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Why Electric Cars Need Behavioural Science, Not Bigger Batteries!
00:52:08
In this week’s episode Imogen talks to behavioral economics expert Rory Sutherland who explains why understanding human psychology might be more important than building bigger batteries. Rory, who founded Ogilvy's behavioral science unit,...
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- [00:09]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Everything Electric podcast, where today I'm joined by Rory Sutherland. Now, he is one of the world's leading experts on behavioral economics and human decision making. And he has spent the past 37 years at the huge advertising agency Ogilvy, where he set up the behavioral science unit. And that means that he basically uses psychology to creatively solve problems rather than always jumping to the technological solution, really taking the time to understand human behavior and what motivates us. And let's just take an example. Let's take range anxiety. Could we in fact solve for anxiety rather than range? And if we did so, could we solve that challenge more effectively and for less investment? Well, probably. Now that is the kind of thing that we are going to discuss in this particular episode. And looking at where we are with electric vehicle adoption, could we solve things slightly differently without deploying new technology? You're in for such a treat. He is such a fantastic speaker. I have to do very little in this particular episode and I really hope that you enjoy it. So do let us know what you think. All of that to come. But first a very quick advert break. Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and cleantech are funded by our fun packed test drivetastic events in Farnborough, London, the Southwest, the the North, Melbourne and Sydney. Next up, Everything Electric Melbourne and you. For UK viewers, you can buy a battery electric vehicle or more at everythingelectric store. Rory, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I think safe to say when I've mentioned that you were going to be joining us for a discussion, people have been extremely excited because they have no doubt seen various bits and pieces that you've done on TikTok or various other platforms, or listen to your new podcast and I think you have an extraordinary way of thinking about problems and solutions. So I cannot wait for this discussion. But I think probably the first question that we should get into is what actually is your job and what does it mean?
- [02:15]
B
I do a variety of jobs, but the main role here would be I founded within Ogilvy, the advertising agency about 11 years ago, Behavioral science practice that believes that in many cases of which this is one and a very important one, understanding psychology might be a better key to solving the problem than obsessing about technology. And at a very simple level I had an insight here which is that I thought that the whole question of electric car adoption, which by the way, I believe is a desirable behavior independent of any climate change, it's a better power train in all kinds of ways. Yeah, but let's park that for most people most of the time. Okay. I'd never generalize for everybody. I thought it was a very interesting microcosm of the problem because you have this problem called range anxiety, and of its very nature. Range anxiety consists of two things, range and anxiety. And range is technological and anxiety is psychological. And we are rightly, I think, spending probably half a trillion dollars or so trying to solve the problem of range by increasing energy density and batteries and so forth. By no means a foolish endeavor, by the way, but you could achieve greater and faster gains rather than by increasing range by reducing anxiety. And there's an important point there, which is I think many cars, for many people have batteries which are probably larger than they need to be because the battery is optimized for maybe 2% of their journeys. And the cars are therefore heavier and more expensive than they need to be. And that's not a product of range, really. It's a product of anxiety. And I think if you're going to spend half a trillion dollars trying to increase range, it wouldn't be ridiculous to, to spend a billion or so looking at ways to reduce anxiety.
- [04:20]
A
And have you got any thoughts on how we might start to address that anxiety?
- [04:24]
B
I mean, Greg Jackson and I both agree that there will be a kind of inflection point when every gas station effectively has some form of fairly rapid charger. Now that sounds silly because they don't need to be in gas stations at all. They can be anywhere. But we know where gas stations are. Gas stations are already places where you can go and buy a, you know, wild Bean cafe and go and have a pee so that, you know, they're quite suitable for, you know, a 20 minute, 30 minute charge. But it also just creates the reassurance, which is, wherever I see a gas station, I can charge my car. You know, that would be something which is important. I. Technologically, in a way, it's irrelevant, right? Where the charges are, psychologically, it might matter quite a lot. I mean, there are a lot of other things I would also point to. I don't think that signage is good enough. And obviously there's much less visibility of electric car chargers because gas stations are like peacocks. They've evolved to be visible from a long distance away. They're massive, brightly lit things with enormous logos, whereas an awful lot of the early electric chargers were hiding around the back of an industrial estate car park.
- [05:40]
A
Oh, 100%.
- [05:41]
B
There's also a fundamental thing. I'm, by the way, in A tiny, tiny minority of people who kind of support smart motorways. I know it's fashionable to disparage them, but there is a fundamental psychological problem with a smart motorway, which is it is unbelievably hard to get people to understand that by going slower you can arrive sooner. Now, that is true. I know it sounds completely counterintuitive, but if you can prevent a buildup of high density traffic four miles ahead of you by slowing down a bit, you can then avoid gridlock, which means, completely bizarrely, you'll end up arriving sooner by, by decelerating. And I, I don't, I'm not blaming people for finding this difficult to grasp because, you know, there are people who study sort of traffic flow patterns who find it difficult to grasp.
- [06:35]
A
Well, the additional aspect of that as well is that I've seen you talk and you shared an incredible diagram and you said, I'm showing you this diagram as an indicator of how we, we think about what we're measuring. And also I'm showing you this diagram because I think it will save lives.
- [06:49]
B
Absolutely right.
