Insider's Guide to Energy EV

22. Exploring EV Innovations and Media Narratives with Dan Caesar of Fully Charged: A Special Crossover on Insiders Guide to Energy with Niall Riddell and Chris Sass

• Chris Sass • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Join us in a riveting episode of the "Insider’s Guide to Energy EV" podcast, where we delve into the dynamic world of electric vehicles (EVs) and the energy transition. In this special crossover episode, we welcome Dan Caesar, a prominent figure from the renowned Fully Charged YouTube channel, known for his expertise in EV technologies and sustainable energy solutions.

 

Our hosts, Niall Riddell and Chris Sass, engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Dan, exploring the latest trends, innovations, and challenges in the EV industry. This episode is a treasure trove for enthusiasts and professionals alike, offering deep insights into the rapidly evolving landscape of electric mobility and renewable energy. Dan Caesar brings a unique perspective to the table, shedding light on the impact of media narratives in shaping public perception and policy surrounding EVs. We dive into the myths and realities of electric vehicles, discussing the role of media in both promoting and hindering EV adoption. This candid discussion provides listeners with a balanced view of the opportunities and hurdles in the journey towards a more sustainable future.

 

Moreover, the episode addresses key topics like the integration of EVs with home energy systems, the future of EV infrastructure, and the global shift towards cleaner energy sources. Listeners will gain a comprehensive understanding of how electric vehicles are not just transforming transportation but also influencing broader energy policies and consumer behavior. Whether you're an EV enthusiast, an industry professional, or simply curious about the future of energy, this episode of the "Insiders Guide to Energy" podcast is a must-listen. Join us as we navigate the exciting world of electric vehicles with Dan Caesar, and get equipped with knowledge to understand and participate in the energy transition. Don't miss this insightful episode – tune in now to be part of the conversation shaping our energy future!

Transcript

 

00:00:02 Speaker 1

Broadcasting from Washington, DC, This is insider's guide to energy.

00:00:13 Speaker 2

This episode of Insiders Guide to Energy EV miniseries is Powered by Paua.

00:00:18 Speaker 2

Paua helps your business transition to electric vehicles by simplifying charging, managing payments, and optimizing your charging data.

00:00:26 Speaker 2

Welcome to insiders guide to Energy EV series. I'm your host Chris Sass, and with me today is Niall Riddell. We've got an amazing show coming up today.

00:00:33 Speaker 3

We certainly do. This is a gentleman I've wanted to speak to you for a long time to ask him. A couple of awkward questions. Uh, we've got Dan Caesar with us today. Who's the CEO at the fully charged show. Dan, do you?

00:00:44 Speaker 3

Want to say hello?

00:00:45 Speaker 4

Hello, Chris. Hi, Niall. It's fantastic to see you.

00:00:49 Speaker 3

It's great that you're here and I guess one of the very easy opening questions we should be asking ourselves, although many people probably already know the answer is who are you? What do we do? What do you do? What is the fully charged show?

00:01:02 Speaker 4

Signed the CEO of the fully charged show, which started life as a YouTube channel back in 2010 dedicated to the energy transition away from combustion towards cleaner, greener technologies.

00:01:14 Speaker 4

With a real.

00:01:15 Speaker 4

Focus on electric cars and electric vehicles, but actually a much wider purpose really, which is to to get people to talk about these post combustion technologies. You may heard of heard us use the phrase stop burning stuff. You know, we're moving away from from fossil fuels and our kind of.

00:01:32 Speaker 4

Mission really is to help people.

00:01:34 Speaker 4

Understand. You know how to get into electric car electric vehicles in general, clean energy as well. But we are a consumer consumer channel with a million subscribers on YouTube, a series of events around the World Now Podcast and some other stuff. I'm sure we'll come on to.

00:01:52 Speaker 3

And if I was to take you right back to the beginning, when did it start and why did it start?

00:01:57 Speaker 4

Well, it started in in 2010, gentlemen, that some people might have know know of and others others may not. Is our founder, Robert Llewellyn. He had the foresight to build the YouTube channel back in 2010 to talk about what was then a very niche niche topic, I think. But he came out of the background of TV.

00:02:17 Speaker 4

So he was pretty well known in the UK as being Creighton, the, the, the Mechanoid from red dwarf and that.

00:02:25 Speaker 4

Streamed all around the world, so he's he's pretty well known, although he's kind of covered in latex when he does that, so maybe not immediately recognizable. And then he followed that up by hosting something in the UK, which is called.

00:02:35 Speaker 4

Scrappy challenge and in the US and Canada was syndicated heavily as Junkyard Wars and towards the color late Naughties. He was spending quite a lot of time.

00:02:44 Speaker 4

In California, and he was seeing what was coming out of Silicon Valley, particularly around batteries and electric tech. And at that point, GM had had its mothballed its EV one its first electric car, Tesla Roadster, was was becoming a a thing, and he just found that fascinating and.

