Beyond the EV Hype: Why the Transition Needs Better Stories with Robert Llewellyn (Everything Electric)

Hello and welcome to Transmission. Today's guest is Robert Llewellyn, who is the founder and host of Everything Electric, as well as a former presenter of Scrap Heap Challenge. Perhaps the best way of saying this is that if you're in this space, you'll almost certainly have seen his work. We talk about the upcoming phenomenon that is Zap Heap, how Scrap Heap Challenge came together, and onto energy, we talk about his reflections in the electric vehicle market. Let's jump in.

Hello, Robert. Welcome to Transmission.

Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.

And in our sort of time honored tradition, I'd like you to begin with introducing yourself and your role in energy markets.

Okay. So, I I I have find it very difficult to really introduce myself. So I've never had anything that resembles a career, but I have worked for many years in what we now would call traditional television, broadcast television, in both comedy and factual entertainment. Those are the two areas that I specialized in. And I think a a key thing for where I am now was for, ten years, I made a a a TV series called Scrapheap Challenge, a game show, an engineering game show. And that led on to me doing a lot of, television about how things work in the broadest spectrum. So how you tin a can of of tomatoes, you know, how that's how you cook the tomatoes and get them in a tin and seal the tin that, you know, from basic stuff like that to how petrol is, diesel is refined.

That stuck stuck with me, that one. This I mean, we're talking twenty five plus years ago.

I went to places like Draxby, when it was still a coal burning power plant in Yorkshire, which was an amazing thing to see. So I got into the weirdest places, the London sewer system, one of my favorite places to spend time.

I've seen you do a tour of the Norweg Power Station.

The Norweg Power Station. We did yes. We got there. So all those sort of things.

And I was they that kind of sparked a genuine interest in how how we okay. I've just got to step one, step back. The first time I drove an electric car, well, this is all very well and good, but where does this electricity come from? Then realized that for the previous forty years, I've driven petrol cars without once, not for a second, ever ever thinking, where does this petrol come from?

Just wasn't a question in my mind. It was too expensive. That would be my but the most of my opinion. So that kind of pushed me in that direction.

And so what I ended up doing then was making, some experimental, series on YouTube. The first one was called Carpool, where I gave people a ride in a Prius, as it was then. And gen and about about eighty percent of them were genuine lifts. You know, person a had to go from here to work.

So I'd get I'd drive them. But while we were driving, we'd talk. We had cameras in the car, and, we had conversations. And so, you know, some famous people and some interesting people.

And that was a dangerous thing to say, because after that became a sort of thing, some of the famous people I knew didn't wanna do it because they say, why don't you get someone interesting?

It's difficult. Anyway, that then made me confident enough to try and make effectively a TV series on YouTube, which was named Fully Charged, which was about electric vehicles. But in twenty ten so it's fifteen years we've we've been doing it. And in twenty ten, I think there were three or four electric cars on the market.

There was nowhere to charge them. There was no charging infrastructure of any sort. It would they were not terribly good, the cars. They they didn't have very much range unless you're very rich and you could buy a Tesla Roadster.

And even that, there was no way to charge it, and it didn't go that far. And it was incredibly uncomfortable. So, you know, there wasn't a lot of obvious examples that this was a viable alternative.

So the only people who had electric cars then were I you can either you can call them one of two things, early adopters or idiots. And I'm really in the middle of that that cusp.

But it kind of changed slowly. And and I think a key moment for me that really galvanized it was literally one journey. So I had a Nissan LEAF on loan from it was a press Nissan LEAF. I've since bought it, and I still have it. And I drove from my house where I had solar panels. So I spent hours working out when there was enough solar, which is really hard to do. There was no technology to do this, and I was plugged into a thirteen amp domestic socket.

So they only used solar, and so it was a sunny day for a couple of days. It took two days to fill it.

And, then I drove to an old friend's house in Dorset, which was a seventy two mile drive, which was the absolute brake limit, terrifying limit that the Nissan LEAF could really do, where he had a converted water mill that generated enough power for about twelve houses. So much more power than a than a my little solar array. So I plugged it in there. I went I got there quite early in the morning, plugged it in there. It was charging all day, but one hundred percent from water going through a water mill through through a turbine.

And then I drove home, and it and I had to drive so slowly home because it was so I nearly ran it. So I I did make it. But what happened then was I've done this journey in a modern piece of machinery. It was made in a factory out of materials that were dug out of the ground that were done. Long list of negatives.

But I didn't use any fuel that was imported, refined, transported, pumped, and burnt. Not one tiny electron came from that. The electrons came from the sun and they came from rain. And that that, I went, that's never been done before.

