Busting the Myths: The Truth Behind the UK’s EV Transition
Morning, evening, afternoon. It's Take It EV. I'm Greg Yashkiewicz. And with me, I have
Colin Walker:I'm Colin Walker. I'm head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit or ECIU for short.
Gregg:That sounds very fancy. It does. It's a
Colin Walker:bit verbose. And we're gonna
Gregg:be talking about combating misinformation. Yeah.
Colin Walker:It's it's never goes away. It always seems to be something that we're really concerned about. I mean, the House of Lords, their environment committee, did a report earlier in the year that identified EV misinformation as one of the biggest barriers that's holding back The UK CV transition. So it's definitely a a thing we need to talk about and something we need to probably be a bit more effective in tackling, but it's it's easier said than done.
Gregg:But let's rewind a little bit. How did you end up doing this job and, you know, what is the, the the organization about? Like, what is the story of your son and then? Sure. And how how did the call came about?
Colin Walker:I'll try not to go back too far into the mists of time, but especially I left uni, wanted to kinda get a job that felt like I was doing some good and and cheesily making the world a slightly better place. So I I ended up doing advocacy and campaigning and policy work in a whole range of different charities like Savor Children, Minds, Plan UK. Ended up at the British Library, which have been all over the shop. Previous to this job, I actually worked at British Cycling because my main hobby is cycling. I love it as a sport, but I also honestly do believe the more we can help get people onto bikes and make bike the obvious option for getting around, honestly do think that will make the world a better place.
Colin Walker:And that was all part of my desire to kind of transition into the kind of climate space. You know, tackling the climate crisis is obviously the most important thing that I think humanity has to deal with, and I wanted to be part of that. And this opportunity at the ECIU came up because they were setting up this new program on transport. And what the ECIU does is we're a small not for profit think tank, really, charitable status. Our work is to try and ensure that all the debates taking place around net zero are informed by the facts.
Colin Walker:We particularly want to make sure that kind of all the the debates that our political decision makers are kind of being exposed to are kind of informed by information, not misinformation. And what that means in practice is I spend 99% of my time engaged in the debate around electric vehicles trying to tackle the kind of daily misinformation we see in much of our media. It's it's it's a never ending job.
Gregg:So does does your job actually does your day start with pulling up all the news and reading the newspapers and
Colin Walker:Pretty much. We we have a monitoring service. So the first thing that happens when I wake up, I'll see that my phone is pinged with loads of messages going, these are all the articles out today that mention electric vehicles, and, you know, a majority of them will contain various levels of misinformation. You know, there are there are columnists in the Telegraph who are particular particularly bad perpetrators of this stuff, and then we need to consider how to respond. You know, do we engage with a journalist?
Colin Walker:Sometimes we have to actually it's it's so egregious that we have to put in a complaint to Ipsos. But that's part of our job. I mean, a lot of my work also involves doing my own analysis, particularly around the costs of running an EV and to kind of really place that in the press to demonstrate that, no. It's not as simple as saying EVs are more expensive. Actually, once you own them, they can save you significant amounts of money.
Colin Walker:This is what the facts are actually telling us to try to tackle that particular myth that EVs are too expensive, no one can afford them. You know, I can't deny that there is still a challenge with the fact that EVs are more expensive from their upfront sticker price, but the whole story about EV ownership is just being ignored. And that's one of the areas where we commission our own analysis to kind of try and feed that into the debate.
Gregg:I mean, we we can do an entire episode about the, the cost of ownership of an EV. But Yeah. Number of times that I hear people saying, oh, I, you know, got this $60.70 grand EV for £200 a month on my salary sacrifice. I'm like, what? I'm paying more for mine.
Gregg:Yeah. You know? So most people are not buying eve eve or any cars, basically, you know, for the sticker price. Yep. People are leasing.
Gregg:Right?
Colin Walker:Well, and that I mean, that wow. I mean, I I think we've talked about even misinformation. We could go flying off down so many different tangents. I know. In so many different rabbit holes.