00:03:03 Speaker 4

Always been in his own words, a bit of a bit of a hippie, you know, bit interested in, isn't there a better way of doing this? A better way of, you know, powering our energy and transport. And so, yeah, I've decided to start a YouTube channel, age, I think 55 at the time. As you do have this incredible way of communicating. You know, we all know engineers I've worked with very many and I love them all. Every single one of them.

00:03:23 Speaker 4

But, you know, occasionally engineers get it straight into the weeds, and when you're trying to, you know, convince people about these new technologies, sometimes you need to keep it.

00:03:29 Speaker 4

Really simple right? So he created.

00:03:32 Speaker 4

Something we met in 2016.

00:03:35 Speaker 4

I've been in the energy industry for, I guess the best part of 15 years at that point, I'd been in solar and batteries and and and heat. I already had an electric car and I was going to loads of different B to B events in the industry and I was saying this is great. We all think solar is great. We all think batteries the way forward, electric vehicles, etcetera. But maybe we need to get out there and stop telling each other how great it.

00:03:56 Speaker 4

Is and maybe we actually need to start addressing.

00:03:58 Speaker 4

The consumer audience and that's what Robert had done. And when I met him, I was like, well, you, you, you, you've cracked it here, you've got something amazing. Let me let me come and help you.

00:04:06 Speaker 3

And you just literally said that. Can I come on board?

00:04:08 Speaker 4

Pretty much. I mean, I actually said to him, I actually had a big assumption, which is I presume this is a YouTube channel. I knew almost nothing about YouTube at that point. I presume you're already making money and this is already already viable, to which I think you sort of, you know, uttered the word help because the the reality was that for small YouTube.

00:04:27 Speaker 4

Channels. You know that just wasn't wasn't the case. Actually the revenue you get on YouTube, all that money aggregates the waterway actually towards Google towards towards YouTube. So if you've got a really, really big channel like Mr. Beast I think has got 100 times more subscribers than we have a.

00:04:42 Speaker 4

Million. Then you can make a lot of revenue out there, a smaller channel, which it was at the time. I think when I rob and I met had 60,000 subscribers, just didn't make any money and and let's be honest Robert was probably putting his own money into to getting it going. And I said well, you know I I share your passion. I've been promoting heat pumps and this sort of stuff for years as well, but I actually.

00:05:02 Speaker 4

Come from a kind of. I don't really like the word entrepreneur particularly, but I come from that kind of background and and I think I can help you turn this into into a business at least sort of struck up a rapport because I think we I I felt very, very strongly and I believe very, very strongly in the technologies as as did he, which is why we think we got on on wealth in the beginning.

00:05:19 Speaker 4

And then we had to puzzle it over and say, well, how are we going to, how we going to make this make money? And that was, yeah, seven, 6-7 years ago. And it's been, it's been a lot of fun.

00:05:29 Speaker 2

Is there a run that takes place because your your B2C educating people on electric vehicles, they're they're just about becoming mainstream. If you go to just about any dealer, they have some sort of EV in their lineup today and in some countries, the internal combustion engine is going to go completely away. Do we still need to be priming the pump here?

00:05:48 Speaker 4

You know, fantastic question. My answer is probably going to be.

00:05:52 Speaker 4

Yes, and a strong a strong yes. Now whether you believe me or not, I mean I think it I think it does. The reason the reason for that is I think we're quite a lot, we're an antidote to a lot of the misinformation that's out there and there is a lot of misinformation anything that's you know poorly understood leads to myths and misinformation, rumor and conjecture and equally mainstream media.

00:06:12 Speaker 4

Just hasn't stepped up to the plate on on this sort of thing. You will not find an electric Top Gear. You will not find anything. Anything equivalent to that in the mainstream media.

00:06:24 Speaker 4

And most people in the US and the UK around the world, but particularly the UK and the US, can't have missed the fact that this has become a big political football and therefore, if we were to say to the BBC, why don't you do an electric Top Gear, they'd be like, well, we should include hybrids in that, right. And we should include hydrogen. We were like, no, no, no, actually, that's not where this is going.

00:06:45 Speaker 4

A lot of the independent broadcasters want balance and actually we have chosen the technology. Now consumers are now voting in in large, large numbers for pure electric.

00:06:53 Speaker 4

Cars. And if you look at Norway, which is the world's leading market in terms of penetration, then they're they're not going for hydrogen cars, they're abandoning fossil fuel cars and their droves. They're not going for hybrids either. They're going for pure electric and that's what we think we'll see play out. But I think it's a long journey that will still be carrying on for another 5-10 and perhaps in some parts of the world.

00:07:13 Speaker 4

1520 years. So we do think there's a strong need for fully charged show and others like your good selves to keep communicating that for for the foreseeable future.

00:07:23 Speaker 3

Yeah, I'd like to come back to the topic of Fudd and misinformation, but, umm, you know, if we go back to the beginning where you were in sort of 2016, uh, you know you you had a YouTube channel, you had some subscribers. What was the journey like to go from YouTube channel through into actually putting on a show? Because I mean there there weren't many electric cars in 2016. How did you put a show on and?

