Now it’s no surprise that I am a big fan of electric vehicles. I’ve been on a recent blogging spree, talking about my experiences with a number of different electric cars, such as the Tesla Model 3 and Polestar 2, where i’ve been glowingly praising their capabilities as vehicles and as pieces of modern technology. In short, I like electric cars. Even as a passionate petrolhead, I enjoy how they drive, how they integrate into your life, they’re truly the direction we will be taking automotive transport towards in the future.
However, there are a bunch of frankly, rather significant barriers to entry when it comes to electric vehicles. Oftentimes these will be used to push FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about whether or not electric cars will be viable for mass-adoption. I do agree that some of these barriers are pretty significant and we will need to absolutely overcome them if we want our existing car-centric lifestyle to continue. I don’t necessarily think our car dependence is entirely a good thing, and this is why I differentiate between electric vehicles and Electric Cars. Most people assume that when I talk about EVs, I am talking about electric cars. Electric Vehicles however, are incredibly diverse, and they cover everything from power-assisted bicycles, to electric kick scooters, to electric motorcycles and to cars as a whole.
I personally think that electric vehicles are the future. Electric cars are just a part of the “genre” of electric vehicles, and a lot like how certain genres of music get smack-talked for being less worthy than other genres of music, electric cars cop a lot of flak for not going the distance, being inconvenient to live with, being expensive to repair, so on and so forth.
So In this article, i’m going to address some of these concerns. I am going to put forward some solutions to some of these issues, and why in some cases, maybe the FUD is real, and we should absolutely address it.
Reason 1: Apartment charging and its teething issues
So As you know from my previous articles, I own an apartment. Now to my American fans, I own a condo. For my Singaporean fans? Well I guess you call ’em Condos too? Basically I bought an apartment as a private-sale residence and I don’t pay rent, rather I pay strata fees to an Owner’s Corporation to cover my costs of the share of common property expenses.
Now apartment living has its advantages. For one, it’s less car-dependent, especially if you live very close to the amenities that are required to live. I live a short walk from my nearest train station, and i can take a quick bike ride to the shops if I need to pick up parcels or do small shopping runs. If I want to electrify my bike, I can cover the distance between my home and my workplace within about an hour of riding thanks to the relative closeness of my home to a major part of the Principal Shared Path network. Apartments are also more environmentally friendly compared to single-family homes due to reduced fuel consumption from vehicles needed to perform daily tasks.
Our current car is a 2010 Hyundai Getz. This car is about the same size as a Toyota Yaris or Toyota Vios, for those in my audience who want a comparison, but the Getz is a simple, reliable little hatchback that gets okayish fuel economy, and is pretty much designed to fill the gaps where we can’t cycle or take the train to places. Now, we have owned this vehicle for two-and-a-bit years now, and we have put around 24,000km on that car in that time period, most of which we have put on in the last year due to the recent METRONET works on the Armadale line. This means that on average, we’ve put about 10,000km a year in mileage on that car, most of which was done during the time that the train line has been down.
The biggest issue for us if we ever do decide to swap the Getz out for say, a Tesla Model 3 or Polestar 2 is going to be charging the thing. Now, luckily we have a council of owners who is pretty open to EVs, especially the majority owner who happens to be a bit of a green-energy enthusiast himself. This is however, not the case for most apartment complexes. It is quite difficult to get charging infrastructure even considered as part of a 10-year maintenance plan, let alone convincing owners of a complex that passing a special levy for a few L2 chargers is going to be worth it for the council. Even with Section 64 of the Strata Titles Act making it easy for owners to install solar panels and other sustainability infrastructure into their apartments, the design of apartments makes it hard for those who live in traditional tower-block apartments to get solar connected to the complex, especially if, for example, your strata company is responsible for billing your energy.
