- Tesla owners are typically white men, a study that analyzed drivers of several Tesla models found.
- The typical Tesla owner has a household income of more than $150,000 a year, according to the study.
- Tesla owners are also more likely to own a home and not have children living with them.
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Tesla owners look different than the average driver, according to recent surveys.
The average Tesla buyer is an upper-middle-class white male, who is typically a member of Generation X, according to a study from Hedges & Company, a digital marketing firm for automakers. The firm analyzed a vehicle owner database of over 175 million car owners and broke down the demographics for over 14,500 Tesla Model S, 3, X, and Y buyers who purchased their vehicles between 2020 and 2024.
Some 74% of Tesla owners identify as male, according to the firm. However, the brand saw a slight increase in female ownership of its Model S as compared to its analysis from a few years prior. The recent analysis found about 27% of Model S owners identify as female, Hedges & Company said. For comparison, about 49% of licensed US drivers are male, per the Federal Highway Administration.
Tesla owners are also majority white. About 81% of Tesla owners identify as Caucasian — down from 87% a few years prior. Some 11% identify as Hispanic, 5% as Asian, and Black owners make up 2% of the Tesla owner pool, the firm’s recent analysis found.
Tesla owners appear to have higher incomes. The analysis found Tesla drivers largely come from the upper middle class (commonly referred to as individuals who have household incomes over $100,000 a year). The group found across the models the average owner has a household income of $150,015, with Model X owners having the highest average household income at $161,898. The median household income in the US is $74,580, according to 2022 data from the US Census Bureau.
Tesla owners recommend charging your EV at home.
UCG
Tesla drivers are also likely to own a home. Some 97% of the owners also own their own home, according to the study which found the median home value for a Tesla owner was over $500,000. And unsurprisingly, the most popular state for the owners was Tesla’s origin state of California. The national rate of homeownership in the US is about 64% — though the number drops below 33% for Americans under the age of 34, per the US Census Bureau.
They’re also less likely to have kids in their home. About 70% of Tesla owners don’t have children living in their homes, according to the analysis. Though, that doesn’t mean Tesla owners are necessarily childless. The study found that Tesla owners tend to skew older with a median age of 48. Model S owners tend to be the oldest with a median age of 55, while Model Y owners have the youngest median age of 47. As a result, most Tesla drivers can count themselves as members of Generation X — individuals born between 1965 and 1980.
Hedges and Company’s analysis mostly lines up with other studies of Tesla drivers when it comes to gender and income, including an analysis by the EV blog Teslarati. However, a study from Jerry, a Palo Alto-based car insurance savings app, found that 58% of the drivers of the newer Teslas (2023 and 2024 models) are between the ages of 22 and 34 — meaning the majority were Millennials or Generation-Z.
The insurance group examined safety and demographics data from 1.8 million trips taken by 32,000 drivers with 2020 to 2024 models. Some 38,000 of those trips were taken by 968 Tesla drivers.
The Jerry study also found that Tesla drivers are more educated on average. Over one-third of Tesla drivers studied had a master’s degree or doctoral degree as compared to only 13% of the US population, according to the Census. The most common occupations were also engineer, which accounted for 14% of the Tesla drivers examined in the study, followed by operations manager and software engineer, Jerry reported.
The average Tesla owner might look different than the typical driver on the road, but they aren’t too far off from studies of the typical EV buyer — a wealthy millennial who has traded in a luxury gas-powered car for an electric one.
