This oil crisis was a huge boon for EVs. In Brazil, despite the "hate" most people have against EVs, BYD went from breaking into the top 10 in March to taking the #1 spot in consumer sales for the first time ever.
Yeah, money talks. And every time you drop another $100 bill into the fuel tank, maybe you start to wonder what it is like to not pay that. Or to not drive to a gas station at all. Then you drive one and become one of the vast majority of people who suddenly have the epiphany "I will never go back, I like this way too much."
Curious as to why American EVs never took off. The US is the most advanced country technologically and has the greatest soft power in history to make deals.
1. Unlike the rest of the world, EVs were sold in the US as muscle cars for rich people (e.g. Tesla). Everywhere else they're cheap cars for urban commuters (e.g. BYD).
2. Republicans sabotaged every attempt from the Democrats to get EVs going on.
3. Space and demography: EVs do very well in small countries (e.g. Europe) or big countries with a concentrated population (e.g.Brasil, Nigeria). They do poorly in countries with big distances and a spread out population.
> The US is the most advanced country technologically
Certainly not in cars. The US car industry really more or less stopped even _trying_ to compete internationally in the 90s or so. The sole exception was Ford, but they went for an unusual approach where Ford Europe designed its own cars, using parts from Bosch etc. Ford Europe is now also all but dead in the consumer space, too. To a large extent the US car industry survives due to protectionism (notably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax).
Incidentally, it's far from what you'd expect, but the US is actually probably more influential in public transport than private transport on an export basis; Cummins is very competitive in the diesel engine space for buses, and the ridiculously-named Wabtec (previously GE and Westinghouse's train-y divisions) is big in locomotive tech.
Though AIUI US companies are largely failing to keep up there, now, too; diesel city buses are on the way out, and electric bus powertrains are largely Chinese or European.
Incumbent American automakers had a hard time switching over. EVs require significant expertise that they didn't have, and didn't particularly want to acquire.
Only Tesla designed cars to be electric from a clean sheet. And they were doing extremely well for a long time, and had an enormous lead. But they squandered it in a variety of ways.
The automakers and oil interests spent a lot of effort badmouthing electric cars. To hear Americans talk about it, they need to haul giant boats on their daily 400 mile commutes into uncharted forest. They didn't come up with "range anxiety"; it was deliberately spread.
For a while there was a partisan divide about it, with electric cars seen as a hippie-liberal choice, much as hybrids used to be. Then circa 2020 Elon Musk began to systematically alienate that market.