Colin Walker:But that's a good example of something that happens on a regular basis because every month, the Society of Motor Manufacturing Traders, the SMNT, released their data on the previous month's new car sales. And in the last few months, the story has been just getting better and better for EV sales. Last September was a record breaking month in The UK for the number of EVs sold in a month, most ever on record. Market share was over 20%, so more than one in five new cars sold in September were electric vehicles. This is unequivocally good news, and yet the capacity of much of the media to try and spin that story into a negative is quite remarkable.
Colin Walker:And one of the main tactics they do is focus on private sales. So they'll go, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But private sales of EVs are really low.
Colin Walker:Last month, they worked out that private sales of the diesels had increased faster than private sales of electric vehicles. And then that becomes the headline. I mean, you have to ignore. We worked out you have to ignore 74% of the data to create that headline. And this notion that private sales are the only ones that count, that fleet sales somehow don't count is becoming increasingly prevalent and really twisting the debate.
Colin Walker:And salary sacrifice is a really good example of how that approach ignores a means of getting cars that is becoming increasingly common. There isn't really an a particularly strong argument to buy an EV as a private cash purchase when you could get it on a salary sacrifice scheme and save an awful lot of money. You just it is cheaper to get an EV on a leasing scheme, but that that salary sacrifice car gets classed as a fleet sale rather than a private scale,
Gregg:so
Colin Walker:it gets ignored. And so this really misleading picture of EV sales and where the market is is created.
Gregg:Do you think I mean, it sounds like they've basically tried to made up a story that fits their narrative. That's me saying it, not you, obviously, but, like, you know, it it's funny just going back to what you guys are doing. I had a conversation with Quentin Wilson the other day, and he said to me, you know, about this whole misinformation. He's trying to tackle that as well. There's there's a lot of us trying to do this.
Gregg:Yeah. But the I I made a comment, We need it's almost like we need adults in the, in this room. And you so you you guys are basically the adults in the, in the room.
Colin Walker:I'll take that compliment. Yeah. I I like to think I try and be the one of the grown ups. And, yeah, I work with Quentin quite a lot. We do an awful lot with the new Electric Vehicles UK initiative.
Colin Walker:I support his work at Fair Charge. They support me at the ECU. It's exactly that. It's trying to be adults about it. It's not trying to pretend that everything's rosy.
Colin Walker:There's inevitably illegitimate concerns and challenges that people have around the electric vehicle transition. Any major shift in kind of technology is is not gonna be an entirely smooth ride, and we should we shouldn't try and ignore the concerns that maybe people have about is our charging structure infrastructure where it needs to be? Is it going in the right places? You know? You know?
Colin Walker:What what how do we support people who may be on lower incomes make the shift to these very, you know, expensive vehicles? These are legitimate concerns, but what frustrates me is on the other side, this kind of clear priority to take any opportunity and spin the story and the figures in any way to try and talk the EV transition down, to put people off. And inevitably, it leads people to conclude that there are kind of vested interests at play here that are trying to do this. And it's hard to talk about that without sounding really conspiratorial, but it should come as no surprise that there's an incredibly massive industry out there that is threatened by the transition to EVs. The idea that they're not doing stuff or briefing journalists behind the scenes to try and promote their own agenda would would be naive not to think that that's happening.
Colin Walker:So, yeah, we we try and kind of maybe turn down the evangelising evangelising, but kind of really kind of focus our efforts on pushing back on some of the nonsense that is said. You know, this idea that car parks will collapse under the extra weight of electric vehicles, ignoring the fact that cars have been getting heavier and heavier for years now for decades. You know, the five heaviest cars in UK roads are petrol and diesel cars and not EVs. So, yeah, these you you there's a whole plethora of misleading narratives, some which sound sane, some which are legitimate, and then some which sound mad. You know?
Colin Walker:I I remember one Daily Mail article published a story based on a survey from The States claiming that men weren't buying EVs because EVs weren't seen as masculine enough. Mhmm. I mean, that is what we're up against. I mean, if if you if your sense of masculinity is dependent on your car going vroom vroom, then you probably need to sit down on the couch with someone and have a chat. But that is what that's kind of what you're up against.