- [06:49]
A
I'm going to see if I get this right. But basically it shows a speedometer which obviously Normally goes from 10, 10 miles an hour up to 70 miles an hour. What have you. And your diagram showed the time you'd save.
- [07:01]
B
It's time you spend going 10 miles.
- [07:03]
A
That's it.
- [07:03]
B
So it's called a paceometer. Eyal Peer is the behavioral scientist who kind of invented it. I remember showing it to Nassim Taleb and he was fascinated because he said it's mathematically trivial but completely counterintuitive. And by the way, that point is that the faster you, you are already going, the less time you save by going 10 miles an hour faster still. So if you're going 10 miles an hour, it will by definition take you an hour to go 10 miles. If you go 20 miles an hour instead, you save half an hour. And if you go at 30 miles an hour, you save. Let me get another 10 minutes, I think, but the amount of time you save. So actually, although having bought a Lotus in that tray, I find this, I find this difficult to put into practice. If, if you're already going 75, say, the time you save, unless you're going a thousand miles or so, the time you save accelerating to 85 is pretty nugatory. It's not worth it. And you may have noticed this through your sat nav or your GPS in that, you know, you're going pretty fast already. Your sat nav says you're going to arrive at 2:05, you welly it up to 90, say, and after about five minutes, your arrival time drops by one minute. It's not worth it because all the other bad things, you know, breaking distance, reaction time, you know, risk of fatality, severity of accident, likelihood of accident, they're all going up exponentially. Whereas your time saving, which is the objective you're trying to achieve, is effectively flatlining. And that's a great example of something which isn't totally intuitively obvious, by the way. Another psychological factor about electric car charging and range anxiety would be, I would argue, that a bit like some elements of woke politics, it's an American problem that's been imported to the UK because we speak English and share all their media. Actually, to use a technical geographical term, the US is what we call very, very big, whereas the UK isn't big. And there's a lovely little statistic which I dug out to illustrate that in the UK we have eight and a half thousand, roughly, gas stations, petrol stations. I'm being international, I don't want to get loads of Brits in the bloody comments going, it's called a petrol station, okay? But we have eight and a half thousand for a population of 60 million people. So in the US they've got 350 million people, but because it's so much bigger, they don't, they don't need sort of, let's say, five times as many. They actually have 116,000 gas stations and that's because you need them to serve a geography, not a population. Now, it's probably true of us in the north of Scotland and, you know, the few, what you might call really Herefordshire, underpopulated rural areas where you need them to cover a geography. Most of the UK is so densely populated that it's that gas stations exist to serve the population, not the place. And consequently we don't need that many electric car chargers, not compared to the us, in order to replicate what we have in terms of refueling facilities. It's just easier to do and, you know, if you're somewhere like the Netherlands, even more extreme, it's just not an issue.
- [10:27]
A
So I would say the first time that I came across you was in your book Transport for Humans, and I absolutely adored it. And there was one example where I think it illustrates the way that you think about problems and their solutions. And it was an example of why is it that when we move that we rarely like to use the bus and you talk about how well with a car you can be a Bit more sort of predictable about the time of arrival, the route that you're going to take to get there. And so your suggestion was that when you move somewhere for the first month, you should be given free bus access so that you can get over all of those little hurdles, because it's been facilitated by that mechanism. And I thought it was an absolutely incredible idea. I wish it existed and I wanted to see if we could.
- [11:12]
B
There's a beautiful one, by the way. In Denmark, you get free rail travel on your birthday. It's very interesting because my co author of Transport for Humans, Pete Dyson, doesn't own a car and is a bicycle fanatic. He actually goes on these triathlon things. Okay, you can probably guess that I don't. By contrast, I'm an absolute car fanatic. And by the way, I'll go further than that. I think the car is in all kinds of ways economically. Well, I'll go so far as to say. We always say America in the 1950s had lots of cars because it was rich. I would counter that with maybe America was rich because it had a lot of cars, because the economic activity which is freed up and by the way, the locations which are freed up because of the existence of cars and vans and trucks which can move from anywhere to anywhere at any time of day without concentrating wealth in narrow city centers in the way that trains do. By the way, I'm a Georgist. I won't go into the whole thing about land value capture, whatever. But I think it's absolutely. I think the car is miraculous. And I think the attempts to demonize it, particularly by Londoners who have an awful lot of money spent on their own public transport relative to the rest of the country. Country. I think attempts to demonize road building and demonizing the car are absolutely, well, almost malicious and stupid. So just to be clear, however, Pete and I would agree on one. We would. When we agree, we go. Okay, we both agree on this. So I quite like buses, but the information around them is appalling. Right? Yeah. So a London bus doesn't say on the side or the front what its intermediate stops are. Now, it's highly unlikely. I want to go to Clapton Ponds or Honor Oak park. That just that at the front of the bus, you know, I'm not Rain Man. I'm not going to memorize the bus routes. Okay. Let's be honest. And what I want to know is, does