GE has released a list of the 10 best cities in the country for electric-car integration right now. The company defines “best cities” as those that “are best set-up for EV adoption by large numbers of commuters” right now.
So what American city is “best positioned” for massive and immediate adoption of EVs? Dallas!
Rounding out the top five are Houston, Detroit, St. Louis, and Atlanta. And here’s the rest of the list:
You might be surprised that such gas-guzzling cities are on top of the list. But, by GE’s methodology, that’s actually the point. Here’s how they calculated their rankings:
We ranked cities in equal parts by how many commuters lived within a 50-mile radius of the city center and what percentage of commuters drive to work already—as those are the cities with infrastructure currently set up to handle car commuters.
So the best cities for electric cars are those where there are the most people already driving. I guess that makes sense, but I do wonder how actual plans and policies for establishing the necessary EV infrastructure would change the list. Dallas’s EV infrastructure, for instance, is currently limited to a couple dozen charging stations that are still in the planning stage.
As A.K. Streeter writes on Treehugger,
GE’s designated top candidates don’t match up with another recent study, by Roland Berger and the Rocky Mountain Institute, that rated 50 major metropolitan markets for what it called “plug-in electric vehicle readiness.”
The Roland Berger/RMI study lists San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Portland, Oregon, as the most “EV ready” urban environments. For these results, according to study author Antonio Benecchi, “we considered local regulations, available infrastructure, consumer readiness, and the operating environment.”
Remember, GE recently unveiled its own fancy new Yves Behar-designed WattStation EV chargers, so maybe their top 10 list serves as a potential market study. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to read in the next couple of months of a new EV joint project involving GE and one of the cities up high on this list.