Colin Walker:That's definitely not adults in the room stuff.
Gregg:It's funny how in the last, say, five years, when the car has actually started coming out regularly with over 200 mile range, the whole story about the re about the acceleration or the slow or whatever stopped happening, and that now everyone's complaining about the range. Mhmm. It's still not enough. It doesn't charge fast enough. Nobody's saying, oh, cars are slow.
Gregg:Electric cars are slow. Because that used to be the myth is that Mhmm. Nissan Leaf's Zoys were slow. Again, those people never driven, yeah, any of those EVs because I remember my first EV was a Nissan Leaf. That car was peppy.
Gregg:Like, if you took off the eco mode, that car was jolt and you pressed the accelerator slightly and it was jolted. Yeah. And the number of, you know, boy races that I left in the dust Mhmm. In that car.
Colin Walker:Yeah. It's it's it's funny. You're right. There's you know, as EVs develop, more and more of the arguments being used against them just get knocked down like Skittles and kind of those who are kind of, like, you know, died in the wall, anti EV people, will just keep on reaching out for new things of which they can try and criticize electric vehicles. So my favorite one at the moment is, oh, they may be really fast in a straight line, but they handle like boats.
Colin Walker:They're no good at going around corners. And you're like, firstly, I remember back in the day growing up with people who were obsessed with cars. All they ever talked about were their cars nought to 60 times. And now that these new cars have come along, they absolutely tramps petrol cars when it comes to naught to 60 times. They've got to reach out for something different.
Colin Walker:And that's why I think things like, you know, I'm looking out the window now and I can see the Ioniq five n. You know, I've heard some people quite dismissive about it say it's a bit silly and stuff. I'm like, no. I think it's a fundamentally important car because there's that whole group in society, the petrol heads, the people who watch Top Gear, the people that talk about Nurburgring lap times and things you know? You know?
Colin Walker:These are people's hobbies, they're their passions. That's all entirely legitimate thing to have. That car will appeal to them, and I think that car will play quite a significant role in beginning to change their minds and realize that the things that have always attracted them to hot hatches can be something that they can be attracted to in EVs as well. And I also think that group there's an awful lot of people who aren't that into cars, but rely on people who are kind of in that kind of group for their information on EVs. At the moment, that group is spreading a lot of misinformation about electric vehicles.
Colin Walker:So cars like that, they can start winning those groups around. I think, are really important and, you know, really gonna struggle now to kind of come up with something negative to say about a car like the five n as a means of attacking EVs more generally.
Gregg:And also what a statement it is as a OEM to say we're gonna do our sports, you know, extreme model. And let's be honest, Ioniq five was not a slouch to begin with. I remember driving the, the when they came out, the dealer gave me one for three hours. And I had fun in it. Let's just put it that way.
Gregg:It was the all wheel drive, I think, version, but it was still it was very peppy. Like, I I can't remember the brake horsepower figure. Frankly, it doesn't matter. It was faster than my Kia Eniro, which has 206 or or eight brake horsepower and plenty of torque.
Colin Walker:I think the 300 and something there, twin motors.
Gregg:Yeah. It was just it was ridiculous.
Colin Walker:Yeah. I mean, when I drove the five n, it physically took my breath away when I put the foot down. I've never been in a car so fast. And the instantaneousness of the you know, as is characteristic of all electric vehicles was just mind blowing. And, I've been quite interested in you know, there were skeptics, and I forget his name, but one of the former Top Gear presenters who's always been quite skeptical about EVs did his road test of the five n, and he said he was, you know, waxing lyrical about it.
Colin Walker:He absolutely loved it. And he said, seriously, if you're in the market for an m three, really seriously give consideration to one of these. He he said that how they had by every possible driving dynamic, it was better than an RS six. And when you've got people like that who are known to be skeptical about EVs going, this thing has really changed my mind, It shows the impact that a car like that can have, and I think others will kind of increasingly follow suit.
Gregg:Do do you think it's because it's got all the silly, in my opinion, features with, like, sounds and fake gear changes in size?