00:07:44 Speaker 3

You know what was the reception to those first events?

00:07:46 Speaker 4

Yeah, that was that was a kind of a pivotal moment really for us.

00:07:50 Speaker 4

I had quite a lot of event experience. I think if someone else had come in to to my role and helped Robert out, they would come from a very different angle. But you can make money from events. You can make money from those sort of you know from exhibitors, from sponsors, from ticket sales etc. So I felt quite confident that that would be a success. I was sick of events actually at that point I actually.

00:08:11 Speaker 4

Wasn't that keen to to to do that? And because it's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of graft as a YouTube channel, by the way. And I was getting to a point where I had young kids, but it.

00:08:21 Speaker 4

Became unavoidable. Really. We had to. We had to go down that path. So I suggested it to Robert almost six years ago to the day we, we announced that we were going to do our first fully charged live exhibition at Silverstone that came around in, I think summer of of 2018. And it was a big hit. But I put that water down to the fact that people Robert had huge amount of followers already.

00:08:43 Speaker 4

Passionate army of people who may have got, you know, Gen. 1 Nissan Leaf or a BMW I3 or Renault Zoe. Or maybe they got a Tesla Model S Tesla Tesla Model X. So the the the response to that. Robert thought no one was going to turn up and I would say to him, look, I've done this before when I've had no audience. I've built audience. So you'll be fine because people will want to.

00:09:01 Speaker 4

To come, and lo and behold, that first day at Silverstone we ran out of vegan and vegetarian food within about an hour the police were called because the amount of traffic locally, people were licking the windows to get in, you know, an hour before the show was open. So we're off to a kind of a a flying start, really. And the great question is what was there to display at that point?

00:09:22 Speaker 4

And we we made a big thing about the fact that we would have, you know, every single electric vehicle available. And from the EMS at that point, it was only really about 10. So it wasn't many. So we were able to get those. We're able to supplement that with other interesting electric vehicles, all shapes and.

00:09:36 Speaker 4

Sizes some clean tech too, but we really started from the point of view that if no exhibitors come, can we still give the ticket holders, you know, good value for money. And so we had lots of live theaters and other attractions to make sure that was the case. So that was an amazing and amazing moment.

00:09:52 Speaker 3

So I've just pulled out a picture from 2018, which is me at the Silverstone event in what was at the time the brand new Nissan Leaf.

00:10:02 Speaker 3

And 100%, you know, there really weren't that many choices on the market then, but it was, it was the first time I'd heard a fully charged. I went to fully charge. I was like, wow, this is incredible. So I was right there at that baptism right at the beginning. So for me, it's always been a live event, which I thought was quite interesting.

00:10:18 Speaker 4

Yeah, we've loved doing it, and since then, we've, as you may know, we've done it in Texas, California, Canada, Australia, Europe, different venues across the UK as well. And that you know we're we're evolving that that that formula very.

00:10:29 Speaker 4

Quickly, it's been, you know, a tremendous experience and against the backdrop of some slightly tricky circumstances with you know, we don't have to go through the full list of the Black Swan events and other events that have taken place in the last two or three years that have kind of pampered business growth. But you've been to grow very, very quickly in in spite of all that. So I,

00:10:49 Speaker 4

Feel quite tired? Time is speaking. We've delivered 5 events around the world this year. We're doing another five next year.

00:10:58 Speaker 4

But it's been a great way to amplify the the YouTube channel. What I think is interesting as people watch the YouTube channel to do their desktop research, which cars I'm interested in. I'm interested in the heat pump. How do I go about that, et cetera. And then they come to the live events to actually test drive them or buy them. You know, that's. That's the sort of thing. So the the two things have worked incredibly well together.

00:11:18 Speaker 2

How is that merging in with traditional auto shows? So one of my kids favorite things these days when you go to the auto show cause with electric vehicles they now run them inside the building like here in DC when you go to the auto show they have an entire building where you actually go drive and race around inside the warehouse basically.

00:11:33 Speaker 2

What you couldn't do in auto shows in the past because you had to be outside. How is that playing with a modern auto show which has plenty of electric vehicles to get a lot of thrills?

00:11:40 Speaker 4

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I mean, we've got a big show coming up in, in London at the Excel at the end of March. And you know the way that will work from a test drive perspective is that the cars will come into the hall and people will be able to get in them and then drive them out onto onto the local Rd. which obviously a massive advantage against what we're able to do with combustion engine.

00:12:01 Speaker 4

Because it couldn't really drive them into big exhibition halls because of the fumes etc. So that's been that's been amazing. And then also within the halls we have this.

00:12:11 Speaker 4

Like areas you can test electric bikes I mentioned we have theaters full of experts. We have lots of other features. We have a 0 carbon kitchen which is chefs cooked plant based food powered by an electric car. We have an area called the home energy advice.

00:12:25 Speaker 4

Team this year, we're doing live reviews. We have, you know, kids zone. There's loads. I mean, there's more than that. There's loads and loads of these different.