I was driving in comfort, okay, in terror because I was in a very limited range vehicle. But I managed to do it, and I thought that is a clue to how things could be. And, actually, what's been reassuring in the intervening, you know, I think it's probably fourteen years ago I did that, is that it's much easier now and so much more plausible. You know, I've now been to, for instance, big rapid charge hubs in, France and Germany, where all the power comes from a solar farm that's next to it is stored in massive batteries.

So you know, guaranteed, this is not connected to the grid. They don't they don't bother with the grid at all. They just and that is like that is do you do that with with your petrol car? You know, you need an oil if you need an oil well or oil refinery.

You know, anyway. But that so that stuff I find I found very exciting. And that's led on to then all the myriad aspects of the energy industry and how that works, which is about four million pounds above my pay grade.

Okay. Okay. Very good.

And I also I I have to bring this in, but someone when you're on the lift on the way, I did ask you, you you said I'm here for I'm here to record a podcast, and and they asked you, well, have you have you done any podcasts before? And I I feel like that was a a an an excellent introduction.

So, well, that was that was a a very good moment. I'm gonna move us on to Zap Peep.

Oh, yes.

So what is Zap Peep?

So this really comes out of a a kind of missionary zeal in a way that, you know, that I hear from from in people in industry. The the CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, is a good example, is we des you know, he says in America, we desperately need engineers. We need mechanics. We need people who can fix stuff, who can build stuff, who can maintain stuff, and we don't have them.

And that has been a bit of a gripe of mine, you know, coming out of an arty farty world of of of of comic performances and theaters. You know, I did a lot of that for many, many years, but I always had a fascination with engineering. And it's kind of in my, I guess, my DNA. My brother is retired now, but, he's three years older than me and was a a a automotive engineer, but very specifically in Formula one.

So he did really high end engineering for most of his career. And he's a a genius at mending stuff and fixing stuff and build I mean, more importantly, building things like gearboxes.

I mean, how did you do that? Exhaust manifolds, you know, all that sort of stuff is what he did in his in his, like, working life.

But the but the the need for engineers is really important, and that is one thing that I've had the feedback in the, whatever it is, twenty years since I did, Scrapheap Challenge. The amount of engineers I've met who said I'm I'm I do this job because I used to watch you on a Sunday evening with my dad. Mhmm. And that's what got me into engineering.

And that is people across the board. I mean, the most extraordinary so I've met people in aerospace, people in the, defense industry a lot. Yeah. People in automotive.

There's lots of people at JLR I've met who said I'm only here because of scrappy.

So that makes you Jaguar Land Rover.

Jaguar Land Rover. Sorry. Thank you. I've used a three letter acronym without explaining it. Gosh. I hate that.

But that is that is a critical part of being the energy industry. So, you know, that's Yeah.

But anyway, so then we I thought, well, we're all the time when we made scrappy, we used old, petrol engines, which was they were lying about. There were tons of them. And that was fun, and they made a noise, and they were dangerous, and they were if you broke down always, they were really unreliable.

And for for probably the last five years, I've toyed with the idea of how couldn't we do scrap heap again, but with electric motors, batteries, and motor controllers, but still make weird machines, you know, not make other cars, but make weird machines that do interesting things. And that was just a pipe dream until I met a wonderful man called Colin Furze, who has a very successful YouTube channel, and he's bonkers and very energetic and full of ideas. And he has built quite a few of the machines we made on he grew up watching Scrapbeat. And he's made some of the machines we made on the show. If you think the engineers made it in ten hours, and it just about worked, a remarkable achievement. He would then build one over, say, three months beautifully engineered that really worked well.

And so that was a great thing to meet him. He was a guest at one of our live events, and he went there on a storm, and he was wonderful. And he said we should do Scrapheap again, and I said, well, I I would love to, but let me talk to all the big honcho people who own the format and all the rights and all that stuff, sort of telly nonsense.

And don't say anything publicly yet. Well, half an hour later, he posted on his Instagram account, which has, I don't know how many millions of followers, but a lot. We're gonna make Marsh crappy with a picture of me and him and him going, ah, you know. So that was awkward, and a lot of phones are ringing in in old broadcast TV circles, but we managed to blag it.

So we've now made two pilots of zap the ZapEAP, we're calling it. And it is exactly the same format. It's two teams. They've gotta make stuff out of stuff they find on a scrapyard, but they are all both all issued with a battery pack that we've had safety tested and electric motors.

So they start with that.

