The EV market will continue to drive forward despite the haters
The electric vehicle market continues to boom, despite the naysayers.
It used to be quite good fun telling other people that I get paid to swan around driving new cars – I can assess whether I’m going to like a bloke based on how excited he gets about it, in an inversely proportional way, while women tend to look at me with fear, as if I’m about to become incredibly boring (this is handy for keeping me married and counteracts my almost irresistible good looks). Lately, however, it has become unsafe for me to announce it.
Thrice in a week recently I was verbally assailed by people who wanted to tell me how much they hated EVs, believing them to be the whispering demon offspring of the devil, and felt that they should be banned forthwith.
In each case I was asked to defend them, or better yet admit that I, too, had realised they were a scam, thanks to some things I’d read on Facebook, and that I hated driving them and felt that Elon Musk should be imprisoned, immediately, for crimes against humanity, and his dancing.
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One fired-up fellow told me that there was no evidence anywhere, ever that an EV will ever be made that is even close to zero-emissions plausible over its whole usable life, or “from wheel to well”.
I whispered back that Mazda actually claimed to have done so already with its Mazda MX-30, but that the good news, from his point of view, was that to do so it had to make the battery so small that it only goes 224km between charges, making it about as useful as a one-way bus service from Sydney to Canberra.
Another guy accosted me as I was standing next to the new Cupra Born “hot hatch” at its launch in Canberra, snarling that “all EVs are shit” and declaring that I was wrong to suggest the new car we were looking at was quite fun to drive, despite not being very fast and having a top speed of just 160km/h. He looked like a V8 man, so I thought this would cheer him, but he just said he’d still rather toss away his testicles than own one.
What all of these people tend to have in common – aside from misguided beliefs that they know everything, and that I give a damn what they think – is a belief that the world is heading in the wrong direction and that we should be investing heavily in nuclear power and hydrogen cars instead.
I love the idea of hydrogen, too, as I did 15 years ago when I incorrectly thought it would be the answer, but if you think EV infrastructure is in short supply, try looking for a hydrogen station.
As for nuclear power stations, if Germany is shutting them down, surely it’s a good time for us to get on board, and I also hear they’re about as affordable as building a new Great Barrier Reef.
Impressively, I even managed to meet an EV driver who hated electric vehicles, an Uber pilot who’d been tempted into a Polestar by an attractive lease agreement. Spending all day in a car he philosophically disagreed with seemed quite painful for him, like Scott Morrison being forced to work in a refugee centre, or Adam Bandt in a coal mine.
What can you say to the EV haters, to calm them down or get them to see reason? Trust me, it’s not easy.
I imagine there were a lot of horse lovers who hated the first cars, too, and just as the first combustion-engined cars were a long way from the near-perfection we see in modern cars, today’s EVs, and their batteries, with all their flaws, are just a hint of what’s to come.
I guess it’s okay not to love the electric vehicles of today, even though many of them are already hugely impressive, but the fact is that cars with no exhaust pipes, and no emissions, are here to stay, and if history teaches us anything it is that they will only get better, more affordable and more wildly popular over the next few years.
And perhaps, by the time I change my title to EV journalist rather than motoring one, even the haters will come around.
Cars get cheaper as key costs fall Cheaper cars as costs fall
The cost to buy an electric vehicle is beginning to come down, making EVs more accessible than ever, but what does this mean automotive brands?
Can battery metals be sourced sustainably?
What are the environmental costs behind sourcing the metals for the batteries that power our electric vehicles?