Now there are solutions, such as those offered by companies like EVSE Australia and EVlution, which can add credit card payments to apartment chargers, as well as metering so that strata companies can bill tenants for their usage. The difficulty lies with Strata Councils, who rarely tend to be open to the idea of getting chargers installed, citing many of the common misconceived FUD points of EV charging such as “Oh, EVs catch fire all the time” (Which they don’t), or “EV chargers are expensive to install” (which they aren’t). In fact, i’d argue the council will be set to make a profit off of EVs if you have a significant saturation of apartment owners who want to adopt EVs, and if you’re a complex with AirBNB tenants who come and go from the complex? Adding EV charging will attract more affluent clientele who own EVs and Pluggable vehicles.
For now though? The large bulk of apartment dwellers will be dependent on, let’s be honest here, the rather patchy DCFC infrastructure we have here in Australia. The nearest charger to me is about a 10 minute drive away, and has only a single usable CCS2 port, which during peak travel times, is almost always occupied. This means that I’ll be beholden to living around the charging station as opposed to living around the petrol pump, which is even more ironic when you find out that that DCFC is a charger located at a petrol station. This coupled with the fact that there aren’t nearly enough DCFCs to meet demand for future EV uptake.
This factor alone, combined with the karen-ness of strata councils as a whole, is what’s going to cause apartment dwellers such as myself to be laggards when it comes to adopting electric cars. However, due to the proximity of apartments to nearby central shopping and business locations, it might be more viable for apartment dwellers to think outside of the car when it comes to EV adoption.
The solution here? Electric motorcycles, bicycles and scooters. Why? Some options can be charged without the need to have the vehicle plugged into a charger in your parking bay. You can remove the battery or park the vehicle in your home.
So let’s start with Motorcycles. There’s a company based in Sydney called FONZ Moto, and they make a bike called the NKD. The NKD has a removable battery that can be slotted into the bike if need be, meaning you can park your bike, take the battery upstairs, charge it inside (or preferably on your balcony for safety), and then when you’re ready to go for a ride, you can take your battery back down to your bike and go for a ride. Sure, you’re not going to be going long distances, at least for now, but with a bike with a removable battery, you reduce the chances of your bike getting stolen, and if you combine that with a small, efficient ICEV to cover the areas where your bike cannot access, you’re already winning when it comes to emissions. The NKD’s job is to bring electric motorcycling to the masses, but more importantly to solve a problem that many apartment owners in Sydney face, the fact that it’s going to be extremely difficult to retrofit charging infrastructure to existing apartments. On top of this too, you can fit two bikes into one parking bay, or a bike and a compact car, meaning you can still have two vehicles for a two-person household. Best of all, it can be ridden on a LAMS license. If you want an option you can ride on a Car license? Look at the FONZ Arthur.
If you have access to a wall socket on the outside of your building like I do, that’s connected to your unit, you could also use a conventional Type 2 outlet to charge a motorcycle such as the BMW CE 04, a longer-range, highway capable Maxi scooter. The best part about these bike options? For a new vehicle, all of them end up being cheaper than buying an electric car, all of them offer a decent range for a daily commute, and all of them can be optioned to work with Type-2 charging, meaning you can do top-up charges on easier-to-install Level 2 chargers, and use those as the motorcycling equivalent of a DCFC.
Electric scooters can also be a viable option for apartment dwellers, especially if all you’re doing is transporting yourself to the local train station, and taking yourself into the city for work. A Segway Ninebot scooter can be had for less than $1,500 and can offer you up to 40km of electric range. More than enough to cover a daily commute to and from the office, and on top of this? You can charge it in less than a few hours when plugged into a regular wall socket at work.
On top of this? a power-assisted electric bicycle is another removable battery vehicle option, as most eBikes can have their batteries removed for charging. On top of this? You’ll get fit in the process. The even better part? You can also plug that battery into a charger in the office, meaning you don’t have to worry about range affecting your commute, and you can convert any bicycle that has a compatible bottom bracket using either a mid-drive or a hub motor conversion kit. (Although, i recommend you do this legally, ie, stick below the 250W that is allowed by most states when it comes to eBikes)
Reason 2: Cars are expensive, electric ones even more so.