the bus go via Charing Cross or London Bridge or Blackfriars or Farringdon or any of the nine Stations from which I can get home to Kent. Okay. Victoria would be fine. I don't know. Because all it says on the front of the bus is the final destination, which tends to be a bus depot on the outskirts of London to which very few people are headed. Now, if you just said Clapton Ponds Via, I would use the bus five times more frequently. So. But Pete and I would agree on that. We'd also agree on having dot matrix displays on bus shelters which tell you how long you've got to wait. Because standing around like a Pratt with no idea of whether the bus is going to come is just something that psychologically we don't enjoy very much. Now, that's one thing. Another thing we agree on, by the way, is that it is really, really. I would argue that you could put up this. Half of your viewers are going to go insane at this point. You could put up car tax a bit, but give people in return 100 pounds of non transferable rail vouchers or public transport vouchers every year. And the reason I'd argue for that is that someone who never goes by train when they ask themselves the question, how do I get somewhere? Is not answering the question in an informed way. Because it's do I do the thing that I do every single time, which I know how to do, which is easy, or do I try something new, which might be difficult and complicated? And we already saw an enormous uptick in rail travel, really, because the web came along and it was now possible to get adequate rail information sitting at home rather than by going to a railway station. Okay. And that, that was one of the reasons, Pete and I think that rail travel went up. Partly it was dynamic pricing, partly was just the provision of information about whether you could actually get somewhere or not and what time the trains went. Now, you know, we did. Most of us didn't have a copy of Bradshaw in our homes anymore. Right. And so this was, this was a game changer, I think. But equally, I think incentivizing people just to expand their repertoire a bit so that they. Next time I go to Manchester, I will ask the question, do I go by train? Now, there's no right answer to that question, by the way. It depends how long you're going to Manchester for, how much luggage you have, whether you have to take a whole load of crap with you. You might argue that Uber makes it a bit easier to go to Manchester without a car than it would have done 15 years ago. I think Uber's complimentary to public transport in many ways. There's no right answer to any question of how do I get from A to B? But getting people at least to try the options so that they're making what you might call an informed decision rather than a habitual decision. I don't think that's a bad thing to do.
- [16:03]
A
Absolutely not. And I think all of the examples that you've given so far are all about kind of asking the right question. What are you actually solving for? Managing expectations supremely well, giving people access to the information and nudging them in a direction so that they can make that informed decision rather than habitual decision. And so I wonder if there's what you've been thinking about when it comes to the world of electric vehicles, because for those who drive electric vehicles, they know that we know that sort of 90% or even higher than that. Something like 95% of EV drivers will never go back to an internal.
- [16:38]
B
By the way. By the way, that is. That is a statistic that needs. The only really reliable measure of a behavior is what you might call repeat purchase. It's whether people who try the behavior and try it enough to make an informed decision, whether they repeat it. You know, I would argue that, you know, on Amazon, you know, obviously it doesn't work for things like pensions, you only buy once. But the most valuable rating system on Amazon for certain goods wouldn't be four stars, five stars, it's a great USB cable. It's whether people buy more of them because that's the most reliable skin in the game, indicator of whether it was a satisfactory transaction. And that fact, by the way, very similar. There's a similar analogy here to automatic transmission. Now, again, they're going to be a load of petrol heads who are going to be despising me for this. But nearly all Brits had a bull story as to why they didn't like automatics. It wasn't always bull, because in the 1960s and 70s, most cars were so feeble, the engines were so feeble they didn't really work very well, and automatic transmissions weren't all that great. But then you reached a point around, I think, the 1990s where everybody continued with their bull story about, oh, I'd missed the feeling of control, okay, but what you found is that everybody who got an automatic stayed that. No, don't get me wrong again, I always allow for exceptions because I think the important thing about free market capitalism is it does at least acknowledge that everybody's different and we shouldn't optimize for the average. And to be honest, if I moved up back home to my ancestral home in the north of Scotland and I had the A9 on my doorstep. I might well go back to a stick shift, but to be honest, when I'm either on a motorway or I'm stuck in traffic, 80% of the time, I'm not really going back. And it's similar with electric cars that most people who adopt it, they overcome the initial hurdle of. Because all behavioral change is kind of a bit painful.
- [18:41]
A
Yeah.
- [18:43]
B
And by the way, new network behaviors take time to, to work. So I don't, I don't wholly oppose libertarian E guy as I may be. I don't wholly oppose some government support for getting electric car charging availability and just the penetration of electric cars to what you might call the threshold of feasibility. And it's going to take a bit of time because I'll just give you an example. When they introduced one of the greatest ideas of all time, the Penny Post in 1840, it was based on a brilliant insight that if you had enough volume of mail, I'm gonna have, oh.
- [19:20]
A
I'm very sorry, I'm gonna have to ask you to, to explain what the penny post is.