They equal each team, and then they have to build a machine using those components. So they're able to find that. And that's the one way we've been able to get around how on earth you know, we don't want them to find a battery pack in an on Nissan Leaf and rip it out with a, you know Yeah. Driver on their feet. It's kind of a bit more complicated. But the advantage we had for the first episode we made was the two teams' jobs, day jobs, are converting existing vehicles to electric. So not just cars, although that is the majority of them.

Tractors, small boats, particularly, Dutch team who work in Amsterdam. You know, they're producing big tugboats to pull barges out of the center of Amsterdam because no one can drive a diesel boat in Amsterdam, let alone a a petrol or diesel car. But they've done a may they so they're really used to working with with batteries, with electronics, with motors, and all that. So that it was really different feel. It wasn't as noisy and dirty as scrap heap used to be, but what they've made is equally insane.

I mean, that was some of the wonder of it. Right?

Some of the the chaos was the was was the dirt, and I think it's gonna still have that right with a a sort of fresh battery as it were, and then all of the parts around it then come from the From from a genuine scrap, from just a piles of old rubbish.

I mean, I say it wasn't as dirty. There wasn't as much oil spilt on the floor. Okay. But actually, now think about it. It was absolute chaos and madness. And there were sparks going everywhere and welding and, you know, so yeah.

That's that's And and look for we we when we do a podcast, we make sure we do lots of research, and this was the best research ever because I just got to watch old episodes of Scrap Peep Challenge.

Right. And I'm not sure I actually did any any work for for for a couple of hours. We'll we'll we'll we'll edit that out. But, but, yeah, abs it was just great to watch it, the chaos, the fun stuff bursting into flames. You know what I'm gonna say to you, which is I'm an engineer, and I grew up watching Scrap Peep Challenge. Right.

Right. Oh, well.

It was And and and maybe so, I mean, that's a a very good case study.

But what I would say is that with Scrap Peep, the the chaos, people making stuff, how does stuff work, how does stuff work is kinda a critical question that always comes up time and time again with engineers. The thing that I found the fondest memory of was and a lot of people always talk about, like, the soundtrack, but for me, it's the little sketches. Yes.

Do you remember the little sketches?

Oh, gorgeous. Where it's like, when somebody says, oh, by the way, we're going to make a plane, and it's gonna fly from this cliff to this cliff. And then they'd be like, oh, how do you get oil? They've got half a bin bag and, this oil drum and this giant elastic, band we're gonna use to fling it off the cliff. And you thought, oh god. How's all that work? And then this lovely little diagram would come up.

Would show you, yeah, with little sound effects. Well, we're praying and hoping the guy that did that has said he would love to he really enjoyed doing it. We have the budget.

We have the the same budget that we had for tea and sandwiches on Scrappy. So we're doing it on a slightly bit more of a shoestring. But I we certainly wanna try to do something like that with the new the new thing. I mean, it's being edited at the moment. We've only just shot it, so it's in its very early days.

And and when slash where do you think people would be able to see it?

So the two things I think which are I'm really excited. Well, one, it will be hopefully November. The first episode will go out in early November. But what's equally exciting is that the when we used to do it, we'd they make they build the machines one day, then we'd take we transport them to the test site wherever that was, and we'd they test them and then they blow up or fall to bits or do something.

And this time, we're we're take we're that was just done, like, on an airfield or in a quarry or somewhere that that we could do it safely. But this time, we're doing it in front of an audience at our, live event, Everything Electric South at Farnborough on the eleventh and twelfth of October. Yes. I've remembered the dates.

And we've got a big arena with raised seating, so they'll it'll be a big sort of show. Amazing. And they will they will both be quite dramatic tests. I mean, we've got enough, I think, because I was always worried a bit about safety having seen a lot of mad machines.

So they there there's enough of a gap between the public and the machines to not not to worry too much. But that is so thrilling, and we're gonna show that audience the build so they will get to see the the actual, you know, the the what we've done so far.

What you've actually made. And and and in a world where those two pilot episodes go fantastically well, and there's great appetite for it, and someone comes looking at your door and says, right. Would you make a season?

Is that something you'd say I mean, like, do you think that's a possibility, or is this very much just, like, let's just do two episodes and that's that's a nice self contained thing?

Yeah. I mean, in a sense, the the the the focus for what we're doing now is just on getting those two done, which has been, you know, amazingly difficult. But we've got, you know, we've done it, which I'm I'm amazed that we've done it. We've had one investor that's that's basically helped helped us do it because there's no way we could have raised the money to do it ourselves.

I mean, you know, if you think that it's possible for us to do an episode of the of Everything Electric for literally a few pounds because it's me in front of a green screen or it's Jack on a with a car that he's already got, you know, we or and occasionally, they're more expensive when we have to spend more money and as travel and and all that sort of thing. This thing cost a a bomb. You know, this thing is like a year's budget Yeah. For for what was the fully charged owners and everything electric.

