Electric vehicles registered in the US

It appears that Americans have discovered a perfect symbiosis: as they buy electric vehicles—presumably to save the planet—they purchase energy drinks at precisely the same rate, as if each Tesla purchase triggers an immediate need for chemical stimulation. One might imagine a deeply confused future archaeologist finding this correlation and concluding that EVs run on Red Bull. The correlation here is 0.964, which is to say, almost telepathic.

What's actually happening is far more mundane and therefore more interesting: both trends track a rising tide of disposable income and youthful consumer spending across the 2011-2023 period. The US population grew by about 10 million people during this window, and younger demographics—the ones buying Teslas and drinking Monster by the liter—have been simultaneously gaining economic footing and adopting these products as identity markers. A single Red Bull costs about three dollars; multiply that by the millions of cans sold annually, and you're looking at several billion dollars moving in tandem with multi-billion-dollar EV sales, all carried on the same economic current of post-recession optimism and tech enthusiasm.

We are pattern-seeking creatures aboard a planet that contains multitudes, and sometimes two entirely unrelated human behaviors simply rise together on the same economic tide, asking nothing of each other. The correlation between electric vehicles and energy drinks says nothing about causation and everything about how we've organized our spending priorities since 2011. Neither explains the other, yet here they are.