- [19:24]
B
Oh, bloody hell. Okay, so Sir Roland Hill at the time in 1840, there were mail systems within cities including London, where for one penny you could send a letter anywhere in London, typically next day, sometimes same day, I think. And Roland Hill had the insight that if you consolidate enough letters on the same train and bear in mind it coincided with the arrival of the train, distance doesn't matter at all because if you, if you, if you watch the film Night Train with the Auden poem, I think they're quarter a million letters on that train going up to Scotland. Now the cost per letter per mile on A train carrying 250000 letters is minuscule. So Rowland Hill had the insight that you could extend this single price postal system to the whole of the UK because all the costs were basically in collection, sorting and last mile delivery. And the, the trunk bit between the sorting and the last mile delivery, the distance was irrelevant. Now they later extended it to the imperial penny post, where in the Edwardian era you could send a letter anywhere in the British Empire for one penny. That never made money by the way. But with the penny post, Roland Hill had this insight and needed to prove it mathematically. And he went to Charles Babbage, inventor of the computer in many ways and probably one of the ten greatest mathematicians of the time to prove his point. Now the interesting thing about that was like many network goods it lost money for the first few years for the simple reason that it required behavioral change. And most people didn't know anybody 300 miles away they could write to. If you think about it, if you're asking people to adopt a completely new behavior which is suddenly for the first time in your life, it's affordable to write that long lost cousin in wherever it may be, they don't instantaneously go, brilliant idea, I'll do that now. Because behavioral change is, well, it's sigmoid and it's slow at first before it reaches a critical mass. And significant new behaviors take time to adopt. And so they subsidize the penny post effectively for the first few years because they realized that it needed to get to critical mass to be economically feasible. And the same thing, of course, applies with electric car charging. If you only have seven electric car chargers and they're all at motorway service stations and there's a queue and people aren't familiar with it and obviously they find it nerve wracking and generally a lot of hassle. There's a lot of friction involved in doing anything new. But. And equally, of course, it's worth noting, we've had 100 years to improve the internal combustion engine.
- [22:17]
A
Yeah.
- [22:18]
B
And so internal combustion engines are very, very good, but inherently ridiculous to a physicist. You may have seen me go viral with that point, which is if all cars were electric and someone invented the internal combustion engine, people would look at them as if they were completely mad. But, you know, but it so happens we've got a status quo bias here. We're familiar with it. We've had 100 years of, of remarkable engineering genius going into the, you know, the improvement of the technology. It is still at some level a ridiculous technology needing oil filters, air filters, coolants, etc. When the alternative is electricity in motion out, you know.
- [23:01]
A
Yeah.
- [23:01]
B
The number of parts in the drivetrain of the, of an internal combustion engine car, like 230, I think. An electric car, it's on six or.
- [23:10]
A
Seven in such a. I'm going to make sure that we link to loads of these as well. But it is a useful thing to inverse invert the problem. That's the sort of mindset shift there.
- [23:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's a, they're great experiments in status quo bias. Which is if, just to give an example, okay. If the, if the United Kingdom did not have a nuclear deterrent, I doubt if many people would be campaigning for us to have one. But since we do have nuclear, you know, four Trident submarines or whatever, people would feel a great sense of unease in losing them.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And by the way, status quo bias isn't irrational in an evolutionary sense, which is do what you've done before and do what everybody else does. Are very rational heuristics in avoiding catastrophic behavior. I've done it before, I'm still alive, therefore it's safe to do it again. And everybody else does this, so it's probably okay for me to do it.
- [24:05]
A
Yeah.
- [24:05]
B
You know, any organism that didn't employ those two sort of default modes would be in an evolutionary disadvantage.
- [24:13]
A
Yeah.
- [24:13]
B
And so, you know, I don't. By the way, there's a really interesting point. I was at the Montpellierin Society just last week, which is kind of Hayekian economic institution, very concerned with liberty. And I made a point which I think is true, which is I used to think, I work in advertising for 30 years. I used to think the bigger the idea, the less advertising it needs. You know, you need a lot of advertising between two shampoos. But actually if it's a really big idea, people will just adopt it. Actually, the bigger the idea, the more behavioral change it requires. And the more behavioral change something requires, the more difficult they find it psychologically. So, you know, everything from air fryers to mobile phones, we forget this in retrospect. I used a mobile phone in Oxford street in 1989 and two people shouted abuse at me from taxis. Right. We forget that there was this eight year period where a load of our. Because you're too young to remember this. Okay. I mean, you were probably born with mobile phones. But in my generation, literally everybody had 10 friends who went, why would I want to make a phone call on the street? And I think they're horrible and they're really rude. And I was on a train and there was a person making a phone call and it's all terrible. So everything big encounters a lot of resistance, which weirdly means I think in investment, dumb ideas are faster to pay off than really big ideas.
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A
Dumb ideas are faster.
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B
Okay, so where I. Where I lived in Rag, this wasn't a dumb idea idea. Where I lived in Ragland, they built a dual carriageway to replace the A road from Ragland to Abergavenny. Now it doesn't take it. It only takes about 10 seconds for people to adopt the new behavior of going on the faster road because they were going to Abergavenny already. If you take something like high speed one, which I think is a good idea, I'm much more skeptical about High Speed 2, we'll park all that.
- [26:14]
A
It's in the book.
- [26:15]
B
People can grievances it literally. High Speed one was a bit of a white elephant for the first four or five years because makes time for people to move to Folkestone, people in Folkestone to discover you can go shopping in London, because it's requiring people now to make a journey they didn't make before in a different way, rather than asking people to make a journey they were already making in a slightly better way.
- [26:41]
A
Yeah.
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B
And so there's a fantastic book, if anybody's really keen on this, which both Pete and I, who wrote Transport for Humans, are very influenced by David Metz, which is Travel Smarter, don't Travel faster.
- [26:55]
A
Yeah.
- [26:56]
B
And he argues that the value of transport investment, road building investment and everything else isn't in time saving, it's in the journeys that now happen that otherwise wouldn't have happened.