So it's a very different beast. But I I think the two things are, and this is very much to do with Colin Firth as well, is that working outside what was the TV industry has proven to be really much more fun. Forget everything else. I mean, it's a massive financial challenge to keep up for us to keep going.

But it's much more enjoyable because we don't have to answer to a corporate body. And and the and the corporate bodies are not necessarily horrible, you know. They can be really nice and supportive. Certainly, my experience with Scrappy was incredible support from channel four and all the commissioning editors.

That wasn't bad, but it still had to fit into a certain formula for them. And we don't have to do that. And we get and also we get bigger audiences. You know, that's the the restricting thing is that our audience is global.

For everything electric, about twenty nine percent of our audience is in the UK Okay. Which I'm staggered at. So it's a big lot in North America, Australia, New Zealand, then the rest of the world. Germany is one of is about our fifth biggest audience. So that shows how well they all speak English because we're we're not we don't do a German version. We should do.

And we've, we've got I've I've made the assumption, maybe incorrectly, that with ZapPeep, you're making a car. Is that true?

They were making, wheeled vehicles.

Wheeled vehicles. And Yes. Okay.

Okay. In the broadest possible way you could see it.

I don't think I don't think you need to I don't think you need to say anymore. No.

And I think what's interesting is the the transmission of the the energy in a motor to the wheels is quite interesting.

There's some very there's some a wide variety of Okay.

Of solutions.

Okay.

Because I because I think one of the fun things is that if it it were to go into a season so, I'm just gonna bring up a few episodes Okay.

Of Scrap Peat just to give people an idea of some of the variety that came through, but also some quotes from it, and and we'll we'll see where these go. Alright. So, I'm gonna call this episode the one where they made planes, which is Yeah. Absolutely as dangerous as it sounds. Terrifying.

So, essentially, they had to make, a a craft, then they tried to sort of pull it along by hand, and then latterly, they tried to get a winch to kind of thing Yeah. Get things to go very quickly. A couple of quotes we had, I was gonna pilot it, and then I realized how dangerous it is. He's got more life insurance than I have. That winch looks like it was made on a previous episode.

And so I said I I said I worked very hard to to to find out.

Was there was there an extremely hardworking health and safety officer behind the scenes?

It's very it's it's I I mean, I can I suppose we can reveal now how we managed to wangle that?

So we had a wonderful, really experienced health and safety, person on the set all the time who was older than I am now. So he was very retired. He talked about his grandchildren a lot. He was slightly hard of hearing.

Okay.

And there was certainly one occasion I can remember very clearly where the crew and the camera people wanted to have a kind of explosion at the for the beginning of the show, in which we're doing on a scrapyard. I mean, it actually was safe, and they're not stupid. They've done that stuff before, and one of the people had an explosives license. So there was some explosives involved, and they just said to me, take grand he called them granddad.

That was his call sign on the radio. Yeah. Take granddad away. Make him a cup of tea.

He took the kids to, Whipsnade Zoo last weekend asking him about that, the grandchildren. So I said, oh, like, oh, yes. No. It's nice at Whipsnade.

We had an everyday. And in the background, I could see this massive explosion with because there's a lot of, there's a lot of petrol, a lot of gasoline, and some explosives. That it makes a big thing. And that went off.

He didn't see a thing.

So but that was you know, you would not get away with that now. I mean, we're talking twenty five years ago when that happened. It would it would be catastrophic, and I'm sure we wouldn't get insurance. But it was something that actually, to be fair to the production on that show, a huge amount of time was spent about safety.

Mhmm. Wait a minute. If if there's someone sitting in this and it turns over, they're gonna get crushed. Yes.

So we would build and that was, you know, where the the health and safety bit was, we would build them a safe cage for a driver to be in a machine that walked on two sticks and had a jet at the back of it.

It was it was definitely happening. So, for example, there was an episode where you just try and design things that would fling a car, which was I mean, obviously, what would you do with things you find in a in a scrap heap? You would learn how to fling cars.

Broke cars. And there's a spectacular thing that someone creates. They create this trebuchet. So it's like a a medieval catapult type thing.

Siege engine.

Siege engine. Thank you. And, and you can see everyone is stood a long way away from this. It was extremely nice. They sort of they pull the pin, and the whole thing just collapses in this giant cloud of smoke. It's just what a wonderful wonderful thing. And the camera pans and says that if it's a failure, at least it's a proper failure.

