Turn on the news, and it’s not hard to see that the world right now is in turmoil, and it’s affecting gas car owners greatly. Due to the conflict in Iran, global oil markets have been thrown for a loop, as Iran’s oil-producing capabilities are in turmoil, while the country has effectively shut down one of the most important international oil shipping channels in the world. This has spiked the price of oil, which in turn has had a not-so-ignorable effect on the prices of gas. Across the country, prices have jumped, with the national average up to $3.58 a gallon, over 50 cents more than it was a month ago.
That has more Americans thinking about electric cars. This isn’t just a hunch, either; Edmunds reported that the share of searches for electrified vehicles—that is any hybrid (both plug-in and not) or full EV—has jumped over the last week. It said that for its car-shopping arm, these vehicles represented about 20.7% of all searches on its site at the end of February. When measured for the week of March 2, the percentage of queries jumped to 22.4%, with most of the gain coming from full EV searches. Edmunds says this tracks with the last recent time where oil spiked, during the initial invasion of Ukraine by Russia in early 2022. At that time, electrified vehicle research queries rose from 17.5% to 25.1% of overall searches within a month.
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