- [27:07]
A
Interesting.
- [27:09]
B
It's. By the way, it's a fascinating book in all kinds of ways. He more or less says this whole argument that if you build roads, it'll just encourage people to use them and, you know, that road build. He thinks the argument is fatuous because in fact he has this bizarre theory which is borne out by the Evans, which is that humans of their own volition tend to like traveling for about an hour a day. And it doesn't matter whether it's a bicycle on foot, a mule, a car, whatever it may be, that there's kind of a time which we naturally effectively settle on, which is around an hour a day, whether it's commuting, whether it's going to the shops, going to your show in Farnborough, which is a little over an hour there and back, roughly speaking, we have, you know, and so what you do when you create different forms of. Of connection or connectivity is you enable new forms of exchange. And the stupid model in which transport investment is predicated at the moment, Hence High Speed 2 is getting people who are already going somewhere to get there faster. And that's. That's not the value of transport investment at all. Even less so when you can work on the train. It's a dumb measure.
- [28:24]
A
That's it. Because I think in your book, and you put it much more eloquently than I'm about to now, but so much money has gone into making that, you know, a fraction faster. Whereas actually had that money been invested in great wi fi, excellent tables, making that time valuable for people whilst they're on the train, that could have been better money spent and may encourage greater utilization rates as well.
- [28:45]
B
I mean, Engineers. The trouble is, you give a problem to engineers, they'll define the problem in engineering terms. And sometimes they're right. And I'm certainly not disparaging engineers for the wonderful work they've done, but some, I always say, if you'd given the brief for High Speed 2 to Disney rather than to, you know, a bunch of consultants who make money out of standing around with theodolites, if you'd given the money to Disney, they would have said, look, you're asking the wrong question. You're talking about time and capacity and all this malarkey. The question to ask is really, how do you make the journey to Manchester by train so enjoyable? People feel stupid going by car.
- [29:23]
A
Yeah.
- [29:24]
B
And that engineers don't get excited by having a carriage on the train with a ball pit for kids. I don't know, or having strange character breakfasts on the train or whatever. Disney would have come up. They don't, they don't get their rocks off on that kind of thing. They get their rocks off on making the train go insanely fast and tunneling through things. And, you know, sometimes they're right. I'm emphatically not disputing the fact that engineers have made rather a marked contribution to human well being, but they often do it at, in a misaligned way, which assumes that consumers care about the same kind of things that engineers care about. And to be honest, I mean, the biggest psychological hack I always think is the, you know, the dot matrix departure board at a station, which is if we know the train's coming in 15 minutes, we're not that bothered. If you just put delayed, we go frantic. And so you can change people's psychological state. They're far more quick, big wins in psychological hacks than there are an engineering.
- [30:24]
A
Investment, do you know? So I thought of you the other day because I was at the airport and our flight was delayed and a lady came on the tannoy and she said hello. First of all, I'd like to thank you all for being so patient. You've been brilliant. Second of all, I'd like you to remember that I am just the messenger. I'm here to tell you that the plane is delayed by an hour, but we have an engineer who is busy fixing the problem and we're going to keep you updated. Thank you so much. It was masterful, brilliant. It was absolutely incredible. And actually, not only were people not annoyed with her, several people went up to her and said, thank you so much for being so clear with how you've told us that the flight is delayed. It was incredible and I think kind of a 101 mastery in providing the right information and managing those expectations.
- [31:19]
B
I can remember being. I think it was somewhere like Milan at one o' clock in the morning and the flight was massively delayed. And there was, weirdly, there was a pilot who was one of the passengers on the flight. This is quite a few years ago, and he was clearly an early adopter of Flight Radar 24, which you probably know if you're a bit of a transport nerd. Once we saw the plane take off from Gatwick, heading for Milan, all our anxieties completely dispersed because we now, we now knew something was going to happen.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Before the plane had taken off, when we couldn't actually track it on our little maps, we were in a state of, oh, God, it's going to be cancelled. We're going to spend the night here. I'm not going to get home. I've got to cancel my meetings tomorrow. Tomorrow. And so simple provision of information, and that includes trains, by the way, where they have got better. They don't stop in the middle of nowhere for 20 minutes without a tanoin. Oops. That's actually a registered trademark. Without. Without an announcement over the loudspeakers. Yeah, they got better at that. That's really, really important. And it's. It's cheap, right? I mean, you know, compared to fixing an engine. Yeah, it's really, really cheap. And I think we're just, you know, I think we just don't give enough attention. We don't give people's mental state enough attention. I mean, one, One quibble of mine with electric cars is at the moment, I think my car's at 67. I haven't checked the app. I don't need to know the. When it's at 84, I don't need to know the individual percentage. My petrol gauge never told me that. It just makes me a bit anxious because I go to the shops and now I'm down from 84 to 82%. I go, oh, I've lost 2%. I don't need to know. At 11%, I need to know. I need that level of granularity. I don't just say 80% plus, I'll be fine. You know, just, just leave it.
- [33:04]
A
When it comes to things like. Because I'm interested to know. Actually, you described that when we have these big behavioral shifts and these big network effects that we need for encouraging new technologies, it's a sigmoidal shape. And right now we're at 23% of new cars in the UK are electric.