Yeah. That was that was a proper failure. And that was the team, the barley pickers, the farmers from Dorset, where one had a very famous line, which was proper job. You know, we're not gonna muck about this. We're gonna do a proper job. And when that thing collapsed, he said, now that's a proper job.

He was very proud of the way it complete they were so delighted. You think they'd spent hours of sweat and toil building that. And when it all fell apart, they were always laughing hysterically. Hysterically.

We're not gonna put that back together today.

No. Yeah. No.

Okay. Yeah.

So final question on on scrap heap. Was and and I think people probably all all always thought this. Was it genuine junk, or was it was it kind of was it littered? I mean, if they'd looked long enough, would they have found something that was kind of of the perfect tool for the job?

No. No. Probably not. So they were all filmed on real junkyards, real scrapheaps.

You know, really they really were. And particularly, we made quite a few series in the USA, and we were on a a huge car scrapyard in the valley in Los Angeles that I never saw the far side of. I mean, it covered thousands of acres of piles and piles of old cars, and all kinds of junk. But we did have to make sure that, you know, there was a I remember there was a a an episode we did in the UK where they needed lawnmower engines for the design.

And we knew that there was we had to make sure that there were, like, three, I think, working lawnmower engines. But we didn't, like, leave them on a shelf with a label. They were kinda chucked in the junk and sort of partially covered over. So they'd have to search for them.

Well, the first thing they came back with was a lawnmower engine we didn't know was in the scrapyard. It was, like, upside down in a puddle. And they spent about four they got it working and they did use it. They spent, like, wasted so long making this wretched old rusty heap of junk work.

That was so classic. So, yes, we did have to it was called seeding. We had to seed the yard. And there were maps that were very secret.

I I occasionally got a glimpse of them, which showed little red dots where critically important things were. So if it really went to poo and they were looking at it for five hours, no. They needed to build the thing. We go, just over there.

Just take a take a look. Morris Minor. Have a look under there. Oh, that's the thing you need.

But that and that, we in, the ones we've just done, this was in a it's essentially a farm slash scrapyard. Okay.

That where there is an enormous amount of junk, but a lot of it from, the electric car industry, you know, attempts at making something that's not worked, and they've dumped it there. And they've got hundreds of forklift trucks that are all piled up. So, bizarrely, it's a more of an electric scrapyard, not intentionally. That's just what it is.

Because that stuff is now coming, you know, coming to the end of its life. So the I don't think I can't I mean, I because they had the motors and the batteries and the the electronics to make that work, but they didn't have any wire. So they had to go and find wire. Well, they were stripping wire.

They knew what to look for. They're they're bright engineers. So they were stripping wire out of things like forklift trucks and hydraulic lifts. They go, oh, that's that's a good computer one.

They were ripping that out. So there is some genuine hunting there.

I think I'm really excited to see someone get excited about the type of wire they've found.

There's a lot of discussion about wire and crimped ends and connectors.

You'll love it. Perfect. This is this is great. I'm I'm very excited for this. Okay.

Let's move on from ZapPeep, and let's go on to everything electric. So Yes. I think a lot of people will know you from fully charged Yeah. Which has just had a rebrand.

So why did you make the switch from fully charged to everything electric?

It was there's I can't now remember the hours of discussions about the title. So the fully charged show just came about someone said fully I don't even know where that came from. And it sort of made sense. So okay. When I first started it, I thought Top Gear, really popular, and and electric cars don't need gears, so I'll call it gearless. So I think there isn't I don't know if it's still up, but there's an episode or two that are caught is called gearless.

And then someone said fully charged. And I went, oh, yeah. That's better. I don't quite like gearless. Gearless. And then also, of course, I curse within days of calling it gearless and thinking that's the title. I drove an electric car with gears.

So some of them do have gears. So, fully charged just made more sense. But then as the as we as we then started doing the live events, and we'd call it fully charged live, it was very much the people who knew the YouTube channel would come along, which is fantastic. And there was a lot of them, and it was wonderful.

But we really realized quite early that it it it didn't mean anything if you hadn't seen the show and you didn't know anything about electric cars, but you might be interested in them. And Everything Electric was our, like, sister channel that was more focused on home energy, renewable energy, those sort of things. And that, people got it. And everyone we spoke to, well, I know what that's about.

You know? So everything electric is obvious. And so then we call the live events everything electric, and we really noticed an increase of people who'd never seen anything I'd done, never seen the that a fully charged show, didn't know anything about anything else. But because it was called Everything Electric and it was in their city, and you could test drive an electric car and see a a company that put solar panels on roofs and batteries and all that, it changed.

