A Geographic Split Shows Why US EV Adoption Forecasts Are Plummeting

The US doesn't have one EV market. It has two, and the national average hides it.Recurrent's Scott Case sits down with Nathan Niese, who builds EV adoption forecasts at BCG, to pull apart the number everyone quotes. The "15% by 2030" headline is really two very different countries averaged together: CARB states on a path that looks like Europe, with parts of California potentially hitting three out of four new vehicles with a plug, and non-CARB states sitting near 5%, where a lot of buyers haven't seen an EV on the lot in weeks.For dealers, that split is the whole story. A regional group in the Bay Area or Seattle is on a fundamentally different trajectory than one in the Southeast, and planning to a national average gets both wrong.What Scott and Nathan get into:Why CARB states track Europe while the rest of the country tracks an early-stage marketThe math behind the national average (high-30s vs. 5%) and why "50% by 2030" was never going to be evenly distributedThe $30K, 300-mile EV that doesn't exist yet, and why building it profitably is the real constraint, not consumer demandHow federal policy dropped out of the forecast, and why state-level decisions now set the floorThe wild card that would rewrite all of it: Chinese vehicles reaching the US marketWhat Toyota's late, full-lineup EV push signals about where the industry actually thinks this is goingNathan Niese works at Boston Consulting Group. The views here are his own.Recurrent tracks EV battery health, range, and used EV market data for dealers and shoppers. More research at recurrentauto.com.