Now, let’s factor our Getz for a second. That car gets (hah), 9L/100km on average, if I’m the one driving it (let’s be honest, i’ve got a bit of a lead foot here.) . It’s fully paid off and at the base of its depreciation curve.
Consider that we would drive the car, on average, 10,000km a year. That means with a 13.5kWh/100km efficiency, like that seen in the Tesla Model 3, we’d be looking at 1350kWh of charging each year, at 0.33c/kWh, that works out to be $445/yr if we charge off of our home’s power at night-time with a cheeky cable dangle, or $931/yr if we solely rely on Ampol’s AmpCharge network for charging. Now sure, both of these are still cheaper than petrol, by a long shot, but we’d also be burning $62,000 of working capital to make a saving of just $1000/yr. If you factor in depreciation of assets, plus any payments i’d be making to the car, it almost looks like a non-starter from the get-go.
The truth is, cars are expensive. They are a tax and a burden on us all. Think about it for a second, if you imagined that you had to pay a tax every time you stepped out your front door, then paid a tax for every step you took on your way to work, then paid a tax to stay at your destination for hours on end, paid a tax to walk home, and paid a tax for to go back into your door, and you paid a tax every time you had a birthday or a health issue, you’d think this would be some sort of orwellian nightmare. But, this is the nature of car ownership. You pay tax for your car to be allowed onto the road (Registration) , you pay a tax to be able to use the road (Fuel Excise), you pay a tax every time your car ages, has issues or simply becomes unpopular (Depreciation), and we shrug this all of and think that it’s perfectly okay to light $62,000 on fire to buy a Tesla, just to save $1100 a year on fuel costs? Not to mention that at some point, that saving will go away thank to the drop in fuel revenue governments get to maintain the roads.
No form of transit destroys its own infrastructure faster than a rubber-tired motor vehicle. The heavier the vehicle, the faster the road wears down. Trucks wear the roads down the fastest, then SUVs, then regular cars, and then motorcycles, but the differences in road-wear between these vehicles goes down exponentially. This is why in my humble and frankly, shit-eating opinion, electric vehicles and cars in general need to get lighter.
Right now, the lightest electric car that is available to Australians is the Nissan Sakura, a Japanese imported electric Kei Car, which will set you back around $30,000 landed and complied, with a battery range of about 150km off of a single charge, and a 20kWh liquid cooled battery. However, this car is tiny. Smaller even than my Getz. Kei Cars or “Kei Jidosha” in Japanese, are a category of reduced-tax Light vehicles, which were introduced as part of cost-saving measures post WWII to allow the Japanese to get moving again, whilst they worked on their now famous rail infrastructure. They are restricted to 660cc’s of engine capacity, 47kW of power, and a footprint which occupies no more than 3.4m in length, 1.4m in width and 2m in height, which explains why so many of them have really goofy proportions.
The advantage of Kei Cars is their fuel efficiency and their size. They make the most of their small footprint by minimising their engine sizes, and improving the overall fuel efficiency of those tiny little engines. As a result, you can expect to see fuel economy ranges in the realm of about 7.6L/100km in a Suzuki Carry Kei Truck, or 2.4L/100km for a Honda S660 sportscar. That previously mentioned Nissan Sakura absolutely obliterates even the Tesla Model 3 for efficiency, with an efficiency rating of 12.3L/100km, or about 0.9L/100km equivalent. Their tiny size makes a city surface street look like a wide open highway, making it super easy to drive in urbanised areas.
The downside? Their size. Their tiny size makes even cars like my Getz look like lumbering great SUVs. If my recent experience with the MX5 ND has anything to do with it, small low-down cars can make you feel unsafe. Now, we live in the age of postmodernism, where how you feel is way more important than how things actually are, so as a result, if you feel like you’re going to die, you may as well just accept the fact that you’re already dead inside and buy an SUV.
