The electric vehicle transition might not be moving ahead with the same gusto it showed in the early 2020s, but it’s still happening. According to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Automotive Consumer Study, 7 percent of US car buyers want an electric vehicle for their next car. While that might sound rather meager, it’s a 40 percent increase from 2025’s survey, which found just 5 percent of car buyers wanted an EV.
Plain old internal combustion remains Americans’ first choice, with 61 percent telling the survey that’s how their next ride will be powered. Twenty-one percent want a hybrid, up from 20 percent last year. Just 5 percent indicated a desire for a plug-in hybrid (down from 6 percent last year), with the remaining confused souls either unsure of what to buy next (4 percent) or some other option, presumably hydrogen (1 percent).
A graph showing preference for engine type in car buyers’ next vehicle. Credit: Deloitte
The high demand for internal combustion engines makes the US an outlier among large car-buying markets. Fewer than half of German car buyers want another gas-powered vehicle, and that number falls to just 41 percent in China, Japan, and South Korea. But those consumers aren’t all fleeing internal combustion for battery EVs. Well, they mostly are in China, where EV demand is now 20 percent. But in Japan, only 5 percent of consumers want a battery EV, versus 37 percent indicating their next car would be a hybrid.
Deloitte conducted the survey between October and November 2025, by which time the current US government’s anti-EV policies would have come into effect. These include cancelling the clean vehicle tax credit, rolling back fuel efficiency standards, and declining to prosecute automakers that exceed existing efficiency regulations, as well as the uncertainty of capricious import tariffs. Many automakers have spent the last several years building up capacity to manufacture EVs in North America for the US market, but the return on those investments is unlikely be soon.
Americans also lag behind many of their international peers when it comes to that most important condition for buying an EV or plug-in hybrid: having somewhere to plug it in at night. Fifty-three percent of US respondents said they do not have a way to charge at home. By contrast, that number was 20 percent in Germany and just six percent in China. Only Japan—where plug-ins and EVs are even less popular than in the US—had a higher rate of no charger access at home (75 percent).