Our state, along with the feds and Xcel Energy, are going big on electric vehicles. The combined tax benefits and other incentives are staggering, totaling tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.

Where are our dollars going, however? I look around my neighborhood and see no EVs. I don’t know anyone who owns one. I don’t know of anyone drawn in by the incentives either. And this ranges across the spectrum from people I know who wouldn’t be caught dead in an EV to those that are receptive to it and are waiting until price and performance come in line with their current vehicles.

I have heard more than once these subsidies and incentives are going to the wealthy. That seems a common sense idea; being one of the people who is receptive to EVs myself, I can tell you the choices I have are new EVs I can’t afford, or used ones so close to battery death they don’t meet my needs.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

To see who owns EVs vs. income, you have to work around some difficulties. There is no way I know of to go directly to that information. My method is laid out in more detail on my Substack, but I, in essence, ended up cross-referencing vehicle registration data by county with per capita county income.

This isn’t perfect and I will not tell you it’s an exhaustive study, but it is a reasonable first-pass look at who is buying what. What I found was quite interesting.

Skipping a lot of calculation and detail, I can tell you the following: Car registrations in total show almost no association with per-capita income while EV registrations show a strong one. That is, as a county’s average income went up, there is not necessarily a similar rise in vehicle registrations, but there is one for EV registrations; you’re much more likely to find EVs in richer counties than in less wealthy ones.

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. No correlation can ever answer the question why, and there are a thousand plausible explanations.

More important here is the differential between the two correlations and what that says. It says EVs are preferentially piling up in wealthy areas. It says this doesn’t seem to be a special case of a general principle the wealthy just have more cars in general.

And it also says – because it’s reasonable to assume the incentives, paid for by everyone regardless of income, are being used to help fund this – money is going out of the hands of ordinary Coloradans and into the hands of people who earn more than they do. This is especially evident when I looked at the top-10 counties for EV registrations in this state: all wealthy Front Range and mountain communities.

It’s fair to say this is not likely what the people who set up these incentives wanted. But wanted and got are two different things, and what we got right now is not fair. Why should you and I, while scrimping and saving to try and get by in this state, be giving money to those who likely have more resources just so they can have an EV? Is that fair? Is this the proper role of government?

I think there is a better, and more egalitarian, way to go about trying to reduce emissions, a way suggested by what I noticed when I ran a correlation between hybrid vehicle registrations and per-capita income.

That correlation was slightly weaker than the one for EVs, though stronger than the one for all vehicles. You are more likely to find hybrids in counties with higher average incomes, but you will find them in a broader range of counties. This, too, is evident when you sort the hybrid registrations by county. The top-10 have some of the same players as with EVs, but the bottom 10 are distinctly different: I don’t have to go up eight rows of zeros to find the first nonzero hybrid registrations like I did for EVs. Additionally, the lowest registered number of hybrids is much bigger than the first nonzero EV registration!

Perhaps our state’s headlong rush into promoting EVs was not the wisest choice. I think we’re starting to see that now, with the incentives funneling money from everyone into wealthy areas. Wouldn’t a better approach have been to not burden everyday Coloradans so we could jump ahead five steps all at once?

Wouldn’t it have been better to see what consumers were moving toward before trying to shove them? Wouldn’t it be more effective and fair to try and incentivize a small step forward so more of the people who pay in to subsidies can and would benefit and participate?

It’s not too late to do that, all it requires from our policymakers is the will and the strength to admit they were wrong.

Cory Gaines is a physics instructor at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling. He runs the Colorado Accountability Project on Facebook and lives for what Richard P. Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out.”