Yer a good man, Charlie Brown. Keep in mind I'm a cranky old man who doesn't have to access scientific papers for purposes other than winning Internet pissing matches.

So yeah. This is a total bullshit study.

1) It does not distinguish between owned vehicles and leased vehicles.

2) They parsed 22 different demographic vectors but didn't even bother to break out the importance of incentives.

3) They make no acknowledgement of the aforementioned lapsing of lease incentives, nor of the fact that federal incentives for Teslas were cut in half in 2018. Tesla has a 4% marketshare of all vehicles in California, and lo and behold their sales were down 20% in CA in 2020.

4) Stupidest of all, though is no mention of this simple fact: if you had an electric vehicle from 2012-2017, you had a Clean Air Vehicle sticker and could rawk the carpool lane. But starting in 2018, you needed a new CAV sticker, which you could only get for a new car, which kicked 200,000 cars out of the HOV lane.

So let's review. From 2012-2016 you could ride the carpool lane with a heavily subsidized vehicle. The subsidies went away in 2017 and the carpool lane went away in 2018. So now you're paying 50% more for a vehicle that costs 20% more to insure and yeah - as goobster points out, 80% of owners stuck with it anyway.