- [33:22]
B
Yeah.
- [33:23]
A
They've recently had the announcement of a new electric car grant. So up to, I think up to £3,750 off. I will check that number.
- [33:31]
B
Yeah, I'm sure there's. I'm sure there is a better way of spending that money to motivate the behavior, by the way. But they, they give the brief to economists who basically go, if you want people to do things, you bribe them. And I always think bribing people is the most expensive way of getting people to do something. You should try persuasion first. And then, by the way, there are loads of persuasive arguments for electric cars which I think have got buried in the environmental message in some ways. I mean, I met someone a few days ago who's a massive. Effectively, he's not a climate change skeptic, but he's a. He effectively thinks that the shift from fossil fuels was made insanely fast past. But strangely, he's completely neutral on electric cars because he says one, it's just a different, you know, powertrain and it's probably overdue anyway. I mean, Edison and Henry Ford tried to build an electric car, if you want the really weird story. And Jay Leno claims this. One of the reasons electric cars got vilified in the Edwardian age was because they were clean and quiet and didn't go very far. Car. They were disproportionately popular with women for logical reasons. You didn't have to hand crank them and they became stereotyped, as, you know, Bear in mind, it was a pretty macho age. They got stereotyped as girly cars.
- [34:50]
A
Yeah.
- [34:51]
B
And therefore guys saw the smoky, noisy thing as the macho, the macho alternative. And it's a, it's a rule in marketing in many categories that you can sell female things to females, you can sell male things to males and females, but you, but you can never sell a female thing to males. It was true in cigarettes. If you position this. For those of you who remember, if you positioned a cigarette as like, cool, I think with a K as a female cigarette, basically the first thing you do is that guys would never buy it.
- [35:22]
A
Yeah.
- [35:23]
B
So that was probably an asymmetry, I think. But also, by the way, there's another point which I don't think anybody gets across, which is the gasoline car can only run on gasoline. Clean. The electric car can run on any energy source you like, whether it's clean or dirty, and it can run. An electric car can run on Coal, and many of them in China probably do. Right, okay.
- [35:46]
A
Or it can run on sunshine from your rooftop, or you can run on.
- [35:50]
B
Your own, your own home generated homegrown energy. Now, interestingly, the trains that left the east coast of the United States heading for San Francisco in the 19th century ran on coal for the first part of the journey because coal was abundant in the eastern United States and they switched to timber about halfway across. So, so they actually, they actually ran on. Because effectively they, they were dual fuel. You, you burned coal in the first part of the journey. And then of course, the western United States is absolutely covered in trees. I can't remember how much of the energy. And someone told me what percentage of the energy in the United States states in the 19th century was actually wood, not coal. And I've got a vague memory. It's more than 50%. It was very much a wood burning economy. And the fact that the train could run on any heat source gives it an advantage over a train that can only run on effectively one specific liquid which has to be produced from one specific fossil fuel. And so that very variability is, you know, my car is probably 23% nuclear powered. I'm guessing, I don't know, I charge it at night. I'm being hopeful. But that, you know, that that's, that's important. Regard, regard. Even if you don't believe in any. And that, by the way, we haven't done a very good job because there is this climate change skeptic audience who, who would love electric cars for their performance but are terrified of looking woke.
- [37:23]
A
Yeah.
- [37:24]
B
Which is a straight, it's a strange thing, but, you know, often happens.
- [37:28]
A
And how do you think, and I mean, this is a big question to ask when we don't have much time left. But how, if you were in charge, and by in charge, not entirely sure of what, but if you're in charge of, you know, electric vehicle adoption in the UK and we look at some of the political heat that they have at the moment, what are some of the things that you do to remove some of that heat?
- [37:51]
B
That's a very interesting question. There is an argument that some of the subsidies are counterproductive psychologically because the assumption is if the government needs to pay me to do something, it's going to be an inferior thing. Now, I would argue that if you think about it, the electric car manages to achieve, you know, at a fairly basic. Well, two things that really excite me, one of which is that it's much more scalable, the electric motor than the petroleum Engine. And I'm very excited by micro mobility. I, I, I test drove Microlino, which is joyful, which is genuinely, I mean I've got, I've got a big ass Lotus Eletre outside, but my perfect car combination would literally be a Lotus Eletre. And a Microlino I think would be, you know, would be almost. My wife's got a Mini electric as well, which is also fantastic. But the ability to go small I think particularly for urban settings is a big deal. I'm also really excited, by the way, we shouldn't forget it's not all about cars. I think ideas like the Heathrow pod.
- [39:00]
A
Yes.
- [39:01]
B
Are much more important than we realize. And I think the reason we're not adopting them is because transport solutions are bought by bureaucrats, not by consumers. Yes, okay. And bureaucrats define what's important. And generally what is important to bureaucrats are things like capacity and speed and it's all the sort of nerdy stuff that you can put on a spreadsheet. Part of the reason the Heathrow pod works is because it's lovely. I mean, do you ever use it?
- [39:35]
A
Yep, I do. And it is lovely and it's magical.
