Understanding your customers is essential for designing effective EV programs and services. To help you engage with your customers and increase EV adoption and program participation, E Source designed a residential customer survey to gather insights from three key residential customer segments: EV owners, customers considering purchasing an EV, and customers not considering an EV.
Topics covered in the 2026 study include:
- EV purchase journey and consideration, including timing, preferences, and budget requirements
- Customer perceptions of EVs, familiarity with EVs, and motivators and barriers to EV adoption
- Interactions with EVs, preferred utility website information on EVs, and trusted sources of information
- EV charging knowledge, behaviors, rate participation, and managed charging program engagement
- Demographics and household information for segmentation
What you get
If you’re an E Source member, you’ll get access to reports and webinars related to our study. Your access is determined by the services your utility subscribes to. If you’re interested in this market research but your utility does not subscribe to an E Source service, please contact us.
- All services will get content about overall survey findings.
- E Source Mobility Service members will get access to the full results from the study, as well as content that focuses on creating effective EV strategies, pilots, programs, and other customer offerings.
- E Source Distributed Energy Resource Strategy Service will get content that focuses on using EV customer insights to shape distributed energy resource strategy and integrating EV charging into load flexibility portfolios and VPP operations.
- E Source Customer Experience Strategy Service members will get content that focuses on creating an excellent EV customer experience (CX) journey.
- E Source Residential Marketing Service members will get content that focuses one effectively reaching customers with appropriate EV marketing campaigns.
If you’re interested in receiving a specific report, but your utility doesn’t subscribe to the E Source service that hosts that content, please contact us.
Methodology
The 2026 online survey included 9,997 residential customers in the US (7,996 respondents) and Canada (2,001 respondents). We recruited participants using a purchased sample of US and Canadian residential households from global online market research firm Dynata. We set quotas for age, gender, income, and geographical location. We oversampled respondents who own or rent a battery electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (830 EV owners from the US and 219 EV owners from Canada). We then applied postfieldwork weighting on the sample to reflect current EV adoption rates while staying within population norms.
Study results
2026 Electric Vehicle Residential Customer Survey
2023 Electric Vehicle Residential Customer Survey
If you’re an E Source member, these links will take you to reports containing results from the study. If you’re not currently a member, contact us for information on how to become a member.