And so, therefore, it was a slow process, but we thought the actual title should be. It's just simpler if everything is called everything electric.

And it gives you it gives you breadth as well. So fully charged felt like it was linked to cars. Yeah. Everything electric feels like ebikes, planes Yes.

Heat trucks, solar panels. Yeah. We had the same naming, question came up this week in the office, and we were asking, what would you call an evangelist in the battery space? And ampbassadors was where we got to.

Yeah.

That's too too too too cringe worthy or or Slightly.

I can I just saw myself with a a a Christmas, cracker paper crown? Yeah. I've got an idea. What about ampbassadors? Yeah. It's a bit of a dad joke.

Yeah. That's my only worry. Oh, it's firmly in the dad joke category. Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay. Let's let's move on to the EVs. So if you, if if you wanted to bust some myths on EVs, where would you start?

I mean, I think the the two that are still clinging on, are I'd have to replace the batteries, and there's nowhere to charge them. So this is from people who've never driven them and, don't know anything. And I mean, there's there's I think there's two groups of people that are negative. They're the ones that actively hate the idea, and they, I have to say, generally men, and think that a real car has to have a petrol engine and make a noise.

And they're gonna be around for the rest of their lives. They're not gonna change, and I don't care. It doesn't worry me at all. But there's a lot of other ones that have been, really, pummeled by negative, information in the in the traditional press, courtesy of the fossil fuel lobby, very effective lobbying group.

And in particular cases, more in the United States than here, but, I mean, it's leaked here. It's the people who fought against asbestos, smoking, and and when I say the people, it's the actual individuals in those come in those lobbying groups that have that have fought, and they know they're gonna lose. That's the clever thing of them. They can delay.

So the delay in in people stopping smoking was probably twenty five years. So in that twenty five years, the tobacco companies made billions, and they fought and argued. It's not sure that it's really gonna give you cancer. It's not absolutely certain that smoking's bad for you.

Secondhand smoke isn't really that bad for you. They would fight and fight, and the one I know about most intimately is the asbestos. I lived with one of the scientists who proved that asbestos wasn't particularly good to breathe, and all that stuff. And the fight that the asbestos industry gave back was shocking.

I mean, it was including violent threats to his personal safety. I mean, they will fight to the bitter death in the oil industry. They're under threat. They're a massive powerful politically cape you know, politically well connected industry, and they will smash anything that gets in the way of their profits.

And that's they're very successful in America at the moment. So I think it's justifiable to be highly critical of individuals who work in the in the oil and gas industry. And I know a lot. And they're really nice people, and they're not evil.

But I won't give forgive them, and I won't give them any quarter. And I go stop working for them, get a proper job, and then I use a lot of expletives that I won't now. But that that fight is effective. So people then say, oh, well, the batteries don't last.

I've heard the batteries they always say, oh, I've heard. And I said, well, where did you hear that from? I don't know. It was in the papers or someone said it on Facebook.

And I said, well, what if I tell you they're literally lying because they wanna keep making money out of you buying petrol?

And and and part of what you do is to say, well, hold on. Look. I mean, you might not be able to get to an EV immediately, but, hey. Here's a podcast.

You can listen to me driving around in electric vehicle, and you can hear how it is, what the experience is like. You'd come to a show Yes. And you could sit in one of these, and you could drive it for yourself. You know, to trust your own eyes is Absolutely.

Your own experiences.

Is is that is that one of those, I would kind of call, some of the people you described, like hippos. So hippos always move from, like, the watering holes to vegetation. They walk the same line every single day, and they kind of always do the same thing. I would say that some of those groups that have always driven diesel, always driven petrol, they're always gonna be the same group.

How how could you get someone like that to go, oh, actually, I didn't have to swap the battery out halfway through, and I wasn't sort of nervously tapping the meter all the way through just to see if I had enough juice left to get there. Actually, it was pretty straightforward. I quite quite liked it.

I mean, I think the thing is so the the the way I think we've had genuine success is in the live events, the the test drives we do at the live events. So that is and we've now done over a hundred and twenty thousand. We've facilitated a hundred and twenty thousand live, you know, test drives all over the world. It was, yeah, I think incredible. I couldn't believe it when I was first told them. I was I think it's gone beyond that now. I think that was a couple of shows ago.

But that has had a huge impact, and I've certainly met people who said, oh, I've been driving my, you know, Kia e Niro for the last three years because I first drove on a a fully charged live as it was then. So it had an impact, and, the it it would what that's led to then is, you know, that's countered a lot of that negativity. And what I think also happens, which which is nothing to do with us, is a person on a street has an electric car and the neighbor goes, oh my god. You must be terrified that I've heard I've just read in the Daily Mail that the batteries are either gonna burst into flames or you'll have to throw it away in two weeks.

