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Americans are less interested in buying and owning electric vehicles than they were two years ago, according to polling Gallup released.
The poll shows that the number of Americans who are open to buying an EV has dropped to 51 percent in early 2025, down from 59 percent in 2023.
EV makers face increasing pressures from sweeping Trump administration tariffs, the threat of repeal of consumer tax credits and a halt to a national build-out of EV chargers. While EV sales are still on the rise from year to year, the increase has slowed in recent months. Tesla sales in particular have plummeted as Elon Musk's push to cut the federal workforce as head of U.S. DOGE Service has polarized the country.
Lydia Saad, director of U.S. social research at Gallup, said the poll doesn't show the exact reasons for the drop in interest - but she emphasized that the drop first appeared in Gallup's polling in March 2024. In that survey, the same number of Americans, 51 percent, said that they own an EV or are open to purchasing one.
"At that time, we weren't attributing it to politics as much as mounting concerns about EVs," she said. "The practical issues of accessing charging stations, the driving range of these vehicles, those sorts of things."
Now, Saad added, it's hard to say whether those issues are continuing to have an effect or if they are also compounded by political controversies.
The poll, for example, captures a shift in attitude among the most enthusiastic supporters of EVs. The number of Americans who say they already own an EV or are seriously considering buying one dropped from 16 percent in 2024 to 11 percent in 2025. Democrats, young adults and college graduates also showed declines between 2023 and 2025.
While Republicans showed a slight increase in enthusiasm for EVs between 2023 and 2025, Saad said that the change was not statistically significant. "We would consider that to be flat," she said.
Even amid uncertainty about the future of the market, EV sales have continued to rise. More than 365,000 EVs were sold in the final quarter of 2024, up from 317,000 in the final quarter of 2023. But the rate of growth has slowed in recent years, and the United States is falling behind the typical "S-curve" of technology adoption - a slow ramp-up followed by exponential growth.
Corey Cantor, research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, said the poll also offers good news for the EV transition. "Half of the market is currently interested or already owns an EV," he said. At the moment, electric vehicles make up about 10 percent of all new-car sales. "It suggests to me that there's potential on the EV side for five-times adoption," Cantor said.
After a year of a lot of political controversy and debate around EVs, he added, it's a good sign for the shift to EVs that there was no drop in interest between 2024 and 2025.
The poll also found high consumer interest in hybrids - particularly among Republicans. Fifty-five percent of Republicans own or would consider buying a hybrid, compared with 31 percent who own or would consider buying an electric vehicle.
The real question is how those numbers might change as tariffs and economic instability sweep over the American auto market. "There's a lot of room to grow in terms of the sales side," Cantor said. But, he added, "there's just a lot of uncertainty."
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