Stupid news report of the day: “There are only 3 EV plugs for every 10,000 Americans”

Stupid news report of the day: “There are only 3 EV plugs for every 10,000 Americans”

There are only 3 EV plugs for every 10,000 Americans, a disparity threatening automakers’ $1.2 trillion investment (msn.com)

  • There are barely 3 EV charge ports for every 10,000 people in the US, a new analysis said.

The meaningful metric is is how many EVs there are per charging port. As of November 2022, there were about 148,000 public charging ports in the U.S. (The above story says only 131,000 charging ports as of March 2023 but another source reports 143,000.)

There are an estimated 2 million EVs in the U.S. – or 13 EVs per charging port.

Electrek estimates that by 2030, the U.S. should have about 40 EVs per charging port, which means we are way ahead of how many charging ports are needed; that would be good news.

 

This sounds horrible:

Meanwhile, more than 95% of EV chargers are in counties with majority-white populations.

First,  23% of US counties have less than 10,000 residents – that’s about 1 in 4 and in total, these counties account for 1% of the U.S. population. The reporter’s county metric is meaningless as it falsely assumes that population is equally distributed by county.

Second, per Pew Research, of the 77% of counties having more than 10,000 residents, and accounting for 99% of the entire U.S. population, 92% of these U.S. counties are majority-white.

(The Pew analysis excludes counties with very small populations. They use the government’s unusual definitions of “race”. An immigrant from Brazil, who is Portuguese ancestry, is classified as Hispanic. An indigenous person from the U.S. is “native American” but an indigenous person from Peru or Ecuador is Hispanic. A white European ancestry individual from Mexico or Argentina is Hispanic, but not white. And no Hispanics are white. It’s a mess.)

 

In a stunning surprise, EV charging ports are geographically distributed based on where EVs are registered – who would have thought?

the richest people in the US have the most access to electric car charging, with nearly 72% of public EV charge plugs in the country’s wealthiest counties. The top fifth of counties in the US (those that are least distressed in terms of income, poverty, and unemployment) account for nearly 33% of all EV charge ports here.

 

This news report illustrates how “reporters” spin everything into negativity.

Reporter Alexa St John has a BA in Communication and Media Studies, per her LinkedIn page and writes about auto news. This is report mangles numbers to engage in faux muckraking and a yellow journalism headline.

This report rates high for overall stupidity in reporting.

Comments are closed.