Electric vehicles registered in the US

We have somehow discovered that Americans buy more electric vehicles precisely when Americans have more money per person, which is either the least surprising correlation in the history of correlation or evidence that the universe enjoys a particularly dry joke at our expense. One might have expected some cosmic rebellion—perhaps wealthy nations stubbornly refusing to electrify out of sheer spite, or poor nations suddenly bristling with Teslas—but no. The data moves together like a long-married couple who have stopped trying to surprise each other.

The real story here is almost certainly hiding in the weeds: as GDP per capita rose from roughly 48,000 dollars in 2011 to nearly 70,000 in 2022, a few entirely mundane things happened simultaneously. Electric vehicle technology became cheaper and less embarrassing, charging infrastructure sprouted like some kind of beneficial fungus, federal tax credits made the math work for regular people, and perhaps most crucially, we became wealthy enough as a nation to care about things other than immediate survival. You could fit about 140 million Toyota Corollas end-to-end from Los Angeles to New York, and in 2011 we still preferred doing exactly that to buying anything with a plug. By 2022, we were richer, slightly guiltier, and finally willing to spend the extra thirty thousand dollars to feel better about it.

The troubling part is that this correlation proves nothing except that we are all susceptible to believing that money and virtue increase together, which is a comforting thought we have been believing since money was invented. Confounding variables abound—technological maturity, policy incentives, cultural fashion, the simple fact that rich nations tend to do most things together—yet we are left with only this: two lines on a graph, moving upward, moving together, asking us which one is leading and which one is following. We still cannot say for certain.