00:12:33 Speaker 4

Attraction. So we feel that we are very, very different to the traditional motor show, which relies very, very heavily on the cars and the car companies participating. We obviously try and get as many of those as possible, but our offering is much.

00:12:46 Speaker 4

Much more diverse.

00:12:47 Speaker 4

And what we've seen is that we're kind of like the electric home and motor show. I would say, you know, those two things have been separate home and motor show, but now they're joined by a cable. So that's a a powerful opportunity for for.

00:12:59 Speaker 4

For us and everything in between, like we're super excited. For example, our vehicle to vehicle to grow and load and vehicle to grid and all that, all that sort of stuff as well, so.

00:13:08 Speaker 4

We're evolving really, really fast. I feel for auto shows. I think they, I think some of them have struggled in recent years. There will always be the big ones that I think will will carry on and they're kind of evolving their themselves. But typically the car market is an extremely volatile.

00:13:24 Speaker 4

Space and most car companies now would rather do digital activity than do loads of motor shows, so they'll always be the bigger shows that I think will survive. But I think out the angle that we're coming from gives us greater durability, more versatility and there's loads of people who have got solar panels on their roof and therefore they then want to look at electric car or.

00:13:44 Speaker 4

Vice versa. So I think for us it's always scraping in those new those newbies that emerge in marketplace because the people who used to buy petrol cars and rave about the fact they made a lot of noise and and smoke, they're not the same people who are buying electric cars by any means.

00:13:59 Speaker 3

How do you see that changing? Because you know go back to 2018, there were 10 models. You know there were, you know, a limited number of buyers. They were like super tech geeks or people who are really passionate about their the green environment. You know, we've now got a world where, like Chris mentioned, you know, pretty much every dealer's got something on the full port that is now electric. You know, we are seeing parts of society where we're possibly going through.

00:14:22 Speaker 3

Uh, you know early and mainstream adopters into even some of the later adopters, particularly in corporates that are pushing this agenda. What are you seeing that's different between that first period when it was all newbie buyers to the period now when actually it's it's becoming a mainstream technology.

00:14:36

So I think.

00:14:37 Speaker 4

If you if you're familiar with sort of classic marketing adoption curve, you know the adoption of new technologies, what you typically see is you know your pioneers first and that your earlier adopters, I think you're right. I think we're approaching in some countries the end of that phase and then we're moving more to that early main.

00:14:52 Speaker 4

Stream and then the rump of that graph. Actually, if you look at it by total is actually late mainstream and Lagarde and we're seeing some really, really interesting things play out like I'm starting to look at car company activity, for example, where they're doing mass marketing of electric vehicles. And that's that's very welcome on one level because it provides legitimate.

00:15:14 Speaker 4

But at the same time, mass marketing, nice, shiny adverts about why you should get electric car to a laggard, or to late mainstream, it feels to me like an absolute waste of money because those people might not get an electric car for another 5-10 years over my dead body, that kind of thing. You might have heard that occasionally from from people.

00:15:33 Speaker 4

So really it is about approaching that early mainstream. Who who are they? And typically they tend to be more progressive. Tech people makes total sense, right? If you if you, if you think about it less wedded to older technologies, more progressive, more open minded, about new technologies. So we see the.

00:15:50 Speaker 4

A lot. And then we also have this audience fully charged, show of pioneers and earlier doctors who 9 out of 10 of them will only ever buy electric ever again, you know. And as the infrastructure gets better and those things get better, we think that 9 out of 10 will become more like 9 1/2 out of ten 9.9 out of 10 in the not too distant future. So it's fascinating to observe.

00:16:10 Speaker 4

But if you look at the way the car companies spend their money, I think they're still in that mindset of it's just going to be the same as marketing our current cars. I don't think it is. I think this is a mess.

00:16:20 Speaker 4

Market in the UK, for example, about 25,000 new electric vehicles get sold every month. That is a tiny, tiny, tiny fragment of UK market over 2 years. You might look at 506 hundred thousand new EVA's sold. That's only about 10% of the people with a driving light. So 1% of people with a driving license in the UK. So it's a tiny fragment.

00:16:41 Speaker 4

Each month and if I had a crystal ball and said I know where those people are going to be.

00:16:45 Speaker 4

You'd you'd want to know that. So we're seeing some really, really interesting interesting behaviours. Now I see a big mainstream campaign like save you money, you know? Actually, not everyone's ready for that. And that's fine. That's absolutely fine. We it's often compared to the switch to the smartphone. You remember BlackBerry and the switch to the smartphone. That was incredibly rapid because smaller tech.

00:17:05 Speaker 4

Quick more quickly replace tick on a two year contract. The car thing is going to take a bit a bit longer well into this and I think most of you know Western Europe will.

00:17:13 Speaker 4

The penetration of EV cells up at eighty 9100% by the end of this decade, which sounds quick, I know, but I think it's really going to happen that quickly.