- [39:38]
B
It's magic. The economic proof of it is the Heathrow pod parking charges a price that's not unadjacent to the price of the short stay car park. Now if there were a bus connecting the car park with the terminal, it would be charging half the price, a third of the price. Instead it's about 80 to 90% of the price. Now, what the Heathrow pod would make possible, I mean this for real estate developers, if there are any real estate developers listening here, right. You could take a load of railway station car parks, parks which are on land in city centers which would, I mean Oxford Station car parks probably worth, I don't know, 20 million. Yeah. You could build on that land. You could produce a car park that's a few miles away and you could run people in by pod. And quite, you know, quite literally you could release an enormous amount of land value because nobody would accept a park and ride bus service. But when it's a pod, all bets are off. We behave completely differently for whatever reason. And you know, I think so they're all manner of things that excite me. I think what happens is procurement who buy, you know, someone comes along with a load of proposals and the procurement people will use metrics which are comparing you like, for, like with a bus or tram, which are the status quo modes of transport and therefore the innovative mode of transport which is better at some things and worse than others. Gets qu. Gets disqualified.
- [41:10]
A
Yeah.
- [41:11]
B
And you know, I think, I mean, it's worth remembering, by the way, that the, the original iPhone had appalling battery life. I mean, it barely made it to lunchtime. But we liked it so much we found workarounds, we bought a huge case or we took a charger to work or whatever. And the initial adoption of any new technology. I mean, by the way, charging, which was an absolutely fraught four years ago when I first bought an electric car, but which, I mean, public charging.
- [41:38]
A
Yeah.
- [41:39]
B
There's also a lot of misinformation around and we need to be really alert to this. So I mean, I mentioned the fact about range anxiety, saying that, you know, don't get me wrong, if you live in rural Idaho, it's probably not an irrelevant problem. Problem. If you live in Oxford, it basically is home charging. There was a whole load of nonsense. I, it put me off installing a home charger because the electrician would come around and go, oh, cable's a bit long, it's not going to take 7 kilowatts.
- [42:07]
A
Yeah.
- [42:08]
B
And then eventually my brother who's an astrophysicist said, you don't need 7 kilowatts. To be honest, if you, if you can get three, you're okay if you can get four for 90%, 95% of occasions, you know, assuming you're not out really late and have to drive to somewhere the following morning, in which case you will need public charging. I, I'd also look at, I'm, I'm there. I think there are, I think there's scope for unbelievable innovation here psychologically. I've always thought, by the way, if you have six charges, the fifth and sixth charges should be more expensive than the other four.
- [42:44]
A
Why?
- [42:45]
B
So that they're free for people who are desperate. Ah, that's just, that's just a throwaway idea. Okay. But I think that would not be. Now, you know, in other words, you could have reasonably priced charges, but once four of them were occupied, the other two would become more expensive so that people would use them to the minimal extent necessary rather than plugging off, going off as plugging in and going off a three course meal.
- [43:10]
A
That's true.
- [43:11]
B
Okay. So you could use really clever pricing mechanisms there, I think, you know, I think there, there, you know, there's scope for, I think really innovative pricing which I think Octopus Energy is pioneering and understanding that human behavior and nudging human behavior is part of the solution to this. Now I'll Give you, I'll give you another example. You know, you can do quite a lot for the environment. Not a massive amount, but something by just put your tumble dryer, washing machine and dishwasher on late at night rather than doing it at peak time because you'll be using the same energy but in a much cleaner form.
- [43:52]
A
Yeah.
- [43:53]
B
And I think, you know, I think there are loads of little behaviors which aren't actually that painful to adopt, which people can, you know, make a difference. Difference. Now, by the way, don't get me started on the whole bloody heat pump bollocks, right? Because one pretty selfish and easy solution is you just install air conditioning, two way air conditioning in your home and 80% of the time in the British winter that will heat your home. It's an air to air heat pump. Effectively. You don't get a subsidy for that because they go, oh, it's an air conditioning unit and people might use it to come cool their homes, it'll increase, come on, it's the UK for crying out loud. And also, by the way, for elderly people that may be essential to their survival. So the, the vilification of air conditioning is kind of an awful lot of this green stuff is really signaling, it's not really practical problem solving and does it, you know, and my argument would be, I've got a gas boiler, I've got my, I'm not going to tear out my radiators, I'm not going to dig up my lawn, come on, go and find a solution that's 80% good that people will actually adopt rather than insisting on a solution that's 100% perfect, that nobody except a lunatic is ever going to try and that, you know, and I, you know, that's one of my arguments. I, I don't totally hate hybrids, right? I don't, I don't own a hybrid. I wouldn't buy one. It seems a bit needlessly complicated. Daddy, Daddy, da. But I can understand that for certain, you know, if you're a cab driver, taxi driver, it might be a pretty sensible compromise. And so, you know, and so one of the things is that we allow engineers to go off on one without being kind of curtailed by any sensible marketing person who would go, lovely, lovely idea. I absolutely love your fantastic flowchart start. But can I just say, nobody's ever going to do this.
- [45:54]
A
Yeah.
