Electric vehicle owners wanted to be among the first to make the switch from gas to battery-powered cars. Now that they are, they’re discovering being the vanguard also means encountering obstacles and bumps in the road before anyone else does.
“As an early adopter in Columbus, you don’t have a lot of people to turn to for reliable help,” said Jordan Davis, director of Smart Cities, an initiative that, in part, includes a $10 million grant to increase electric vehicle adoption in the Columbus region. “It’s not like your neighbor will have an electric vehicle.”
In 2015, a mere 0.37 percent of all new cars sold in central Ohio were electric, Davis said. That figure rose to 0.7 percent at the end of last year, and regional planners are aiming to hit 1.8 percent by 2020.
Nationwide, plug-in vehicles still have a tiny market share, though sales grew by 26 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.