In part 3 of this episode, we discuss:
⏰ The realities of charging times for EVs
🔌 The challenges and realities of accessing charging infrastructure
🏠 Solutions for accessing charging points when at home
⛽ Will hydrogen take over or is electric here to stay?
🚕 Transition options such as hybrids
🧑⚖️ Legislation changes affecting cars
Transcript
The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.
Matt Nally
So my final question, I think around the sort of which route should you go generally, is that people are thinking about whether they own a car or buy a loan and buy a car or whether they lease, there’s obviously different factors to take into account. So if you buy, you potentially have to have a higher cash outlay, maybe you find that’s it, obviously, there’s the interest then, but you have an asset at the end, you can sell, obviously, there’s no appreciation for how long you’ve had it. On the leasing route, you don’t have any of that headache. And so there’s just in everything’s dealt with, it’s a lot simpler. How, how do people weigh that up in terms of what the factors to consider around the lease, buy cost aspects, all that type of stuff?
Shane Pither
I think that that argument has always been there. And here’s why a lot of people come to leasing in my mind, leasing a vehicle was probably the most cost effective way of keeping a vehicle on the road. But that’s just me personally, it’d be slightly different than their views on this. But you’ll factor this in as you will, you’re right you own when you’ve got something at the end of it. The problem is for me, and the concern for myself is why leases is uncertain, you don’t know what that’s going to be worth, ya know, then you’ve got the method of disposal problems with this. And then you’ve got particular moment, this emerging new technology that’s changing so rapidly, that you get left behind with old technology. And we’ve seen this in the expanding Ulez zones where people got perfectly good cars, you probably heard about them lobbying against it, hoping it wasn’t going to happen it did. We get them on the phone, they’re desperate for a car because they’d been toying with charged 12 pound 50 a day to go home to their own home, or parking on the fringes having to walk 10 minutes back from a road down the road, which is not in ozone, which is crazy. That’s only set to get worse. And also the technologies we know with EVs, it’s not like a combustion engine where we know that they got to a limit to degree where they can get this mpg. But they’ve been working with a few years, and it’s it’s gone as far as it probably can get, within reason. With electric cars, you’re seeing more developments, more efficiency on the batteries and motors, new different type terminology, solid state batteries coming our way. All these things can help improve. With that in mind, I wouldn’t want to own anything. That would be Yeah, people are buying things tend to don’t like taking risks. For me, that’s taking a massive risk.
Matt Nally
It’s very interesting, because we’ve seen that added quite close to London, and I’ve seen plenty of people who have to get rid of cars that technically are fine. Okay, fine. They don’t have the lowest requirement. But But then there’s the whole debate around what do you buy next? And it might be compliant now? Is it compliant in a year or two or three years? And then you’ve got the same issue again, if you’ve got to try and sell it at a low price, because it’s not compliant in a lot of areas, and then you’ve got to try and buy something that’s more expensive that that is so it’s actually it is quite risky process these days that it probably wasn’t before.
Shane Pither
It is yeah, it is. I mean, it’s these cars can lose 50% Plus sometimes on the residual value after three years. If a house you probably wouldn’t buy right
Matt Nally
now know that that uncertainty, you would possibly always get severe. So that’s right. Is there anything else that that’s worth looking at around the sort of leasing process lease or buy and Sally sacrifice areas? Have we covered a lot of that? Do you think,
Sarah Worthington
I think just probably one part that we’ve kind of just kind of missed a little bit bit comparing petrol diesel versus electric, obviously, there is a middle ground in there, there’s plug in hybrids, as well. And actually in going back to kind of some of our earlier questions and answers around actually what mileage you doing each day and each week on whether or not you can transition now to electric and whether or not you have that ability to charge at home off street there is kind of like that middle kind of step that we’ve got time for obviously, we’ve had the extension given by the government around electric vehicles and that kind of ban for some people it’s kind of opened out actually a little bit more breathing space to think about okay, I’m not I don’t feel I’m quite ready yet to move to electric does that kind of stop gap of the plug in hybrids? And that kind of linked to salary sacrifice, it can be done through salary sacrifice, but just the savings just aren’t as great just because you pay benefit in kind of plug in hybrids. And then just kind of one last thing for me would be used car leasing as well. So actually, we’re seeing now more used vehicles coming round after the 234 year contracts, something that we’ve really kind of that’s really taken off with us here at select, is vehicles come around after contract. And we’ve seen some really great kind of lease rates on these vehicles. And that, again, is electric plug in hybrid, and it’s petrol diesel models as well. So even more affordable ways to get into leasing, if you’re not quite can afford that kind of step to brand new vehicle.
