It's pretty simple: the majority of people who drive "green" cars want you to KNOW they're driving a green car.
There was a study done on this with Priuses. The study showed that Priuses sell far better than other hybrids (Civics, Escapes, etc.) because people don't JUST want the environmental and economic effects. They also want the people who see them to know they drive a hybrid for those reasons.
My wife bought her Focus EV precisely because it wasn't screaming, "Look at me! I drive an electric car!" But that isn't true of the majority of people. Unfortunate, because it really is the one that's most like a regular car in every aspect.
Here's a link to a radio story I heard on the study
And an excerpt:
"
DUBNER: So the young twin economists, Alison and Steve Sexton, set out to gather some data on hybrid car sales in different places. They chose Colorado and Washington, two states with a lot of political diversity, and they got hold of vehicle-registration data and voting records. Now, the vehicle data told them what kind of cars were being bought where and the voting records stood as a proxy for how “green” each part of the state was – the idea being that “greener” communities vote more Democrat than Republican. When the Sextons looked at the numbers, they found that hybrids indeed sold disproportionately well in the greener ZIP codes – in Boulder and Seattle, for instance. But was that true for all hybrids? What about the Honda Civic hybrid, the Sextons’ control car?
A.SEXTON: We did a test to see if the market share for Honda Civics also increased in greener ZIP codes. And we found no statistical effect. And in fact, in a few of the regressions we found a negative effect.
DUBNER: But the Prius? Those green ZIP codes were crawling with Priuses."
