Automakers of all types are making massive commitments to battery-electric vehicles with 50 new models expected to hit the U.S. by the end of next year.
This kind of shift requires a massive commitment at a variety of levels. President Biden’s push for 500,000 new EV chargers is funded, while several EV charging companies are investing hundreds of millions into their own ventures.
All that investment is good news, but none of those things really reveal who — or more precisely, where — is ready to handle this influx of electric cars and trucks? Good news, the answer is — somewhat unsurprisingly — California and Washington, D.C.
According to a study from Zutobi, an online driver education company, those two spots earned the highest EV readiness scores at 8.16 out of 10. The company pulled together the score by using a variety of metrics, including: the number of registered EVs, the percentage of all registered vehicles that are electric, the number of public chargers and how many EVs, and the average number of miles there are per charging point.
The top 10 most ready
California is the most EV-ready state in part because it is the only one with more than 1% of all vehicles registered being electric, it also boasts more than 30,000 more public charging points than the national average. However, because there are so many EVs in California the amount of public charging points struggles to keep up demand.
Washington, D.C. got kudos and a top score because there is a public EV charger every 2.66 miles on average, this is far better than the national average of one charger every 121 miles. Additionally, 0.68% of all vehicles registered in the district are EVs, and this is the fourth-highest in the country for this factor, according to the Zutobi.
The top two finishers are necessarily a big surprise, but there are some states in the top 10 that may come as a bit of a surprise. The top 10 most EV-ready states are:
- California/Washington, D.C. (8.16)
- Vermont (7.55)
- Massachusetts (7.27)
- Utah (7.12)
- Rhode Island (7.07)
- Maryland (7.03)
- New York (6.99)
- Colorado (6.91)
- Maine (6.90)
Other notable states
Third-place Vermont rates highly because it has 2.68 electric vehicles per charging point, which shows that their infrastructure is ready to cope. Furthermore there is a charging point every 17.13 miles on average, which is much lower than the U.S. average of 121 miles.
To some, Utah may be a bit of a surprise, but it shouldn’t be. The state’s former Republican Governor Gary Herbert has pushed hard to implement the technology needed for EVs, including proposing the state spend $66 million to increase electric vehicle infrastructure.
“These investments will help us achieve our goal of reducing annual statewide per capita emissions by 25% by 2026,” Herbert said in early 2020. The state also approved a $50 million investment for an EV charging network across the state.
The five least ready states are, in order, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, New Jersey and Montana.