Colin Walker:Yeah. I I I think it it it does seem a bit silly, but
Gregg:If that's what it takes.
Colin Walker:What it takes to win people around, then completely fine. And I think we should be wary about dismissing people's enthusiasm for that kind of stuff because I do understand how the noise and the involvements of driving a petrol car is something that's always animated people. So if that is what it takes and, you know, I, you know, I when I drove it, I kind of turned it off. I didn't see quite see the point. But I've heard a lot of people say how they find it actually really adds the drive the simulated gears actually really adds to the driving experience.
Colin Walker:So it's clearly winning people around.
Gregg:Interesting. I actually I don't miss the fact that I had to shift and, you know, be slow because of the shifting. And also, I don't know, from, like, pure, you know, human psyche point of view, we associate the noise with the speed because that's what happens. Right? Yeah.
Gregg:And then at some point in the eighties, OEMs actually decided to tune the, exhaust sounds so they sound a bit more uniform rather than, you know, random rattling coming out of the car. And that and it's funny how people just grew up with it. It's kinda like kids these days grow up with music that has plenty of auto tune in it. And when you this is complete tangent, like 80 degrees. But when you see kids trying to learn how to, sing, they'll try to emulate a song that has, like, obvious auto tune in it, like, to the point that I can't listen to it.
Gregg:But that child will try to sing it that way, and I'm like, don't do that. That's that's not natural. Anyway, let's go back to the, the misinformation.
Colin Walker:I I wouldn't be surprised. Just on that five minute, I would be I wouldn't be surprised if people get them. You know, when they first start driving them, use all the sounds, use all the the simulated gears and everything, and slowly over time, we'll just use all that less and less and just become accustomed to a new driving experience.
Gregg:You you know how sometimes when you open a new app on your phone or whatever, it it gives you, like, little hints every so often, like, tip of the day? There should be a tip of the day in the Ioniq five n that says, by the way, if you switch off the gear changes, you're gonna be faster. Yeah. Absolutely. So go going back to misinformation, what is the status of the organization?
Gregg:Is it is it private or is it charity?
Colin Walker:We're a charity. We're not for profit. Very much third sector. You know, we'll describe ourselves variously as analysts or kind of a we often get described in the press as a think tank. So there there's no profit there.
Colin Walker:There's no interests we're serving. It is largely just born out of a desire to but, you know, lots of people are doing lots of different things in the transition, and we felt there was a space for someone to be kind of really looking at the misinformation that was taking place in the media. And that was born out of concern that an awful lot of our politicians who are making decisions that will, you know, profoundly affect the speed and the pace at which the EV transition in The UK happens, you know, they're humans like everybody else, and their understanding of electric vehicles, an awful lot of it is based on what they see on social media and what they read in the press. And we were looking at what was appearing on social media, and we were looking at what was appearing on the press, and it was just littered with nonsense. And, you know, that that nonsense when when MPs are debating about introducing a zero emission vehicle mandate, you know, a measure that the climate change committee has said is the single biggest thing that The UK currently has in place to make the move to net zero.
Colin Walker:You know, if the future of those targets was threatened because because MPs voting on it had a completely nonsensical idea about what EVs are, that's a real threat to The UK's net zero transition. So that's that in a nutshell is our theory of change. We don't we don't lobby. We're not campaigning. We're not we're not kind of, like, advocating for particular things.
Colin Walker:We're just trying to we're we're working to ensure that debate the debate around electric vehicles is more based on the facts.
Gregg:I mean, I'm gonna ask you, you know, very serious question. Mhmm. But how do you fund fund yourself? What is the source of income?
Colin Walker:So we get a lot of our funding for our line of the program is the European Climate Foundation, and they basically so they're a refunder. So they basically get a lot of money from, like, philanthropic organizations, you know, rich individuals who are concerned about the climate crisis. They provide money to the European Climate Foundation who then use that to fund different organizations and projects that they think, you know, are playing an important role in kind of, like, feeding the debate around net zero transition.
Gregg:Okay. I mean, it's important to know that because, you know, people will say, you know, but what if what if you're getting money from, you know, other, like, OEMs or fuel, you know, No.