This is why i guess SUVs are becoming so popular, there’s this perceived arms race where if you see everyone out there buying big, dangerous SUVs, you have no choice to buy a big, dangerous SUV to counteract the uptake of other idiots buying big, dangerous SUVs. Not Just Bikes did a great video on how the frontal area of vehicles presents a real and present danger to other road-users.
So with this in mind, electric cars are still incredibly expensive. This is because cars as a whole, are expensive. Expensive to own, expensive to maintain, expensive to subsidise (thanks to their roadwear), and expensive to our environments as a whole. Car dependence is the price you pay to live in a city that’s poorly designed around humans, and is instead designed around the motoring and oil lobby’s interests.
Now why am I agreeing with this form of FUD? Well behind every piece of FUD, there is at least some grain of truth behind it all. This is essentially the underpinning basics of Dialectical Materialism. The arguments FUDsters make are simply them falling for the phenomena behind the slow uptake of EVs without analysing the material aspects of why their uptake is slower than usual. For example, all the FUD you hear about EV fires and such are deliberate talking points of organisations who want to defend fossil-fuel companies, despite the fact that EVs are safer than ICEVs when it comes to this standpoint. However, there are some valid FUD talking points, such as the restricted access to chargers, lack of home charging infrastructure and the overall cost of entry. Now, Auto Industry phenomena will tell you to simply suck it up and bear the cost of Electric Cars, however there are alternatives. As previously mentioned, you could encourage electric micromobility options, or even better, make the access to equitable public transit even fairer, but building it out and making it cheaper.
Singapore does this to an incredible degree. To own a car is a financial burden beyond the pail there, with a Tesla Model 3 costing in excess of $300,000 when all the taxes and COEs are considered, vs the $62,000 it costs to buy and register a Tesla here in Perth. These taxes fund the Singaporean Government’s public transit network, to construct new MRT lines, build bigger and more bus stations, and to improve walkability and cycleability in their island city.
We should be punishing car ownership as much as possible, to encourage people to only buy a car if it is needed. Yes, that sounds painful and yes, you probably aren’t going to agree with me on this one. But, there is also a reason why Singapore has the second highest life expectancy in the world behind Japan, it’s because public transit, cycling and walking are more affordable and more accessible ways to get around your city. It’s because Singaporeans and Japanese people are incentivised to buy motorcycles and cars that are smaller with cheaper COEs in the former country, and Kei cars in the latter category. The roadway designs of most Japanese cities are built around a person driving a car that is no bigger than 3.4m long, or better yet, built around the scale of a human who is more than likely walking to their destination than not.
Trains consume less energy, wear out their infrastructure slower, and can carry more people with greater efficiency than their car counterparts.
But despite all these facts, people still cling to the car. Hell, I still own one even though I’m close to a train station. Mostly because i like the idea of being comfortable, dry and being able to go where and when i want to. So this is why I believe the middle ground is with Micromobility solutions. These plug the financial and logistic gap that sits between cars and public transport. They’re small and light enough to not be a significant burden on roads, and they’re cheap enough for most people to access. Postmodernism also underpins our ideology in the 21st century, to think that how we feel is more important than what actually is. People feel like they enjoy their car more than sharing the train with other people. The feeling of being able to exclude oneself from others makes you feel exclusive, but here’s the thing. When everyone does it, do you really feel unique? This is why I really don’t see the point of dropping $62,000 on a car unless you need to replace an existing one, and why I think that spending as little money as you can on road transport is both good for yourself and good for the environment.
There are costs that go into producing a car. A financial cost, sure, but an environmental cost as well. Despite the fact that EVs over their lifecycles are more efficient than ICEVs, this is on the assumption you are going to consider environmental impact and a greater meaning into your commute. Most people do not have this privilege, and if you put this into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, The top-of-the-pyramid level Self Actualisation comes well after the Level 2 safety-aspect of getting yourself around to fulfil a Level 1 aspect of being able to feed, shelter and water yourself.
