"EVs won't work for me"

I don’t know about you but I tend to get into quite a lot of conversations with people who don’t own EVs. As a general rule they are ALL interested in EVs as a concept but a large proportion of them seem to think that an EV won’t work for them. There are ALWAYS three statements or questions that come up whenever you’re discussing EVs with someone who doesn’t have one. These three are 1) What’s the range? 2) What about charging? 3) Oh, but they’re too expensive. Those of us who are familiar with these comments know that they are part of the fossil fuel narrative to keep people buying petrol and diesel cars as long as possible. So today i want to go through how you might address these comments the next time you engage in such a discussion with people. Remember, however, the goal is not to convince sceptics that they should buy an EV and that it’ll always be the right choice for them (Sometimes it won’t be). The key is to identify where their thinking is guided by inaccurate or outdated information or a narrative that is not correct. How Far Does It Go? If we look at the first comment it’s usually ‘How far does it go?’. What they mean is ‘Can it go as far on a charge as my current vehicle can go on a tank of fuel because if it can’t I’m not even going to consider it’. In the past I’ve tried to answer this question by saying ‘mine goes about 120 miles but there are models that can do 400 miles’. The problem with this answer is that it forces you to try and disprove the Fossil Fuel narrative about having a large tank of quickly refillable petrol or diesel. An EV is never going to disprove that narrative. Plus whatever figure you give them will always be compared against what their current vehicle can do and - if they have something like a diesel Vauxhall - it’ll never be able to beat that ‘Oh. 400 miles? I get 600 miles on my tank. Not sure an EV would work for me’ I find the best way to answer this question or address this sort of comment in the first place is to open the conversation by addressing the use case rather than getting specific with range. My usual answer is something along the lines of ‘My car will go as far as any other car on the road. I regularly do trips up to Yorkshire from Hampshire. But let me ask you a question: on a day to day basis what sort of travel do you do in your car?’ if you get them to think about the distance requirement in these terms it reframes the discussion from being ‘How far will an EV go’ to ‘Can an EV do the sort of travel I need?’ Most people have a regular commute (either from home to their place of work or from home to the railway station). For the vast majority of people this will be fewer than 20 miles. On a weekend they may go a little further afield - 50 or 60 miles? Make sure you narrow down the actual distance travelled in a single stint behind the wheel NOT the overall distance travelled from A to B. (I mean if you’re doing a trip from London to the South of France you break it down into chunks. You don’t say 'I need a car that can do 900 miles in a single journey.' Nobody drives that sort of distance safely/legally without a break.) Once you get people to understand that the distance they need to be able to travel in a single stint is much less than they imagine, you can then start to have a more sensible conversation about range. At that point you can highlight cars such as the new e-Niro, the Kona, the iPace and the eSoul with ranges of 250+ miles. Of course there’s always going to be someone who needs to be able to travel long distances each day as part of their work (reps are an example of this) and sometimes it’s the right thing to say ‘You know, you’re an edge case when it comes to driving and you’re not ready for an EV just yet’ and leave it at that. Basically the conversation needs to focus on ‘Need’ when it comes to range rather than ‘desire’. What about Charging? The next topic will then come to charging. People will usually say ‘Well where can I charge them? There aren’t any chargers.’ This is because they don’t realise what a charger looks like. They may already have seen one at their local petrol station but mistaken it for some sort of fancy vacuum cleaner over on the edge of the forecourt. The fact is that there are more charger locations in the UK than petrol stations. They’re just not marked as prominently as places like your local Shell or Esso garage. Which will bring them onto charging at home. The next comment will be along the lines of ‘I can’t charge at home. I don’t have a charger.’ Well, obviously everybody has a charger at their house. They use it to charge their laptop, their phones and to provide power to their microwaves, wifi routers and TVs. it’s called a wall socket. Every single EV on the road will charge from a wall socket. Sure it’ll take some time but.. what’s that? You can’t park near your house so you’ll need a long extension cable to charge? Ah. Right. you’re one of the 40% of people with no off-street parking. That’s a bit of a deal breaker when it comes to EVs right? Actually no. The thing you need to let people know about is that even though 40% of UK home owners cannot charge from home, 100% of fossil fuel car owners cannot refill at home because they don’t have a petrol station at their house. So we’re actually improving the situation by 60%! There are numerous examples of people who own an EV but live in a place where they cannot charge at home. Co founder of the podcast Simon is a prime example. But - as mentioned earlier - there are literally thousands of public chargers around the country - a lot of which are free to use. Tesco and PodPoint have just installed their 200th charger at Tesco stores and they’re all completely free. So instead of going shopping then stopping at the petrol station on the way home to refill why not plug in while you shop and go home with free electrons in your battery? You don’t need a charger at home for that. If you work somewhere that has installed workplace charging that can solve your anxiety issues right there. Public parking, shopping centres, cinemas, restaurants, hotels. These are all places where you can charge your vehicle while doing something else and come back to a charged battery. In fact there are several park-and-ride facilities around the country now that have chargers where you leave your car plugged in while you head into town and it’s all full and ready for you when you come back at the end of the day. They're Too Expensive So now you’ve covered their issues of range, you’ve convinced them that they can charge at home and/OR use public charging so having off-street parking isn’t a problem. The next issue they’ll always bring up is cost. ‘They’re very expensive aren’t they?’ To which my answer is ‘sometimes’ But remember a £30,000 EV costs the same as a £30,000 ICE vehicle. The actual purchase price is not the issue. What people are doing is comparing the base model of a range with the EV version and realising that the price is different. We’ve talked before on this podcast about the cost of EV’s. I said at the time that the new electric Mini is priced slightly lower than the Cooper S version on which it’s based. But if you’re comparing it with the base model mini you’ll be shocked at the price difference. But an EV isn’t a basic model in the range. It’s usually based on a higher spec model and the price should reflect that. But here’s where the narrative comes back in. In the Fossil Fuel model you purchase the car and the price is relatively low. But then every time you use it you’re accumulating a cost per mile. This is a cost to own and run the car. It includes servicing, road tax, fuel etc. In the EV these costs are either not applicable or much, much lower. But with the fossil fuel narrative these two figures - the purchase price and the running costs - are divorced from each other. One is high and relatively hidden (the running costs) so that the other can be as low as possible (the purchase price). With an EV there’s no need to do that. When your friend starts to tell you about how much more expensive it is to buy an EV you need to ask them if they’ve looked at it from a cost per month rather than just a purchase price perspective. I pay £290 per month for the lease on my vehicle. Road tax is zero. Servicing (fixed price) works out at around £7 per month. Electricity to charge works out at £26/ month for 1000 miles. Total = £323. This was a 36 month lease with no deposit. Now do the same for the petrol version of my car (or, in this case the base model of the Kia Ceed which is quoted at £20,800 and is a similar sort of vehicle). Servicing will be the same at £7 per month. Road Tax is £250 per year. If I was to lease it through Kia the payments would be £326/ month and fuel for 12,000 miles per year would be £1435 at the combined economy of 45.6 MPG (£120/month). Grand total: £460+/ month For the cheapest car Kia do (The Picanto 1.0l) the monthly repayments are £195 on a lease, road tax is £215 (£18 per month). Petrol is £100 per month Total = £313 This means the base model Kia Picanto is more expensive to lease on a like-for-like basis than the Soul EV I am leasing. Now obviously the rates I am paying are for an 18 month old vehicle but the difference is quite staggering. Let’s take a look at a vehicle that HAS a direct Fossil fuel equivalent: The Peugot 208 GT Line We'll use the same basic criteria for the lease: £1000 deposit, 37 months, 12000 per annum. The quoted figures are from the Peugot ‘Just add fuel’ finance offer and include insurance, servicing and tax. 208 GT Line 1.2L PureTech 130 EAT8 S&S £417/month (including insurance). Petrol is £110 per month. Tax and servicing is included. This gives £527/ month e-208 GT Line Electric 50 kWh 136 is £475 per month. Electricity for the same 1000 miles will be approximately what I pay at the moment for mine = £30. Total = £502. This means the Peugeot ‘Just add fuel’ finance option for the 208 and the e-208 results in the e208 being less expensive. Sure if you want the base version 208 with a smaller engine and lower spec the monthly payments are £315 plus petrol (£100?). But you’re not comparing like for like. Let’s have a look at the e-Mini (Again figures are from the mini finance website.This is just the lease option and does not include fuel, insurance or road tax) MINI 3-DOOR HATCH COOPER S SPORT : £404/ month. Tax = £45 Fuel = £126 Total = £570 plus service costs MINI ELECTRIC LEVEL 1: £482/ month Tax = 0 Fuel = £30 Total = £510 plus service costs (£60/ month cheaper) If you want to go second hand the price differential really starts to work in your favour. As we've mentioned before Euan McTurk has done calculations where he proves that an old Ford Fiesta - which he provided for free in his example - is actually more expensive to run than an EV with a financed purchase of £6000. It’s all down to the fossil fuel purchase being included in the monthly cost rather than being excluded. Remember traditionally people look at the monthly repayments on their car to calculate how much it’s going to cost them and don’t include the regular running costs. With EVs you look at the total cost of ownership and see that in many cases it’s cheaper. Finally it’s also worth remembering when chatting with your friends about this that any household which has 2 vehicles or more has almost zero excuse for one of those vehicles NOT being an electric one. The range issue disappears when a second car is available, charging doesn’t play into this and - I would suggest - if you have 2 cars then ‘the price’ of a car is not that much of an issue. If they were too expensive you would settle for having just 1, especially now that I’ve shown that an EV can easily be cheaper than the similar fossil fuel version. Next time you’re having these conversations with your friends about why you’re driving an EV these are the sorts of facts and figures you can introduce into the conversation to let them know that they might be someone who should also consider an EV. If all else fails and they’re still one of the ‘I need 1000 miles, the ability to tow a caravan and run a car 24 hours a day with no time to stop for a charge!’ types then they’re probably not the sort of people you want as friends anyway.