To Accelerate Climate Impact, Build Better Products

To Accelerate Climate Impact, Build Better Products

A famous set of pictures show the same corner in New York City, in 1907 and then again in 1917. The first shows a street crowded with horses. In the second, there is only one horse — the street is filled with cars and trucks.

In 1907, there were only 450,000 cars with internal combustion engines (ICEs) registered in the entire United States — but millions of horses. In 1917, there were 5.8 million ICEs — and in places like New York City, horses had been put out to pasture.

In ten years, our transportation system completely changed.

This wasn't because the transition was easy — there was an entire infrastructure built up in cities like New York to house the horses, feed them and deal with their waste. There were farms dedicated to breeding good, solid work horses, and a whole profession devoted to training them so that they were fit for service on busy streets.

But it was the path of least resistance, because an ICE is a lot better than a horse for transportation.

Afternoon crowds and traffic in Times Square, New York City, undated (ca. January 1917) by William David Hassler. From the New York Historical Society collection.

In the 1910s, the internal combustion engine was the better solution.

Today, we see the same transition happening — away from ICEs towards electric vehicles (EVs). Every time I drive outside of my neighborhood, I see more and more of them. The new incentives being offered through the Inflation Reduction Act should accelerate adoption even further.

Yet the desire for an EV won't be driven by incentives alone. For the past decade, Tesla has dominated sales, but Tesla's products are aimed at an Early Adopter market. That market is willing to accommodate low reliability and frequent recalls, long shipping delays, over-the-air updates and, in the early days, the lack of charging infrastructure, to be one of the first on the block to own an EV. They're willing to take risk, they're willing to pay more, and they can absorb the extra cost both in money and in time spent dealing with the problems that go along with early product releases.

EVs Move Into Early Mainstream

Today, EVs are in the Early Mainstream part of their lifecycle. We see this in the ever-increasing numbers of EVs on the road, and in the proliferation of EVs from mainstream car makers available on the market, even from companies like Toyota that had not planned to go this direction a few years ago.

The Early Mainstream customers have different needs. They want transportation that works. They want it to work like the ICEs they're used to driving. They appreciate the fact that an EV needs less maintenance, and costs less to run. They respond well to the financial incentives that make an EV pay for itself faster, as that helps justify the cost. They're more likely to buy from a brand they already know and trust.

Early Mainstream Products Build Trust Through Close Connections