00:17:22 Speaker 2

You're talking about the the end vehicle is the exciting the advertising. I I know the biggest pushback I hear having moved back to the US from Europe is the infrastructure right folks, we're not ready for that. I'm not going to drive my EV across the country because gosh, I have to stop and wait 20 minutes to charge a thing and there's not gonna be a charge point anywhere where I need to be.

00:17:42 Speaker 2

Doesn't that advertising that help social?

00:17:44 Speaker 2

Wise that the need for the infrastructure and help people be more Placid with infrastructure going in.

00:17:49 Speaker 4

It it does, it legitimately legitimizes the whole thing you know, on a very subconscious level. If you see mainstream advertising, you think, well, all the car can be seen to piling into this. Therefore, you know, slowly the kind of objections melt away. And I think there's three things going on. Part of that's the reason. Another part of, you know, the mainstream advertising is that car.

00:18:07 Speaker 4

Companies are keen to show.

00:18:09 Speaker 4

They are moving in this direction, even if they aren't manufacturing and vast quantities, they're keen to show people that they're doing the right thing and then you get other car companies like Tesla or BYOD for your audience are less familiar with that. Boyd being soon to be the biggest electric vehicle company in the world, just about to overtake.

00:18:29 Speaker 4

At the end of this this quarter or the next quarter?

00:18:33 Speaker 4

Who will sell you every single electric car they can make, as opposed to some of the others? Maybe, like VW, who have had some, some, some, some demand issues, you know? So it is. It is interesting. I mean, I would say also you've got this amazing thing, Robert and I used to talk about this phrase a lot. And it's not our phrase, but the future is already here.

00:18:51 Speaker 4

It's just not evenly distributed.

00:18:53 Speaker 4

And the reality is that what we're seeing in Norway, we think will happen in other places. The UK actually is, is is not up to that standard. The Netherlands is further ahead than us. Iceland is further ahead than.

00:19:03 Speaker 4

But the US is actually a little bit of a way back. I hate to say that, Chris, but that's that's the the reality the US is used to being first on those things. So it's a bit of a bit of a shock and the US obviously has these huge open spaces, but for the vast bulk of drivers, they just don't need as much range as they as they think they do.

00:19:24 Speaker 2

When you say that Tesla, perhaps being an American company and and and and helping lead this charge and the numbers you gave in in the UK, I mean, even half a percent of US car sales is still a pretty significant number.

00:19:36 Speaker 2

Is it not so if you have Texas, California, Colorado and a few East Coast cities, it's a fair number.

00:19:42 Speaker 2

Of EV's.

00:19:43 Speaker 4

Yes, I mean America has, you know, Tesla has come out of America. It's come out of California originally. Obviously it's been kind of rehoused in, in Texas. It's significance cannot be understated it without the Tesla movement, we would not be where we are. It has kicked in the pants.

00:20:02 Speaker 4

All of those other car companies who said our Tesla will go bankrupt? They won't gonna do any volume. This is going to be over soon.

00:20:08 Speaker 4

And how wrong? How wrong they were? You know, they are at a run rate of almost 2 million car electric cars a year. Now. BYOD is at similar level. So Tesla has kicked this off. America has had a slightly unusual relationship with Tesla though, because even Joe Biden, who's you know, introduced the Inflation Reduction Act over the last.

00:20:28 Speaker 4

15 months or so in the US has had a thorny problem to deal with. That is, that the US economy also needs GM.

00:20:36 Speaker 4

And forward to succeed as well, and Tesla has as an outlier had some advantages that Ford is pretty committed to this. I think we see some good noises from Ford, but GM is really, really struggling. There's also things like unionization, right to get to grips.

00:20:53 Speaker 4

With, you know, there's a lot of different factors. So the US market.

00:20:57 Speaker 4

Is probably the single most interesting, but by volume at the moment it's it's really bicoastal. It's the West Coast of the East Coast that's driving and everything in between. You'd be update apart from little place like Austin where we used to do a show we so we know that.

00:21:08 Speaker 4

Well, you know, places like that, there are obviously outliers, but generally it's a, it's an East Coast West Coast thing where that's moving really, really fast. So if you go to California, you'll see plenty of Tesla's absolutely loads in fact. But the reality is that America is, you know, just such a, you know, vast, vast space that it can be really different. Your experience from from one place to another.

00:21:27 Speaker 3

We've talked a lot about the fact that this is coming and there's some good logical evidence to show that, but it does seem like the mainstream media seems to be on a bit of a different trajectory at the moment. Can we talk a little bit about what is the stop burning things? Stop burning everything, campaign all about. Why are we in the world whereby, you know, mainstream media has responded so.

00:21:48 Speaker 3

Actively. And what are you guys in particular doing about it?

00:21:51 Speaker 4

Yeah. So we.

00:21:52 Speaker 4

We have tried to stay above the political fray, you know, we we think this is a global mega trend that Trump's politicians, you know, we think it's bigger than that.

00:22:01 Speaker 4

You know, politicians have got lots of levers, they suppose, or they can slow these down things down a little bit. They can't necessarily.