Now Public Transit is the most equitable way to smash all aspects of the upper tiers of this pyramid as well as to fight climate change from the transit aspect, but any way that we can drive down the cost of electrified or low-carbon transit, be it through the uptake of smaller cars, electric motorcycles and micromobility, is going to be very effective in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. But whilst our cities are still designed around the car, it’s going to be more difficult for those who cannot afford electric vehicles, or for those who cannot afford a vehicle in its entirety, to decarbonise their lives. It’s hard to charge an EV in an apartment, let alone buy an EV in this economy.
So how do we make electric cars more accessible? Simple. We make them cheaper, we implement size restrictions, and we make the environment they operate in more hostile to faster vehicles.
Call me a joyless communist, but I think that speed limits are too damned high. The faster a vehicle goes, the more power it needs to use to get itself up to speed and keep itself at speed. This is why EVs do so well around town, but you see their efficiency absolutely tank when you go faster on the highway. It’s simple physics really, the drag equation goes up exponentially. Slowing down will increase your range by a pretty significant factor due a to reduction to wind resistance.
Reducing the urban highway speed limit to say, 70 or 80km/h, and reducing the speed in urban areas to 40km/h is a good start. That way too, you don’t need to sell electric vehicles which need gargantuan-sized batteries to be viable for once-a-week charging in cities. Smaller batteries means a lower cost to the end consumer. Lower costs to the end consumer means more consumers take on electric vehicles. More electric vehicles means less carbon being emitted.
To make EVs cheaper, you need to disincentivize the production of larger vehicles that cost more to make and therefore need to be sold at a higher price. Do what Japan did. Make it so that Kei cars, or smaller cars get advantages over bigger cars when it comes to taxes. Lighter vehicles also cause less roadwear than heavier ones, meaning you don’t have to spend as much money to maintain your own roads. They also present a smaller environmental burden, are cheaper to fix when they do have issues, and with them travelling at slower speeds, you don’t have to pack them so full of safety technology that they end up weighing an extra 500kg due to all those additional safety systems that you need to pack into the car to make that gargantuan truck of a thing that’s on sale at the moment safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
On top of this, we need to once again, embrace electric Motorcycling. Vietnam and Taiwan are already beating us to the punch here, with the Vinfast motorcycle charging network in Vietnam, and the Gogoro charging network in Taiwan. The latter is something I really, really love, as you can use hot-swappable LFP batteries that recharge in a charging station and can be requested before you arrive. You drop your old batteries off and pop new ones into the stand when you’re done with them, and they charge up to 80%, with a few batteries being fully charged before a user comes to collect them, with timing based upon an algorithm which tracks the average uptake of charged batteries and the dropping off of old ones. Gogoro enabled Motorcycles as a result, end up being cheaper and faster to refuel than competing ICEV motorcycles. They also end up being cheaper to own too, due to less servicing requirements. This makes them more equitable as a form of electrified transit than any car on the market.
Reason 3: the emotional aspects of a car.
…and I entirely get this. Nothing beats the sound of a tire-shredding, rip-roaring V8 engine. It gets the adrenaline pumping, it gets the heart racing. There is absolutely an emotional aspect to ICEVs, and my friends all tend to agree with me on this front.
