It's called walking the talk.

Also, putting your money where your mouth is.

Either way, when we polled our Twitter followers to ask when they intended to buy their first battery-electric car, we didn't expect the distribution of responses we got.

DON'T MISS: Plug-in electric car sales in Feb better than Jan lows

Cars with plugs represented just a tiny fraction of last year's U.S. new-vehicle market: 195,000 or so out of 17.5 million light-duty vehicles sold.

That's just slightly more than 1 percent. Conventional hybrids made up no more than another 2 percent.

Among respondents to our Twitter poll, however, the numbers were radically, rip-roaringly different.

Fully 44 percent of the close to 500 followers who responded to the poll said they already own a battery-electric vehicle.

That would, if nothing else, explain the rich and useful comments from many electric-car drivers that expand on the real-world experiences of other such drivers we occasionally publish.

CHECK OUT: Electric-car sales in 2017 set new record: just under 200,000

The next largest group of respondents, 24 percent, said they planned to buy an electric car within the next year or two (we defined that as by December 2019).

Following them was the group that planned to do the same within three or four years (by December 2021), at 18 percent.

2018 Nissan Leaf

2018 Nissan Leaf

2019 Hyundai Kona Electric

2019 Hyundai Kona Electric

2018 Volkswagen e-Golf

2018 Volkswagen e-Golf

Just 14 percent of poll participants said they didn't intend to buy a battery-electric vehicle until 2022 or later. That is, quite frankly, pretty remarkable.

It's either an indication that there is a large pool of potential electric-car buyers waiting for the right vehicle to arrive at the right price. (A small electric crossover utility vehicle with all-wheel drive, COUGH, perhaps?)

READ THIS: In what segments will EVs do best by 2025? Twitter poll results

Or it means our Twitter following is radically, utterly unrepresentative of the broader car-buying public at large. (Or, most likely, some of each.) Which leads us to our standard caveat ...

As always, please note that our Twitter polls are far from scientifically valid, due to small sample size and self-selection by those who choose to participate.