00:22:06 Speaker 4

Stop them. But it was disturbing to us to see the amount of misinformation, particularly in the British press.

00:22:12 Speaker 4

From the beginning of 2023, we are expecting an onslaught of misinformation in the US next year as the presidential election campaign ramps up, I can feel the missing engine information is being fired up. As you know, Trump.

00:22:25 Speaker 4

Tries to dismantle Biden's legacy and pull apart things like the Inflation Reduction Act, so we saw a lot more misinformation. So we've started an initiative called stop Burning Stuff, which also shortens to stop BS, where we actually can. You know, we can take on the misinformation we're seeing in media, whether it's.

00:22:45 Speaker 4

Digital media, whether it's TV, whether it's print, we can talk to politicians and we can start to say no. If you're worried about, you know, the composition of of batteries, for example, how long they'll last and where the materials come from and are they cleaner and greener than combustion engine vehicles, we can actually put the truth across and we've.

00:23:03 Speaker 4

We've made some some progress in that respect, but at the moment, if you know, tell me where there's an electric car TV channel for example, or a clean energy TV channel on any of the domestic broadcasters like the BBC in the UK or the streamers like, you know, the Disneys and Netflix and Amazons. And I would say, well, but there isn't one. You know, how come that's you know, that's bizarre.

00:23:24 Speaker 4

Now as we move towards these new new technologies and we would love to beat that.

00:23:28 Speaker 4

Provided that information on one of those channels of course. But you know the way we see it, the fragmentation of media has meant that it's YouTube really that's that's that's giving people the opportunity to talk about electric vehicles and that's where a lot of the a lot of the action is. And at some point, I'm sure a traditional.

00:23:49 Speaker 4

Broadcast or or or streamer.

00:23:51 Speaker 4

Kind of get in on the on the act there because these technologies are here to here to stay fundamentally so. Yeah. Stop burning stuff for us is is just the opportunity to correct some of the lies we've seen some staggering, staggering lies and exaggeration, misinformation, misrepresentation.

00:24:07 Speaker 4

Of the British.

00:24:08 Speaker 4

Press and as I say, I'm afraid I think we might see some of that in the US.

00:24:11 Speaker 4

The next year as.

00:24:11 Speaker 2

Well, what are some of these lies that you're hearing or what are some of the most outlandish ones that you think need to be dispelled?

00:24:18 Speaker 4

There's some that are carry a little bit of weight and you have to fight harder to push against and there are others that are absolutely in.

00:24:28 Speaker 4

Lane and you know, you most people can see through that and can laugh about them. So on the on the latter point, you know, there were some speculations that all of our cars will be shut down by the foreign government soon and we won't get to drive them. Even the Top Gear guys had a had a good laugh at that, you know. So if you wanted to shut down all the cars in the UK.

00:24:49 Speaker 4

To the South, the UK wouldn't make any difference because it's gridlocked there already. So the reality is you can't. It doesn't. It doesn't work like that. That's not possible. And you know that that car parts would collapse because electric vehicles are so much heavier now in in the US you'll be aware, for example.

00:25:03 Speaker 4

Cars are pretty heavy already. There's some pretty big cars. It's strange that that argument has been made now, so there's some which are, you know, I I think are, you know, really ridiculous, you know, sort of sort of pretty much your equivalent of sort of, you know, Flat Earth, you know, as far as conspiracy theories are concerned. And there are others that do carry more weight, as I said is it is, are they greener, are they cleaner and greener?

00:25:23 Speaker 4

And you account for all the material extraction, all those sorts of things. And yes, they are. So that's a good one to push back against the fact that actually if you do.

00:25:31 Speaker 4

All the the emissions life cycles, actually, these cars are actually cleaner and greener after just 16,000 kilometres. Then you can show that and you can also say not only are they cleaner, greener, but actually the batteries are going to get recycled and other thing that comes up frequently is cobalt. You know, there are in motive images of young boys mining.

00:25:51 Speaker 4

Cobol in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and even though that's an infinitesimally small part of the cobalt industry.

00:25:59 Speaker 4

We take it seriously, but the reality is now there are new chemistries that don't have cobalt tools, so a lot of these things can be these things can be used to good effect and misinformation is is a real thing. If you look at merchants of doubt, the book which talks about how they kind of sort of managed to.

00:26:14 Speaker 4

Fulfill, you know, fill the world full of doubt about smoking, for example. That was a very positive playbook and big oil is trying the the same thing again with with elect.

00:26:24 Speaker 4

Cars. It depends really. I would say. Anyone who reads or watches anything should really, really question whether it's true or not. That's the that's the era. That's the world we live in now, right? I think that's really, really important. So. But from a perspective of these technologies, are they cleaner? Yes, they are. And also the way we generate the power in the 1st place, it's gonna get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. So electric cars are cleaner now, even off the dirtiest grid.

00:26:44 Speaker 4

Even off a coal-fired powered grid and they can get much much cleaner as we clean our grids up. And of course you know, one amazing thing. I mean, I have solar at my house and I can charge my car off the solar panels.