See, I met the large bulk of my current friends in the car enthusiast community. The fact that there is an entire mode of culture which surrounds a method of transportation is something that in some ways, baffles most people, but cultures are cultivated by common connections, common interests, and a significant push by companies to support those communities. This is why certain automotive brands thrive off of building a sense of cultural connectedness to the brand and to the idea of your choice of vehicle being from that brand. I’ve been in and around many car scenes. The Japanese Domestic Market (or JDM) car scene, the Mazda MX5 scene, the Electric Car scene, the classic car scene, the supercar scene, all of them all have their cultural niches, their sacred cows, their jokes, their ways of talking. In a way, to own certain kinds of vehicles is to be part of a club. Ferrari even goes so far as to consider themselves as a form of car club more than an automotive manufacturer, where its most desirable members are active participants in the club with their vehicles, and their lesser-able members are dripped out in Ferrari Merch, or waving Ferrari Flags at your country’s next Formula 1 GP or Endurance race.
Now, you’d think that to the average petrolhead, Electric Vehicles don’t quite incite the same level of passion amongst their enthusiasts, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Electric cars especially have a culture entirely around the commonality of living with an electric car. Where’s the best charger? Who’s got the best, most efficient, most fun electric car? Who can generate the most power off their solar panels? There’s even a subgenere of this culture, with Tesla Fans exclusively occupying the same sort of niche within a niche that Apple computer enthusiasts occupy within computer culture.
Everything is political and everything is cultural. Some see EVs as a cultural sin. In much the same way that a deep-in-the-red Republican voter would find the ideas of the Democrats abhorrent, Petrolheads find the idea of electric cars abhorrent as they do not represent what a car is to them.
There are simply some people who will never own an electric vehicle. People like my mum, for example.
“I just don’t get it. You put petrol in a car, not electricity”
My mum
Now you can make all the fake exhaust boomer noises you like, Hyundai Ioniq 5N, normies are not going to like that your electric car is pretending to be a petrol car. It’s the same reason why the plant-based meat industry is failing. There are plenty of delicious vegetarian and vegan dishes out there. Just go ask the Indians or the Vietnamese about this. You don’t need to go out there and turn my beef burger into a mass-manufactured slop burger. I’m already enjoying the beef burger, why are you telling me that my decision to eat beef is wrong? That just makes me want to eat beef more, not less.
So what’s the solution to this malaise by ICEV enthusiasts? Well the solution simply, is to stop cramming electric cars down their throats. The best proof of this is to simply look at the recent uptick in polling preference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the two-president-preferred polls. Kamala, unlike Biden, isn’t campaigning on whether or not the policies of the Democrats are more effective and subsequently talking down to swing voters, she is providing a better alternative to Trump, purely on the basis that she is a better potential leader of congress than Trump and his pack of creepy weirdo uncles. Simply by differentiating herself based upon the lack of merits of the other party, is making her win.
There’s some incredible Vegetarian and Vegan dishes out there, but they taste good on their own merits, not because they are Vegan or Vegetarian. Likewise, there are plenty of fantastic electric cars out there, that are great on their own merits, such as the Teslas and the Polestar I reviewed. The entire reason why Hyrbids became so normalised is because Hybrids just became a part of the background music of life, they just blend in now. No weird shapes or spaceship interiors, they are just normal cars with more efficient powertrains. The second Toyota gets off its arse and makes an electric Corolla that’s practically a normal car? That’s when EVs will be considered a normal part of our lives.
I regularly eat vegetarian foods now. Probably about once every two weeks or so for dinner, but honestly, probably more than this, because If you think about it, a bowl of chips is a vegetarian food, and yet you don’t think about it, because there isn’t a big “vegetarian” word slapped on the side of it. Hell, potato chips can in some ways, be entirely Vegan, and here we are, ignoring the fact that they’re a vegan food, because there isn’t a glowing red “Vegan” sign on the side of your cup of chips.
The solution to this is to embrace the positive aspects of EVs as a whole. The quietness, swiftness, ease of driving, and the comfort of EVs are what makes me love them. The fact that they’re better for the planet is an afterthought and a happy side-effect. What needs to be improved is their normality and their cost of entry. This is something that will eventually happen, but whilst we are still in what I like to call the “Prius” stage of EVs, where owning one is a statement of political intent or frankly, hypocritical moral superiority, EVs will not become a normalised thing. Wanna know how I know this? Ask your typical Corolla Hybrid driver what they think of BEVs. They will likely say the same stuff they hear from FUDsters in the press about how they’re inefficient, bad and costly, whilst driving a car which those same paid-for-by-oil-and-gas FUDsters would say the same things about 20 years ago when celebrities were driving Priuses and being smug pricks about it.
