Mike's Minute: The next chapter of EV won't be pretty

Along with the honesty from Toyota around the value, or lack of it, in the second-hand EV market here, we got February's figures for new car sales.  January was a bust, February was barely any better and the industry is expecting March to be slow as well.  The EV story is revealing its next chapter and its one many purchasers and early adopters will not like.  What drove the fizz was a couple of things - hype and free money.  Governments have decided EV's were a climate answer and got on board with rules and regulations around emissions that basically forced the industry into electric, whether they wanted it or not.  When the consumer didn’t join in, they handed out incentives.  The uptake improved but in most countries, it still didn’t really take off. America has them but they haven't worked, Australia has little, if any, appetite for them and New Zealand got a bit enthused but that’s all over with the change of Government.  So, there were regulations and bribes, and they still couldn't do it and now if you look all over the world Governments and industries are backing away. Everyone from Jaguar Land Rover to Ford are focusing on plug-in hybrids. Britain has backed away from banning combustion engines and Ford in America are re-investing in new engine factories and capacity.  People lost their sense of objectivity and Toyota here has highlighted that this week with their warning over used values.  What is a used EV worth? We don’t really know yet because the market hasn’t been established. And in that is the fear.  Markets are driven by demand. You can create demand artificially, the way we did with subsidies, or you can create demand by value, or performance, or sometimes hype.  The EV is plagued today with what it has always been plagued with; range, anxiety, price, re-charging issues and the unknown. When you compare an EV with a petrol car, the petrol still stacks up. Not in running costs but in convenience, distance, reparability and resale value.  All of this might, might change with solid state batteries or charging stations on every corner. But what we are fast learning is we jumped the gun, Government's jumped the gun, the industry jumped the gun, and the enthusiasts jumped the gun.  Sales don’t lie and worse - if the re-sale story turns out to be a dog, you watch the love affair with internal combustion go to a whole new level. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.