00:26:57 Speaker 4

For example, I would be frightened if I was big oil as well, and if I was their lobbyist, I might well be pumping, you know, disinformation into public discourse too.

00:27:06 Speaker 2

Is there a public health benefit that people are seeing? I know in Europe one of the things drove me nuts. Everything is diesel. Everywhere you go, all you do is smell that diesel and can't be particularly healthy. From studies I've seen to breathe all that diesel, is there a public health element that people don't normally bring up when we're talking EV's in the cities is particularly?

00:27:22 Speaker 4

There's a very significant element. It's not my, not my specialism, but even you know, anything you you can bust, you know, will have an effect on your respiratory system. A lot of the things that get pumped out of the back of the vehicles are are carcinogenic.

00:27:37 Speaker 4

I recently held a panel where I was talking about indoor cooking. Even indoor cooking can give you real serious respiratory problems, so anytime you burn anything that creates a lot of problems. And obviously with electric cars you just don't have that issue. So we have a few years now of experience of communicating these things.

00:27:57 Speaker 4

We do talk about air pollution on the fully charged show.

00:28:00 Speaker 4

We do talk about, you know, climate impacts as well, but we don't talk about them often. We typically focus on how cool and how much better the technology is because what we find is if we mention the words air pollution, we mentions the word words, climate change, a large percentage of people switch off subconsciously. I think. So actually we really.

00:28:20 Speaker 4

We're really keen to point across this is cool new.

00:28:22 Speaker 3

So you've kind of set up the next question which is come on then, what's the coolest thing you've seen this year?

00:28:28 Speaker 4

Oh, that's a good. That's a very, very good question.

00:28:31 Speaker 4

I I think you know from from my point of view I'll I'll come up with a A, a sort of sexier answer than I come up with something a bit more mundane, if that's OK. But I think that I think the the kind of the more mundane is that this this movement, you know, towards these technologies has continued to grow in spite of some extremely serious.

00:28:50 Speaker 4

Headwinds, both economic and political, so that gives us great comfort. So one of the bits of misinformation at the moment is that EV sales are down in the US and that that's not, that's not true at all. What it means is actually what you're seeing is some of the lots have got EV's on them because some of the car companies have overpredicted.

00:29:09 Speaker 4

How many electric cars they were sold would sell, but actually the reality is that the growth growth.

00:29:14 Speaker 4

Use. I think in terms of the technologies we've seen, you know we do like the cars and I it's like living in a candy shop. I get to see all the cars, you know, which is great. I get to drive a few of them. We're, you know, really, really into the home energy technology as well. And we're seeing some good movement in that respect. But I think the thing that.

00:29:35 Speaker 4

Find particularly exciting is probably this. You know this vehicle to everything, technology vehicle to lower vehicle. I find that to be the potentially the biggest unlocker of all. When people can suddenly see their vehicles not just as vehicles.

00:29:48 Speaker 4

Because let's be honest, your vehicle is unused 9095% of time, but as assets you know where you can trade energy as back up where you can actually, you know, maybe avoid a power cut in the future. I think that is incredibly compelling and once people see that you know the the smartphone is different to the dumb phone, the smartphone.

00:30:08 Speaker 4

There's all these things apps etcetera. Why is it even called a phone? It's a computer, right? The electric vehicle is a massive step forward on the combustion engine vehicle and I think once people see that and everything can do, particularly when they see they've got a battery on their drive, then that's then that's gonna really.

00:30:23 Speaker 4

Unlock the potential of this market.

00:30:25 Speaker 2

And definitely that aligns really well with what Neil and I do here on the insiders guide to energy talking about the infrastructure and how that plays in the EV space. But what we don't get to do is some of the cool stuff you guys do on your show the other day I watched in my Instagram feed someone saying that the, the Super car era is dead.

00:30:41 Speaker 4

I have A at the moment I have a I have a Tesla and it's pretty quick and it's it's every bit of quick as quick as I need it, but I'm a fairly normal guy. I mean, I like cars, but I wouldn't. I would never have described myself as a petrol head. I think there will always be a group of people or want something.

00:30:58 Speaker 4

A little bit more extreme.

00:31:00 Speaker 4

I don't know if you saw it the other day, but it's a slightly bonkers vehicle and I I probably wouldn't get one in the UK and I put one to drive anywhere, but if I lived in America, I'd be might be a bit more tempted by the cyber truck thing and I think there are some super cars. There's an amazing Croatian company called Wimax who produce a, you know, a sort of super car equivalent. So I think that will.

00:31:20 Speaker 4

It will come, but like you say, I think that kind of initial acceleration is probably anyhow.

00:31:24 Speaker 3

Yeah, I I'm, I'm. I'm actually fascinated by the point you raised about V2G and V2L and the integration between home and the car.

00:31:32 Speaker 3

As you might remember, I spent a bunch of time at EDF when we were first talking and we used to sit there at EDF and go listen, you know, electric car owners are hugely important to energy companies because the, the volume at home goes up by about 60%. So suddenly you're selling more electrons. Then you've got the ability to obviously integrate in into that household. All these different technologies.