The other way once again we can make more people become enthused with electric vehicles is to make cars that people actually want to buy, or rather, what they can afford to buy. Better yet, those same efficiency and size restrictions mentioned earlier will help to improve electric car uptake, or better yet, reduce car dependency, and make motorcycling, bicycling and walking safer as a whole overall to make transit more equitable.
The Chinese are embracing the former, with their strong focus on undercutting western manufacturers, to the point where the US and the EU have placed tariffs on Chinese EVs in order to buy them time to catch up… Or to just simply keep the enemy out of their markets. They did this because, instead of trying their hand at making ICEVs (like they did the first time they came to Australia and subsequently got laughed out of the room), they instead focused on building an entirely new kind of vehicle industry, focusing on BEVs and PHEVs. This is why Chinese manufacturers absolutely dominate the electric vehicle industry, with bikes like the Surron Light Bee forming a very real threat against ICE Motorcycles due to their reduced weight and low purchase cost compared to regular ICEV dirtbikes, not to mention their absolutely massive dominance over the electrified personal mobility space.
And yet, purely for ideological reasons, people are afraid of buying Chinese. Hell, my partner is skeptical of BYD’s vehicle manufacturing prowess, despite her iPad likely being made by the very same company.
This is because we as humans, don’t like being forced to change and to accept new and present realities. Hell, all that Vegan talk back then is going to make me look slightly morally hypocritical, because I know there are a few people out there, especially in the Electric Vehicles discord group, who are diehard and dedicated Vegetarians and Vegans for moral reasons. I know that they are correct, Vegetarian and Vegan diets are better for the environment than non-veggie ones, but, I still like my meat, and I still am okay with driving an ICEV despite my love for certain EVs. This is the interesting thing that’ll probably baffle you. Debating people is not going to make them follow your argument. Rather it’ll make them double-down and continue their lifestyle even more than when you did it before. The positive aspects of EVs, Renewable Energy, Vegan/Vegetarian Diets and so on are all there. It’ll take time for us to slowly but surely normalise them, but eventually they will become so normal that we just, forget that we even did what we did in the past anyway.
And yet, there will come a time where I will use my iPod to listen to music, and there may come a time in the future that I will drive an ICEV just to feel the thrill of that revving engine, or enjoy the taste of a beef burger when meat becomes more of a niche product. Hell, I like the idea that John Green is promoting with “Beef Days”, where you consume beef, probably the most carbon-intensive of all the animal meat products, on certain days of the week, as a way to slowly but gradually incentivise the reduced consumption of beef, and then eventually meat as a whole.
Oh, and jokes on you, Conspiracy theorists, I live in a pod already, and I’m allergic to the bugs.
So… TL;DR?
Electric vehicles are happening. The changes will not come as quickly as some of us electric vehicle evangelists would like to think, but all things take time, and all things will change very slowly. The Horse and Cart was slowly and gradually phased out over the course of several decades, and it took many things, the increase in scale of production, the accessibility of motorised vehicles and the changes to our very urban environment, to make it so that the motorcar we love and adore is the main form of transit in our cities. I envision a future where we don’t need cars and ICEVs as much, and that we focus on more human-scale transit, trains, buses, motorcycles, scooters and bicycles, and we embrace the idea of the 15-minute city. We walk more, eat, talk, grow, build and enjoy our lives, without thinking about whether or not our transport is a moral decision. That’s the biggest barrier to electrified transport, i think. Making it such a big deal is what’s going to push people against it. Build it, and they will come.
Beano out.