Automakers Attract Many New Buyers with their Electric Vehicles

• Brand loyalty plays a smaller part in the purchase decision when it comes to EVs.

• Ford, Hyundai, Kia, and GM all benefit from this.

• 81% of Ioniq 5 buyers had never owned a Hyundai vehicle before.

Conquest rate is a metric that has long been used by automakers to gauge the success of individual models and their brands as a whole.

Over the last few years, this metric has gained in importance since the arrival of electric vehicles has boosted the conquest rates of many automakers.

Brand loyalty used to be an important factor in car purchase decisions, meaning that people who owned one brand of vehicle were more likely to choose this same automaker for their next car.

This is not necessarily true anymore since electric vehicles attract a very large proportion of buyers who are new to the brand.

Indeed, companies such as Ford, Hyundai and Kia have all claimed their new EVs have allowed them to reach a new customer base that wouldn’t even have considered their products only a few years ago.

For example, 69% of the people who buy a Ford Mustang Mach-E have never owned a vehicle adorned with the blue oval before, 79% of Kia EV6 buyers are new to the brand, and an impressive 81% of Ioniq 5 owners did not previously have a Hyundai vehicle.

General Motors CEO Marry Barra also recently commented that 40% of the corporation’s EV buyers are new conquests.

This is great news for automakers since attracting new customers that don’t have a previous experience with the brand is the most difficult and expensive task their marketing department is faced with.

It will be interesting to see if those who currently own an electric vehicle will choose to continue with the same automaker for their next purchase or if brand loyalty is truly a thing of the past.

Source: Edmunds