Armen Petrosian
June 10, 2011 
Past blog posts
No comment We recently sent out anonymous surveys to 1000+ members of our PlugShare user base to get a feel for who are users are and what they want. A lot of it was generic demographic stuff, but I wanted to share some of the more interesting questions.
Here’s an interesting look at the common use case for electric vehicle enthusiasts and purchasers:
This reinforces a lot of the research out there that shows electric cars will likely be the second or third vehicle in the household. I think this especially makes sense for families who may often take long road trips and don’t wish to make sacrifices by limiting themselves to a 100-300mi range.
The next question aimed to find out why our users were interested in electric cars:
So it looks like the majority of our users are interested in electric cars for reasons around global warming and oil consumption. A surprisingly large chunk of users are interested simply because they love technology and want to see new cars on the market.
Finally, we posed a trust question to see who our users are looking towards for answers:
Interestingly enough, PlugShare edged out all participants in this survey (undoubtedly a bit of selection bias there). Perhaps even more interesting is the disparity between Nissan and General Motors among electric vehicle enthusiasts. While GM may have captured a larger audience with the marketing campaign for the Volt, it seems like the early adopters are looking towards Nissan for answers in this new era of transportation.
That’s it for now. Will post more responses when we send out our next round of surveys!
-Armen