Matt Nally
That’s a really interesting point that was driving that, as you think, is it? The fact that the cars are so good anyway, now that even if it is three years old, it’s still a fantastic car? Or is it the cost of living that what’s changing with sort of, yeah, perceptions around? Or what consumer habits around that?
Sarah Worthington
I think it’s both to be honest. And I think it’s obviously seeing kind of use car prices after this kind of three, four years, within leasing companies, actually, they’ve got lots of life left in these vehicles, to be honest. And actually, clearly, there’s some insight in leasing companies that are kind of working out the residual valleys and depreciation, which I probably wouldn’t like that job today in this kind of ever evolving market. But they’re seeing an opportunity there, with vehicles coming back after those contracts and seeing another lifespan that’s available. And it just shows back to people wondering how long these batteries are going to last? Well, look, we’re seeing new vehicles go around a complete cycle with the lease contract, and the going out again, and leasing companies wouldn’t be doing that if it if it wasn’t possible to be doing so. Okay,
Matt Nally
so it’s around this episode off, we’re gonna look at the future of the electric car market. And I suppose the future of the car market generally, I suppose as a starting point for that. And it because it ties in nicely to some of the stuff we’ve discussed so far. I imagine one of the things that will sort of drive changes in the adoption of this is things like charging times, and he’s charging. So you want to touch on that first in terms of where we might be heading in terms of the speed of charging availability, all that type of stuff. Yeah, touched on it a little bit
Shane Pither
earlier in the conversation, but charging times can vary wildly. And it’s a question we get asked quite a lot. Select car leasing by customers are new to this about how long does it take to charge? It’s a really hard one to answer because there’s various factors that can affect this, it’s you know, how deplete the battery is, what the temperature is outside how fast the charger is how, how quickly the car can exceptive is on rapid charging. So it’s a really hard one to quantify. But in generally speaking, public charging, where you’re rapid charging these cars, manufacturers talking about the 10 to 80%. Because again, going back to what we’re saying earlier, charging just enough to get home. That’s where that 10 to 80% comes in. Yeah, anything above that, that last 20% recharge at the top could take as long as the first 20 to 8%. Because the battery charge slows down as you get to the top, it’s a bit like a glass of water. As you fill it up, if you turn the tap on full, you never fill it out because all overflow you have to slow the speed of the tap down which is similar when you top up a battery. So I guess charging times if it’s a really real bugbear for yourself, you’re on the road quite a lot and you want to get the maximum bang for your buck you need to be looking at ones that are able to accept the most amount of charging speed in them. Tesla we know do quite well with their but their superchargers is the limiting factor will be the car at that point. And again, a slick car leasing we can advise you on that because we understand which cars are capable of doing that at the same time. But again, most of this charging is done at home.