Colin Walker:No. No. No. No. Absolutely no money from any kind of corporate organizations or anything like that.
Gregg:Good. Good. Then on the flip side, what is your reach? Like, how much power do you have? Is it just, you know, kinda you're the people who work in the shadows and will reach out to a newspaper and say, like, stop it.
Gregg:This is nonsense. Like, you know this is nonsense. You should do a retraction or whatever. Do they actually do this sort of thing? Like, how much sway do you have?
Colin Walker:It's growing. I mean, we we the transport program only started two years ago, so we were starting from ground zero in terms of raising our profile as an organization that was operating in this space. But we had a lot of successes recently in getting newspapers to kind of amend headlines, publish corrections, publish apologies. We've been successful in getting IPPSO, which regulates the press, to kind of, like, intervene and kind of basically instruct newspapers to correct misleading articles. I've heard that we're not particularly popular with a couple of, like, newspaper articles, which is, as far as I'm concerned, great feedback because it means we're having an impact and we're being heard, and people aren't, you know, getting away with saying stuff and then going unchallenged.
Colin Walker:So I do think we're kind of, like, having an increasing effect in that respect. We're not an organization that necessarily seeks huge amounts of kind of publicity or profile ourselves. We kind of judge our success by the extent to which we feel the debates around EVs is changing.
Gregg:What what is the, the sort of the most outrageous thing that you've ever read when it comes to misinformation about EVs?
Colin Walker:There's a few. There's that one I said earlier about this notion that somehow EVs aren't masculine. I mean, you're like, oh my god. Is this the nineteen seventies? Like, what a ridiculous thing to say.
Colin Walker:And it's never been repeated because I think some narratives like that are so out there and so ridiculously silly that I think even the readers who wants to read negative stuff about Eevees kind of go, oh, come on. What's that? There was a real concerted push for quite a long time to claim that The UK's car parks wouldn't be able to handle the extra weight of EVs even though, like, the association that you know, because there's an association that represents pretty much everything in The UK and the association of, like, British car parks or whatever. I don't think that's his name. I don't think that's his name, but there is one that represents that, but it came out and said, no.
Colin Walker:There's there's it's fine. It's the
Gregg:I thought there's gonna be one that's a that's a, you know, an an association of civil engineers or engineers structural engineers or I
Colin Walker:think there's a there's a body that actually represents kind of, like, the British car parking association or something like that. But, you know, they came out in categories who said, no. There's no there's no threat. It's fine. I think some of the things that the stuff that was being said about the fire risk of EVs became particularly pervasive and quite damaging, I think.
Colin Walker:I mean, a really good example of that was the Luton Airport fire Yeah. The Luton car Park.
Gregg:Which wasn't an EV.
Colin Walker:Which wasn't an EV, which we knew on the day it wasn't an EV, because the head of the fire service that was fought fighting the fire at the time came around and said this wasn't an electric vehicle. It's it's it's you know, people even had a number plate of the vehicle doing a round, and all you had to do was put in the DVA website and see that it was a diesel Land Rover, not even a hybrid. It was a diesel because everyone was going, oh, but it was a hybrid. We're like, well, how do you know if it was the battery element of the hybrid that started the fire? Even if it was a hybrid, how do you know these things?
Colin Walker:We always people speak without any information whatsoever. And then a couple of months later, Bedfordshire Fire Service released their official reports on the fire, And again, it reiterated the fact that this started with a diesel vehicle. And even when, you know, there was no one out there had a better understanding of what happened to that fire than the fire service that fought it, even when they came out and unequivocally said, this was not an electric vehicle. There still wasn't enough for people.
Gregg:I think the well, didn't they have to didn't they release even a video when it start like, the from the one of the cameras to show that it it, you know, this is a Land Rover. Like, look at look at this.
Colin Walker:Yeah. Yeah. That was all. But it just shows there's not enough for people. But that's that's where you've got the particular negative impact that social media can have.