And the per and then they see them two years later and they're still driving it, and they go, oh, is it alright? Yeah. It's fine. It's boring.

Yeah. Alright. It's just a car.

And we've got some EVs going into sort of hundred thousand miles type thing now.

So it's it's Oh, we've just seen, oh, no.

Wait. A hundred thousand mile. No. I've got V EVs that have done a mine, Nissan Leaf's done a hundred thousand mile. No. Well, ninety seven, I think.

We've seen a car in China that had done, five hundred and fifty thousand miles on one battery. Wow. Five hundred and fifty. But what's important to and this is really the truth that is hard to communicate, is what the cars that are being made now with batteries now, the battery genuinely is not a piece of, you know, PR.

It will outlast the car. You'll have to rebuild the car. So that the battery that that the car that that battery was in had new drivetrain, new suspension, new seats. It was knackered.

It had done half a million miles. It was complete bodywork was shot to bits. The windscreen wipers did you know, everything else had broken and worn out. Not the motor.

The motor will do a million miles of the you know, because that's the well, the thing about when you tell people about the Nissan LEAF motor, really early electric motor in cars needs to be serviced and, lubricated after half a million miles. So they've done nothing to that motor at all. You don't touch it. You don't look at it.

It's absolutely fine.

It's got one moving part.

It's really simple.

It's incredible. I you know, from the stationary storage side, which is my background, the the sort of you go back, say, three, four years, and it was sort of seven thousand, eight thousand cycles was sort of full charge discharge.

It was considered to be sort of what we and yeah.

Unrealistic.

Would have been sort of for your front end.

Now that number is thirteen, fourteen, fifteen thousand cycles. So not only have you got older cars being able to do this, but you also this sort of next generation of batteries coming through are going to be x percent less.

What is that? CATL who we went to visit in China recently, they're talking about the ninety year battery. So it will be it will have a useful life of ninety years. So there might be forty five years in a car and forty five years as static storage, you know, which is you know, when you see that now being done. So a good example is Redwood Materials, which I mentioned in, the USA. They power their very, very big industrial units. It's not a little workshop.

Massive factories with enormous energy needs, hundred percent renewably powered from vast solar farms in the desert, but feeding in huge batteries that are all secondhand, car batteries repurposed into big boxes and, you know, it's it's not pretty. I think you could easily say this is not a pretty it's just rows of of, like, big industrial containers and massive fields of solar, but it's in the desert.

So, you know I I think we are gonna see this in many, many places.

So perhaps not so like, in Central London, you're not gonna see sort of a load of secondhand, batteries laying out. But if you're going to any kind of industrial process somewhere where there's space and there's because of cost restrictions, then, yes, a second line for sure. Makes sense.

Very briefly, because it was a few years ago, I've been in an apartment block in Paris Mhmm.

That it that the lifts and all the public lighting are charged, from solar on the roof stored in old Nissan Leaf. No. Old Renault Zoe. Pardon Pardon Pardon Renault.

Old Renault Zoe batteries. And the lift is powered by Renault Zoe batteries. And it was so stupid because I've done all this stuff for years. But when I got in the lift, I was a bit nervous.

Like, there's enough. Has it got enough range?

I hope it was the building.

That's what I thought.

It was quite tall.

Yeah.

But unusually, it was probably ten floors.

That's a fair question.

Which is for in Paris, it's quite high because they don't do massive anyway.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Sorry. I'm gonna move us on to our, final two questions. So, is there anything you'd like to plug?

Oh, well, I mean, I think I would only like to encourage people if you can get get to our live event. So we're doing a whole lot of new ones next year, and I can't remember anything about them. But the big one we do every year is at Farnborough. I mean, we had over forty five thousand people there last year.

So they are big events, Amazing talks we get and amazing panels, which I sometimes think, oh, that's too weird and quirky and packed to the roof. They're funny. I've just got to tell you. So Dan Caesar, who's the CEO of the company, comes out of domestic energy stuff, renewable energy in your home, high heat pumps, solar, all that stuff.

He did a a talk a few years ago called Beyond the Boiler. And at one of our meetings, we're going, well, everybody's gonna be queuing up for Beyond the Boiler. They're not gonna wanna talk to this amazing man that we've got. Beyond the Boiler, you couldn't I couldn't get in.

I would think there's four thousand people say watching that panel because it was people who are really at the forefront of heat pump engineering and how you install them and how they work, and people are interested. It's really So I had to eat my words about it.

