Take a quick look at the cars Americans buy and you’ll see the usual suspects that populate our parking lots: Full-size pickup trucks take their place at the top of the podium, while a few well-known sedans — and lots of SUVs and crossovers — round out the top 25. What you won’t see is much overlap with the big electric vehicle push.
The Tesla Model Y is there, an outlier in a field of mostly gas-guzzlers. The F-150 and Silverado trucks occupy spots one and two, and while Ford and Chevy have introduced fully electric versions of each, they haven’t been able to convince many pickup partisans to go EV. As for the thoroughbreds of the Target run that Americans buy in droves, a few come as plug-in hybrids, but there are no fully electric Nissan Rogues, Subaru Foresters, or Honda CR-Vs on offer.
Suddenly, though, here comes a familiar face. This summer, Chevrolet rolled out the Equinox EV, a battery-powered version of the small crossover that sells by the hundreds of thousands in its combustion configuration. And later this year it has promised to release a true entry-level version of this vehicle that starts around the magical $35,000 mark. The electrified Equinox is, on the one hand, painfully ordinary, just a battery-powered version of the car you see in the school drop-off line. Yet it might be the most important EV of the moment, and one that could tell us a lot about the success of GM’s electric fortunes and the true state of the American EV buyer.
Whether we’re truly in an EV funk depends on how you look at it. Sales aren’t growing as fast in 2024 as they did in 2023, but that’s largely because the industry leader, Tesla, got distracted from building new cars people actually want. EV sales didn’t spike into the stratosphere once more models hit the market, as some predicted, but that’s because such predictions were always specious. Whatever spin or narrative one puts on top of the car sales data, the question is basically this: Now that the early adopters have adopted, what will it take for the silent majority to buy electric cars?
Lots of those potential EV buyers are brand loyalists. They own a Subaru, and once they drive it into the ground, they’ll get another one. They are on their third Toyota RAV4. They are Chevy ‘til they die. For some of them, the arrival of an EV in their favorite make or model might be the tipping point to try out the life electric. General Motors doesn’t have to sell all of its fans on the idea right away, either. Chevrolet sells more than 200,000 petrol-powered Equinoxes in a typical year. Moving just some of those people to electric power would be a difference-maker in American EV momentum.
There’s something about a well-known name, too. Ford tried to dust little sex appeal onto the Mustang Mach-E by putting the pony car’s name onto its electric crossover. But making an electric version of a Panera icon like the Equinox says something else. It’s an attempt to signal to the practicality-minded parents of America that it’s their turn to try an EV.
Detroit had hoped such logic would work when it electrified its money-makers, the full-size trucks. But the automakers ran into headwinds, in part because lots of pickup drivers belong to the “never EV” camp and thought this amounted to electrification being forced on them. People behind the wheel of a family crossover like the Equinox are less likely to see their vehicle as an extension of tribal identity. It’s a car, and if they can be convinced that an electric one can save them money or make life easier, a lot of them will probably take the plunge.
Then there’s the other reason to see the Equinox as an acid test: price. Well-equipped versions of the EV now arriving at Chevy dealerships cost well into the $40,000s. But the simpler 1LT version of the car that’s tipped to debut in the fall will start as low as $35,000. It’ll be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit, taking the effective cost of the car down under $30,000 — effectively the same as the $28,6000 starting MSRP of the gas-burning Equinox.
This is territory where only smaller EVs like the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf had been able to play. The Equinox, though, is no city compact, but rather a family crossover with a promised 319 miles of driving range. If it comes to fruition, it’s a hell of a value proposition compared to where the EV market has been, with most vehicles starting with 200-some miles of range and costing $40,000 or more, a point where not even $7,500 in Biden bucks made them cost-competitive with the perfectly ordinary cars that make up the bulk of American auto sales.
In other words, we’re about to find out whether money really was the issue holding back the EV revolution. If the EV Equinox doesn’t take off, then we can expect to hear more bugles of retreat in the form of headlines about automakers scaling back electrification and pushing more hybrids out of fear that the suburbs truly aren’t ready for the electric car. There’s a lot at stake for the EV push — and for Detroit, where GM has recommitted to reaching an all-electric future, eventually.