Colin Walker:And there's this whole world of clickbait. People stuff has been directed to people because that's what they want to read and they just want to and say they've got their existing prejudices against things, so the content is directed towards them, and they are attracted to content that reaffirms that prejudice. It's confirmation bias. So that is what you're up against, and that's a very difficult thing to manage. And, you know, the media has cottoned onto that because, you know, traditional readership levels have fallen, so they rely a lot more on producing articles, clickbait articles that they can quickly get out on social media that draw people towards them.
Colin Walker:It's just clickbait, clickbait, clickbait, and, yeah, people are just more and more saying things that they probably know are inaccurate, knowing that there's a group of people out there that will click on them and read them because it's what they want to hear.
Gregg:What can we do?
Colin Walker:That's a good very good question. It's not something that's gonna be fixed overnight, But I think we did some interesting polling of petrol drivers and electric vehicle drivers, and we asked them which sources of information do they trust for accurate input around electric vehicles. And quite interestingly, a majority don't trust the mainstream media. A majority don't trust social media for accurate information. They don't trust government.
Colin Walker:They don't trust the car industry. The one group where a majority of people said they that they a majority of people said they trusted was friends and family.
Gregg:How interesting. Yeah.
Colin Walker:I think it's word-of-mouth.
Gregg:I thought they're gonna say podcasters, but disappointed.
Colin Walker:Oh, we didn't ask the question. We we we all asked the question, and I'm sure it'll come out as 90% for our trust, I'm sure. No. It was it was, yeah, friends and family. And I think that it's that word-of-mouth, I think, trumps all those other sources.
Colin Walker:I I see it in my the my own WhatsApp groups and my friends. A lot of them, you know, they they are there's a degree of skepticism there, an awful lot of the stuff that they're constantly being exposed to in a lot of it in news arts papers that have a lot still maintain a lot of respect and credibility for the information that they're providing, you know, for likes of the times, etcetera. They pallet this stuff. They repeat it. It's clearly informed their understanding of EVs.
Colin Walker:But I've got, you know, my friend who recently got himself a a model y, and he just came out and said, like, you know, everything you've been saying on this conversation about EVs is just not borne out by my experience. And you could see their minds changing. It was hard for them to disagree with him because he had the actual lived experience of an owning and driving an EV, and they didn't. It's very hard for them to go, no. What you're saying is not true.
Colin Walker:You're like, what? You think I'm just making it up? I've had this car for a year. What are you saying? So I do think that word-of-mouth thing could be a really effective way of tackling it.
Colin Walker:So just the more that, you know, the listeners to your show can go out and just have a not preach to people, like, you know, don't don't they don't tell them off for not having an EV. Replacing a car was a major financial commitment. No one's expecting everybody today to go out, ditch their petrol cars, and get an EV. What what I think the whole climate change, like, kind of pathway that we need to go on as a country to achieve net zero is just wants to see that when people come to replace their car, they replace it with an electric vehicle. So the more that you can just reassure people, offer them your real life lived experiences, you know, the try and ignore because newspapers love jumping on an individual anecdotal story of someone who's had a bad time in between.
Gregg:Of course.
Colin Walker:And it always ignores the survey after survey after survey that shows that 90% plus of EV owners would never go back to a petrol or diesel. Yeah. You know you know, like, it's amazing how one individual anecdotal story trumps, you know, surveys of statistically relevant sample groups of The UK because it just doesn't sound people relate to an individual story. So if you, as an individual, can relate your positive experiences with an EV, that's likely to have cut through. So I think that is a particularly effective thing that people can, you know, really push.
Gregg:I remember reading that story about the, one of the one of the newspapers saying so many drivers actually go back to ICE cars. And I was like, I've been driving an EV for eight years. I am in this industry, in this little bubble, which may be a bit of a bias, but I literally don't know of anybody who moved back. I met one person on my road trip in their MG ZS something that was a plug in hybrid purely because they were disappointed. They were elderly people.
