There are plenty of well-off people in poor rural areas, and there are plenty of wealthy urban areas in flyover country. California is an important market but it's not so important that the rest can be ignored.
There are plenty of well-off people in poor rural areas, and there are plenty of wealthy urban areas in flyover country. California is an important market but it's not so important that the rest can be ignored.
Please provide geographic economic citations of where.
Here’s mine:
Interactive: Visualizing Median Income For All 3,000+ U.S. Counties - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/interactive-median-income-u... (blue is better, red is worse)
(assume 45k-$50k new vehicle price in the US, back out to the income needed to support a payment at current interest rates on a 5-7 year term, which is roughly $500-$1000/month, which is why auto loans are currently defaulting at record highs)
/r/dataisbeautiful: USA auto loan delinquency rate from 2000 to 2025 - https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ueked2/oc...
It makes no sense to respond to this with a chart of median income. That tells you nothing about how many well-off people there are beyond limiting it to less than 50%, presuming the median is below whatever threshold you consider.
Here's a table of states with median, top 20%, and top 5% figures: https://beforeview.com/income-percentile/state
Mississippi, the lowest one on the list, has a top 5% at over $200,000/year. That's ~150,000 people in households who can comfortably afford a nice new EV, in just one small, poor state.
The states defined by the Census Bureau as being in "the midwest" (a subset of "flyover states") contain about 70 million people. The top 5% would be 3.5 million people who can afford a nice new EV. And this is conservative: someone in the top 6% can probably afford one too, but I'm not counting them, and there's plenty of "flyover state" territory beyond the midwest.
California is big enough and rich enough to have a huge amount of market power. But it's not so big and rich that it makes 100+ million Americans in the middle of the country completely irrelevant and ignorable.
Los Alamos, in New Mexico :)
Seriously though, everywhere I've lived there have been at least some doctors, dentists, college professors, business owners and suchlike; even Mississippi has hospitals, or so I'm told.
Sure, I know and admit these people exist. I did extensive market research on the US EV TAM before being a late private early public investor in Tesla (~<$20/share), riding in the first Roadster to evaluate the product, etc, and even with updated models to account for socioeconomic strata that continues to bifurcate, I believe my thesis holds around who and who cannot to afford to buy new vehicles at current price levels (it’s definitely gotten worse than 15 years ago, for gestures broadly at everything reasons). I’m saying, broadly speaking, all of the purchasing power is mostly in urban areas, although there are some exceptions in the middle of nowhere as you commented. This does not mean we should leave Rural America out in the cold.
Fundamentally, if we expect Rural America to buy affordable EVs (which, imho, they will need to do, and we should crank on policy to achieve), someone will have to force them to be affordable. Allow cheap, high quality Chinese imports, or nationalize an automaker as they approach failure. But right now, Rural America is captive to a parasite US auto industry profitmaxxing by minimizing production and maxing their profits, protected by tariffs. You cannot compel them to make affordable cars currently, but if you don’t, Rural America is fucked.
“You can just do things.”
(no current TSLA exposure, out long ago around “420 funding secured,” but still own a handful of Teslas out of sentimental reasons)
We absolutely should not go down the road of nationalizing companies and means of production. The government already has too much influence and control over our lives, we don't need them taking even more by using their power to gobble up failing companies.
We should watch how poorly its going trying to have NYC own something as simple as a few grocery stores. If the government is stepping in to make things cheaper they're destroying competition in the entire industry. They either inadvertently end up owning the entire industry by driving out all privately owned companies, or they subsidize those private companies so they can compete with the state owned ones.