trade-offs. And in plenty of ways, EVs are just better. They’re zippy and fun to drive. They don’t require much of the routine maintenance, such as oil changes, that make car ownership annoying. They can do all sorts of things that fossil-fuel burners cannot: refuel at home, keep a house’s lights on during a blackout, store luggage in a “frunk.”
But if gas that’s creeping up on $5 a gallon isn’t enough to persuade people to go electric, what will? When I posed the question to Buckberg, she told me about research she’d worked on while at GM: Drivers were “happy to buy an EV—as long as they don’t have to give up anything they like about their current vehicle,” she said. In other words, it’s not enough for EVs to be good at what they’re good at—especially when relatively few Americans know someone who has one. They need to match the things that gas cars are good at too. Fast chargers are spreading, but not fast enough to free us from the mental load of worrying about where to refuel—something that’s been a given in a nation with a gas station at every corner. And what EVs can’t do yet (unless you’re in China) is recharge in as little time as it takes to pump gas. That’s something American drivers see as a prerequisite, even though most of us don’t regularly take very long road trips and drive an average of 30-some miles a day—a total easily handled by charging at home.
My sister-in-law has owned a Tesla for several years and had a home charging station. She’s become an empty-nester and moved into an apartment with no charging ports. And home charging infrastructure is expensive to install.
I’m a few months out from passing on my 2018 Mazda CX-9 to my oldest and getting myself a newish vehicle. While I seldom have more than three passengers, I need to carry six or seven—or the gear for a two-week beach vacation—often enough that I want to stay in the same vehicle class.
After considerable research, I’m leaning heavily toward the Hyundai Palisade. Equipped the way I’d like, the gas version comes in at close to $60,000, which is considerably more than I paid for the Mazda eight years ago. The hybrid version, which by all accounts drives more smoothly, costs roughly $ 2,500 more. While the fuel savings are surprisingly modest, they’d pay for the premium price during the time I’d own the car, making the step-up a no-brainer.
The electric sister vehicle, the IONIQ 9, gets rave reviews, even compared to the hybrid version. Its range and charging speed satisfy even my extreme use case, the annual trip to the Outer Banks. But the equivalent trim package goes for $78,000. And that doesn’t include the cost of installing a home charger, which is the only way I’d have an electric as my sole vehicle. While I could theoretically afford it, I simply can’t justify the difference.
There’s every reason to think that EVs will continue a gradual climb, Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. A new wave of hyper-capable electric cars is arriving in America, with ranges above 400 miles per charge. But if EVs really have to do everything gas-powered cars do—and more—before drivers give them a chance, it’ll be a long time before America embraces them en masse. We’re nowhere near the charging speeds that China has achieved nor the density of plugs that would rival the ubiquity of gas stations. Until then, Americans will keep pumping gas into worse cars while the rest of the world has long moved on.
It’s honestly just not fair to compare us to the rest of the world on this front. Outside a handful of densely populated cities, we’re considerably more car-dependent than other countries. We’re much more spread out, so we have long commutes—often two in the household.
It’s true that we like comparatively large vehicles, while most of the world has adjusted to driving tiny, soulless econoboxes. But we’ve figured out how to make electric versions of those that are just as good as the gas and hybrid versions. We just haven’t brought the price down to a reasonable level.