Gregg:They bought an m MG ZS EV, and then they had a problem with charging on, like, couple years ago. This was, like, you know, early two thousand and twenty on one of the trips, and they changed the car because of that. But there's just so many things stacking up in there. And to be frank, in their case, they they just basically they were perhaps not informed about, other charges in the area or, like, whatever. They you know, some elderly people elderly people don't have the I don't wanna say smarts, but, like, they they don't they don't they're not up to date on, like, the apps and stuff like that.
Gregg:So they just rely on other sources. And they just basically, like, saying, like, we don't need the stress, which I can understand. But the the the the infrastructure has moved on so much that I think most of the time, it's just people's pure laziness, to be honest, that there's behind queues at the charges and all these stories you hear at the whenever there's, you know, mass holiday migration to the holiday cottages in the country, whatever. There's queues at the charges, and you read read about it. And when you look on the map, on, like, ZapMap and, like, share maps or whatever, there's always plenty of charges in the area, and nobody goes to them purely because they just they feel inconvenient about it, yet they queue for thirty, forty minutes.
Gregg:I I never understand that. And then you get a story in the newspaper about it.
Colin Walker:Yeah. Although they they always desperately hope. It's been quite amusing because of some of those big holiday getaway events haven't resulted in major stories of queues. You can almost sense the palpable disappointments amongst journalists in certain newspapers. They don't have some amazing footage of EV drivers getting into a fistfight over an EV.
Colin Walker:I think that's desperately what they're hoping for. Yeah. Look. Some people there is an adjustment. There's a different way of driving.
Colin Walker:People think all those adjustments are necessarily negative. People just really will not engage with the fact that in particularly if you have a driveway, which a majority of households in UK do, you never have to stop at a petrol station. You just get home, and it fills up while you sleep. People just won't engage with that kind of, like, positive, improved aspect of car ownership that comes from owning an EV. Obviously, there will always be people who aren't satisfied, but I think at 90% plus satisfaction rate is not to be sniffed at.
Colin Walker:And I I I you know, there's evidence that newspapers are finding it harder and harder to find these stories to kind of, like, portray these negative experiences. We had one recently where well, last year, there was an infamous article by Giles Cohen in The Times in which he talked about his negative experience with his Jaguar I Pace, a car that is, you know, quite well renowned for not being the most reliable vehicle on the road.
Gregg:It's I mean, Jaguar as a brand
Colin Walker:Yeah. It's it's reliability isn't great. I mean, I hear a lot of people saying it's a wonderful car, not a great EV. It's pretty slow charging, etcetera, etcetera. But it was also been around for a while.
Colin Walker:You know, he's said a lot of stuff in that that I think kind of frustrated quite a few people in the EV community. But then there was another article that appeared a few weeks ago in iNews about a woman complaining about bad experiences in a Jaguar I PACE. And we looked into it and put two and two together, and we realized that this columnist was the wife of Charles Cohen. And she was telling the same story about the same car just a year or so later, which we thought was really underhand. You're like, another story's been pushed.
Colin Walker:You know, this story's already been done. You know, that seemed to indicate that they're just having to try and to recycle bad experiences in effort to keep this drumbeat off of negative EV ownership stories.
Gregg:I don't know what happened in there, but, like and I don't know how journalists actually work, the, the old school journalists, as I like to call them. But are they are these people just incentivized by a newspaper trying to buy an article that, you know, has a certain angle? Or what is your experience with that? Like, how does that work, do you think?
Colin Walker:I mean, it's hard to say sometimes to kind of get inside and understand what the kind of editorial guidelines are at some of these newspapers, but I think a lot of these newspapers are actively looking for peep to commission stories that give a certain angle on certain things. I when I used to work at British Cycling, we got we got sight of the editorial guidelines at a certain newspaper, and it said, you know, one of its priorities, the topics of stories that it wants to cover was anything negative about cyclists. That was seen as something that their readership wants to read, that's something they wanted to get out there, and it just kinda gave you a real insight into where all this negativity around, you know, cycling was coming from. And I think there are certain newspapers that have a similar approach to EVs. They want commission kind of like awful, you know, bad news sells.
