In the race to electric vehicles, Austin leads the Texas pack. Radio channel KUT 90.5 looked at registration data obtained through the Texas Public Information Act and found that 2.1 percent of registered vehicles in Travis County are battery-powered cars and trucks — the highest EV adoption rate of the five biggest counties in the state.
According to utility company Austin Energy, more than half of the EVs on Austin's roads are Teslas, KUT reported — not entirely surprising, since the company's main headquartered in Travis County, as are Elon Musk's SpaceX, Boring Company, and a Tesla Gigafactory.
A 2 percent adoption rate might not sound like much signals "a big change that happened recently," said Gil Tal, a leading expert on electric vehicles who runs a research center on EVs at the University of California, Davis.
California leads the nation in electric vehicle adoption and is nearing a 3 percent EV ownership rate. The state has spent heavily to promote EVs and plans to ban the sale of new gasoline-only vehicles by 2035, the KUT article notes.