- [45:55]
B
I mean, one thing is, by the way, one painful thing with electric cars is that you have to take delivery an electric car on the day you wave goodbye to your petrol car. Now if you could have a period of parallel running, or you gave people two week test drives, an electric car, so they could overcome. I think Greg Jackson says the worst thing you can do is lend someone an electric car for, for three days because they encounter all of the problems and, and, and they don't get over the hump into the benefits. But if you could actually allow people just to try an electric car, if there was some system, instead of using this subsidy, you had this wonderful system where people could try them out because they're brilliant. Right. I mean, previously, if you wanted to have comfort, quietness and performance, you were in kind of Bentley Aston Martin territory. And now you get it in Skoda territory. You know it. And by the way, one pedal driving is one of the most glorious things, by the way, which, what, you know, once driven, forever smitten, as Vauxhall used to say, it's one of those things that you have to try it to appreciate it, you know, otherwise it's all very hypothetical.
- [47:03]
A
Oh, and I think the fact that it is possible to have to drive and to have that precious hour that you may have a day traveling from one place to another and it not be this hugely sensory overloading type experience especially enabled by one pedal driving as well.
- [47:18]
B
Oh, no, no, that, that, that. And by the way, adaptive cruise control, which is nothing to do with electric cars, although it's nearly always available on all of them for any long motorway drive. This is, I would argue, psychologically 70% of the benefit of fully autonomous drive driving.
- [47:36]
A
Oh, I totally agree. Yeah.
- [47:38]
B
Which is what you effectively do is you find someone sane, okay. And you outsource your driving to them. You basically set yourself at a reasonable distance, follow them, and anybody who isn't a mad tailgater or some sort of nutter, you basically go, okay, for the next 30 miles, I'm just going to be following you in a slightly stalky way, perhaps, you know, 50 yards behind.
- [48:01]
A
And so mentality.
- [48:02]
B
Yeah, a lot of, A lot of these things are simply, it's, it's what I call the air fryer phenomenon. Nobody wants one until they have one.
- [48:09]
A
Yeah. Do you know, I don't even know why I'm saying this, but I think at least once a week someone will send me a link to an air fryer deal. And the only thing that is putting me off an air fryer is how much space that they take up.
- [48:23]
B
Oh, not this. Oh, no. But my wife treats kitchen surfaces like the Somme. You know, she'll fight over like, you know, and die over 3 inches of surface.
- [48:36]
A
I'm with her on this one.
- [48:37]
B
The only point of kitchen surfaces is you can put more gadgets on them. No, no, I know that clean, you know, kitchen aesthetic. Yeah. That's the big obstacle. You, if you can find you. I mean, you could put one in a cupboard, by the way, or indeed, if you've got vehicle to load, you could put it in your car and have really high end picnics.
- [49:00]
A
That's it. I'll put it in the back of my eye on it.
- [49:02]
B
Exactly.
- [49:03]
A
The kitchen counter problem. Perfect. I'm really aware that. I know that you have another meeting to go to, so we probably are going to have to leave it there. But what is so frustrating is that we've probably just.
- [49:16]
B
We've scratched the surface.
- [49:18]
A
Yeah. So we really have to continue having this conversation because I just, I find your. Your mind absolutely fascinating and I wish there were more forums in which we could have these discussions for creative problem solving and actually getting different types of brains at the table to solve problems in a different way.
- [49:36]
B
Totally happy to oblige. Yeah. I mean, by the way, I'm not claiming to be right, nor am I denigrating other approaches. I mean, I've come from a sort of scientific family. I'm just saying that the people who understand the psychology often get to the problem far too late. High speed 2 didn't need to be that fast. High speed 2 should also have stopped somewhere near the M25 so that people don't have to go all the way into London and all the way out again.
- [50:06]
A
Yeah.
- [50:07]
B
You know, I'm currently boycotting the Eurostar because they won't stop at Ms. Fleet and Ashford. There's a Kent reservoir. I think if we're going to have the sodding trains rumbling through our county, at the very least they could pick us up.
- [50:21]
A
Yeah, I think that's an extremely reasonable request if you ask me. Yeah. Well, honestly, Rory, thank you so much. Let's continue this conversation.
- [50:30]
B
We will. I'd be delighted. Thank you very much indeed.
- [50:33]
A
Thank you.
- [50:33]
B
Thank you.
- [50:34]
A
It is such a shame that that is all that we have time for because I was so enjoying that conversation. Conversation. And I am so aware that we just skimmed the surface. I personally want to use another episode to get into the topic of air to air heat pumps versus air to water heat pumps because I have a feeling we may have a slightly different difference of opinion there, which I'm interested to get into in more detail. But wow, what a mind Rory has. And I think that was an excellent 101 in how we need to think about the fact that big changes and big ideas will require big resistance as well. But we can address some of that resistance and make this easier for everyone. If we recognize that everyone is an individual, we shouldn't optimize for the average. We should get people access to the information they need, nudge them in the direction by making it easy for them. And of course, managing expectations super clearly as well. I think there's some incredible lessons there, not just for electric vehicles, but for deploying any sort of idea and thinking about things slightly differently. Of course, as ever, we would love to know what you think. We'd love for you to leave us a little comment. We'd love for you to like and subscribe. We cannot tell you how valuable that really is. It helps ensure that we keep growing and we can keep on interviewing wonderful and interesting people like Rory Sutherland, but that's it. Thank you too. Let me have a look on the list. Andy. Thank you to Andy from our team. He'll be editing this particular episode and if you have been, thank you for listening or watching.