So go to the show, but make sure you go there early so you can hear about going beyond boilers.

Because otherwise, it's gonna be in the back of the queue.

It'll be in the back of the queue.

And you're gonna gonna hear nothing.

And there's also loads of test drives at those things. Loads of, cars you probably won't have seen. So we know we've got quite a few cars being unveiled there.

That's one of the really So you can get in them, press buttons Yeah. Get a few out Drive them.

Drive them. Perfect. I I so important for the for the groups out there who've kind of only ever seen petrol and kind of yeah. Just need to get a that hands on experience. Okay. And then final question.

Is there a a contrarian view that you hold?

Oh, well, I suppose in terms of electric vehicles, is that they're they're not gonna save the world. They're not the answer to all our problems. You know, they they create their own set of problems that we, you know, we they'll they'll create new problems that I can't actually envisage yet. But I've just walked right through central London, and what really pleased me was I saw two electric bin lorries, dust dustbin lorries, we call them, or garbage trucks, and about ten delivery vans that were electric.

I saw thousands of electric cars, but I mean, they're just cars. Why are people driving in London in a effectively a medieval city with very narrow streets and very few places to park cars? Just seems a bit bonkers. It's a really easy city to move around in with pub public transport, the London Underground system, the Elizabeth line.

Bus services are amazing, and you can ride bikes now much safer than you could when I With all of the cycle superhighways that have been put in place.

And when you go to cities that have gone to the next level, so you tracked in the Netherlands, very glowing example. You know, car use has dropped to almost nothing. You still can own your car if you live in Utrecht, but you have to pay a lot, and it's a real pain in the ass. But you're much better off using a car share scheme, which they've run, which is brilliant, which is also connected to the grid and does car to, vehicle to grid on a proper big scale.

So their city is partly running from all the cars that are parked there. Anyway but that when you see it, you go cities would be much better, but I quite like the fact that I'm able to get from outside the city to nearest city when it's raining in an electric car. Absolutely. What I need then is a car park at the end with, with, you know, slow charging with with destination charging, which is coming.

But so I would always argue electric cars aren't the answer, but they're much, much better than the stuff we use now. So if you're, you know, we're near the Euston Road in London, which which, how long ago? Because I did a TV program just down the road about the air monitoring, system outside the university just down the road. And that was when it was catastrophically toxic, that street.

It's got much better because of electric transport in London, but it's it was really bad. It was a carcinogenic the guy the scientist described it as a carcinogenic soup. That's what you're breathing in. And the really shocking thing was I remember pushing my son in a pushchair up that road years ago.

He's now thirty two, so it was a long time ago. And, with the one of the things they did at that monitoring station was put one of the sensors down low at sort of child height, and that was ten times worse than at our height. So the stuff sinks all the particulate something. And the children are breathing that, and he said that is lethally dangerous, that that area.

If you breathe that for too long, you're going to get you're going to die. You know? You if you lay down there to sleep, you wouldn't wake up. I mean, it was really shocking.

And that's and that was a lot to do with taxes and buses, which were all diesel. It was that was diesel. So we're shedding diesel in this country, which thankfully, you know, is the most toxic bloody fuel.

So your noncontrarian view is that we need to move off diesel and petrol into EVs.

But your contrarian view is the EVs not necessarily always the best tool for the job.

And also Sometimes I mean, the ownership model, I think we need to challenge. And I think your generation and younger than you are going to challenge that, which is a really big problem for car manufacturers. Because it basically means we need about ten percent of the cars we've got now. It would you know, if you could if you're sharing a car, which an electric car is a very easy thing to share, you don't need as many.

And if you got if you can be confident and the only place I've seen this really work well is Utrecht, which I mentioned it, is there were sort of middle class university graduate people with children who literally did decided to sell their car because it was a pain in the ass and use the car sharing because they've got a little Renaults out down the corner for the thing. They can do use a Tesla to go and see grandma in Amsterdam. You know, they've got this choice, and it's so local. They walk twenty meters, and they they can use a car.

And it's so easy to use.

And that They they they kinda go like multi transport as well, so they have this kind of rental car.

And if you go somewhere like Amsterdam, you'll see all these parents with the, the the bike's called like an Urban Arrow. Yes.

And, essentially, it's just a bike, and it's got a big bucket on the front. The load of the bucket is you chuck chuckling your kids in the front and you're your kids in shopping.

Yeah. Exactly.

And so, like, coming to London soon, I hope. Yes. Yeah. Well, Robert, that leads me to to tie it all all in and say thank you very much. You've been a wonderful guest. It's been a real honor having you on and, very, very, very good luck with ZapPeep.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.