00:31:52 Speaker 3

The battery, the solar, etc.

00:31:54 Speaker 4

When people get an EV, the first thing they do is they need to then address their charging when they can. They're lucky enough to have the ability to charge it at home. Maybe they need a charger, or maybe they've got to, you know, you know, work out their local ways that they can.

00:32:06 Speaker 4

Then typically they look at their energy tariff, then they start to think about well, could I generate my own energy? Can I store my own energy? How you know, how do I, how does this affect, you know, how I I heat and cool my property from our perspective, we're entering this new early mainstream period. So I mean we've just seen so many amazing technologies. There's a real rush now.

00:32:25 Speaker 4

And it I can't believe we've come to this point where there are only 10 cars. I could display it.

00:32:29 Speaker 4

Go to. Now there are 300 and you know it's all the. It's all the electric bikes. It's all the electric, micro mobility, the big stuff like electric boats and you know, electric vertical takeoff and landing. All the home tech. It's really.

00:32:42 Speaker 4

It's still relatively.

00:32:43 Speaker 4

Early in this game, ironically, you know, for people like us who've been in it a while, it it's desperately impatient for it all happen a bit.

00:32:49 Speaker 4

More quickly, but if I look back just five or six years, we've come so far in the next five or six years, I think is going to be extraordinary.

00:32:56 Speaker 4

Larry, let's just try and work to make these technologies a bit cheaper. That's the one thing I would.

00:33:00 Speaker 2

The one final thought or question I have having come from the technology background. Eventually technology got to be where the the hardware wasn't the differentiator anymore. It's the software that differentiates. And so for example, I sold routers early on and built the Internet and things like that. And today when you buy a router, really it's not so much about the silicon, it's about the software running on it. You can basically buy this.

00:33:21 Speaker 2

The silicon in in uh.

00:33:22 Speaker 2

That do you think EV's will get to that point where it's really just about the software and not so much about the hardware?

00:33:28 Speaker 4

I think we're seeing, you know, a bit of a divergences now, you know, with an Audi customer typically would buy another Audi and a BMW customer would typically buy another BMW. The conquest rates for people to skip from one of those cars into a Tesla or a pollster or a Kia or Hyundai or whatever it may be.

00:33:42 Speaker 4

Are incredibly high, like the industry has never seen anything like it before. I think that will.

00:33:47 Speaker 4

That loyalty might crystallize again over the next 5-10 years, once people have flirted with their first electric car, maybe their second electric car, maybe third electric car. But the reality is that the.

00:33:56 Speaker 4

Chinese cars are good.

00:33:58 Speaker 4

And they are well made, but the tech is better than on the German equivalents. For example, you know, it's very well known that VW is an amazing company with amazing heritage. I actually think Vivid 3. ID 4 Very, very good cars, but it is a well known fact that actually they have struggled with software and therefore what you may well find is that the V Dwid 3 driver.

00:34:18 Speaker 4

Might say up to two or three years. Well, I'm not sure about that. Maybe next time I'll I'll look elsewhere and some of the Chinese companies with the the the tech is is really, really fantastic and you know, again Tesla can be.

00:34:29 Speaker 4

The thanks for kind of making that part of the the mix. So I yeah, I think I think those cars will look will look very, very different. I recently sat in the BYD seal, which is the Byrd's kind of competitor to the Tesla and they've gone for the exact same screen size as the Tesla Model 3 and the Tesla Model Y.

00:34:49 Speaker 4

Why big? My theory is because.

00:34:52 Speaker 4

It works, you know, they know it works. They've got one little quirk, though, and it's a bit of a gimmick. I suppose. You press a button and actually can spin round so it can go from portrait to to landscape mode as well. If you wanted to.

00:35:04 Speaker 4

But the reality is that the the the Chinese been working on this moment, developing these cars from a long way out. And of course, they're very close to the supply chain, Chris as well in terms of very close the battery materials, all those sorts of things. So they're in a very, very strong position indeed. And I hope that as many of the car companies make it through this and respond as.

00:35:24 Speaker 4

As quickly as they can, but it does seem to me, you know, elephants don't dance. Sometimes these are big companies and and it it could be a tough time for them.

00:35:32 Speaker 2

It's with the visions of elephants dancing that we unfortunately have to come to an end of this episode. What a great conversation. I want to thank you so much for being our guest today on insiders guide to energy. It's been a pleasure having you, Dan. Thank you so much.

00:35:45 Speaker 4

Yeah, it's been my absolute pleasure.

00:35:48 Speaker 2

For audience, we hope you've enjoyed this episode of Insiders guide to Energy EV series. What a great session. I love these crossover episodes. I love hearing about fully char.

 

00:35:57 Speaker 2

Charged. Thank you again, Dan. If you've enjoyed the show as much as we have, if you're a first time listener, insiders guide to energy, don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to comment and find us on YouTube as well, and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide to Energy EV series. Bye bye for now.