Colin Walker:So stories about people having a terrible time with this technology that people believe they have been forced into. I'm using inverted commas there for the you know, that I think there's there's editorial guidelines, And, you know, those editorial guidelines will sometimes explain this annoying phenomenon we have where you get a headline that doesn't really match the contents of the article. The headline would be really sensationalist and negative and quite misleading. And then you actually go into the article and there's much more reasons. And it's often completely contradicts what the headline said.
Colin Walker:And people and, you know, when we kind of point this out, the journalists go, yeah. But look, the article is much more balanced. It addresses the things you've raised. You're like, yeah. But an awful lot of people just particularly in this day and age in social media do not answer the headline.
Colin Walker:The headline is really the the thing that most people read and will be the thing that informs people's just general impression about electric vehicles, all other technologies like heat pumps or renewable energy or, you know, home insulation. So, yeah, there's definitely certain papers that have a have an editorial stance that is quite negative, in certain cases, hostile towards electric vehicles, and that shapes the things that are written and the pieces of work that are commissioned.
Gregg:Anybody listening to this says, a, you know, how can I report things? How can I help? Where would you send them? Because, obviously, if you're reading all the newspapers in The UK, you know, it's most likely impossible for you to miss and misinformation. You're probably gonna get it before most of us read it.
Gregg:Right? So we shouldn't we shouldn't be probably telling you, like, oh, there's this article. You're like, yeah. Yeah. I read it two hours ago.
Gregg:I'm putting my words in your mouth, but I'm I'm, you know, I'm I'm probably close to true. Right? Yeah. You are. How else can we help?
Colin Walker:I mean, it's gonna sound incredibly narcissistic, but perhaps maybe follow me on Twitter. That's probably where I'm most active because a lot of the stuff I do on social media is flagging where we see an article that's misleading and explaining the reasons why it's misleading. We know we think that's a effective way of journalists being held publicly to account for saying things that are perhaps a little misleading. And it, you know, it sounds weird to say, I don't wanna it's not that our approaches to embarrass journalists, but it's to kind of make sure that there are consequences to writing stuff. You know?
Colin Walker:You you it will be pointed out publicly if you said stuff that is not exactly accurate. So, you know, we don't write emotive language, but I will often write threads that go through, you know, issue by issue in a piece that I feel isn't representative of the true reality of what the facts are telling us. So, you know, the more we can get people to engage with those posts, share them, kind of expand their reach, expands the impact and the the maybe felt by the people who wrote them in the first place. So you can follow me. I think my Twitter handle's at colinwalker seventy nine, which is a massive betrayal of my age.
Colin Walker:But that's a good way of getting you that's a really simple thing where you're just liking or sharing the stuff that we do can help expand impact. But, you know, if you see something yourself that is just you know, I think the EV community is very effective on social media when particularly when it sees an article written by someone, one person, like, the ones I mentioned recently about, oh, I've had a terrible time with my EV. You know, push back, go online and say, well, that may be the case for that one person, I certainly know myself and everyone I know that drive EVs. This is not representative of our experience at all. We're really happy.
Colin Walker:We would never go back. These are the reasons why we would never go back. Just getting those individual stories out there, those counter stories, could be really effective. So use social media or conversations with friends to do that.
Gregg:You've mentioned your Twitter account, but anything else you wanna promote or any any other place you wanna, any resource that you wanna put, in here?
Colin Walker:I mean, I I think follow us. Other organizations are active in this space, like Fair Charge, the Electric Vehicles UK initiative that's recently been launched by Fully Charged, supported by Octopus EV. You know, that's gonna be a real effort to try and coordinate and amplify the work of lots of different people operating in the misinformation space. So I'm really excited to see what they do and what impact they have, and we're involved with them. We're certainly supporting and kind of hopefully will be part of the delivery of our activity.
Colin Walker:But seeing groups like that, seeing industry trying to come together and try to better coordinate its response to some of this stuff is a really positive development. So, yeah, have a watch of them.
Gregg:I mean, I've already had Quentin Wilson and other people from that initiative, you know, on this podcast. Anyway, thank you very much for,
Colin Walker:for your time. Yeah.
Gregg:No worries. Well, as always, I'm just gonna say Greg out.