Matt Nally
Yes, okay. And then I suppose one thing we actually discussed off camera before before this was I suppose how many people actually have access to charging so so good point in cities where people might live in a block of flats versus you know, detached houses? How many people can access charges, I suppose whether their work or home and and how might that change in the future? Yeah,
Shane Pither
it’s an interesting one. Because what you’re saying is right, you’ve got people in terraced properties that haven’t got driveways, it’s very difficult to have that charger connected. And as well we’re in flats, unless the landlord’s willing to pay for the infrastructure to be put in. Probably not gonna happen you’re gonna use in public charging. So if you look at the demographics, depending on your speeches varies wildly out there, but it’s as much as maybe 50 50% of the UK population potentially can’t change at home or they haven’t got the right set up to be the charge at home for whatever reason. So at least a bit of a gap. So there our solution is the initial one is just a charge of public charging. There are other solutions are coming to light in Windsor, you if you drive into Windsor, you’ll find quite a lot down there. There’s curbside charging being put in place, as well. So, one solution, you’re seeing other companies looking at lamppost charging, I think it’s, it’s not necessarily all the solutions because it tends to be a small amount of charge that’s coming out of these lampposts, you can probably imagine. But it’s another solution if you can’t charge, like a three pin plug, if you have to, it’s there. But I think other solutions that maybe people are not aware of is what they call peer to peer, or p2p charging, which is showing someone else’s charger. And I think this works really well with fleet. So I’ll probably probably agree is that fleet tend to be more effective than this. And it’s as high as 80% of them because the demographics are in flats or terrorist properties can’t charge. But yet, the employees are probably in a similar sort of area, so that probably 20% of them can. So they could potentially put a charge on that employees will use peer to peer charge, which basically means that you loan out that charter for that period of time, that person plugged in overnight pays an amount of money. Absolutely. And whilst that may be a bit unnerving for some, it does bring the neighbourhood closer together, because you’re sharing that and what becomes a stranger then becomes a neighbour. And I’ve seen this happen many, many times before where you know, guys have come up in the morning, and the person whose charges even made them a cup of coffee, it’s, it’s quite a nice touch. And also, you’ve made a new friend. And it’s an environmental thing that she’s sharing at the same time, but at a much reduced cost. And doing what we said earlier on is charging while you sleep, plug it in, walk five minutes back home, spend some time with a family, rather than a public charging network. Or you use a reliable network charging solution. We’re partnered with within the vault, we’ve just got some charges gone into reading football stadiums, like Harley’s and stadium. These are really quick charges that can charge up very, very fast again, so there was some there was some solutions there. And there’s some hope to make to make this work as the government sort of crank up there. Drive on this transition.
Matt Nally
It Yeah, it’s a good point around sort of, I think patients as well, one of the things I was thinking about earlier, yes, you might have to stop for 1520 minutes to, you know, charge the car versus a five minute topper for on petrol. And I think that top up was always longer than you realise. Because every time I go to a service station on the motorway, I wonder why I’ve lost 15 minutes. I didn’t it didn’t think I was in there that long. But it’s possibly also a way of changing habits, we’re very good at racing around and feeling like everything has to be done yesterday. And then speed and speed and speed and it’s forcing in a bit of time to actually just stop for a few minutes is not a bad thing.
Shane Pither
Really good point, you make them out as well about going and spending that 10 to 15 minutes. That vehicle, a lot of people go, Oh, I’m gonna plug it in, there’s all the hassle. Well, I’ve got to plug it in. Well, what do you do with a combustion engine, you’ve probably got to make the effort to go out in the pouring rain or the cold weather. And time, it’s probably not convenient because you put it off because you don’t want to do it because freezing cold outside, for example, you drive down the road, you spend some time doing that. You spend some time queuing to get to the petrol pump, then you spend some more time queuing to pay for it. It’s a great experience, isn’t it? You spend some more time driving back home. Whereas over the last 10 years, I’ve just plugged it in and got on with my life. So it’s no more difficult charging than doing what you would have done exactly what you said spending 1015 2030 minutes at all. I
Matt Nally
didn’t like my friends with electric cars when the fuel shortage happened because I knew I was on about an eighth of a tank. It was about 1111 at night. I couldn’t be bothered to go to go so I went home. And then the next day when I went to go fill up it was the fuel shortage had gone up 30 feet and I was gutted.
Sarah Worthington
So did I inquiries on EVs I think during that time.
Matt Nally
Oh, definitely. Yeah. I suppose what are the other features are on the car market? Because there’s a lot of noise around a new obviously not seeing big adoption of this at all? Yeah, the network’s not there, but around hydrogen. So like JCB have announced the fact that they’ve got a whole fleet now that can run on hygiene, looking into the production aspect. And I suppose commercial ships and planes and stuff are more likely to potentially use that over batteries just because of weight issues. So will we potentially longer term see something like that takeover? Or is that really going to probably say as a commercial thing, and cars will tend to go off of battery? Do you know what that might look like?
Shane Pither
I think it’s really too early to say on this really, because there’s a lot of projects going on. There was a couple of models in the domestic arena that already do this. But you’ve probably got a very limited amount of stations where you can charge to fill this up with hydrogen. And the cost is not much cheaper than combustion wet fuel anyway, the moment you’re right in what you’re saying and heavy goods, vehicles, lorries, planes, boats are probably going to need to have this because the downside, if you don’t is the battery needs to be too heavy and too big for the payload and it just doesn’t work. So I think there’s definitely some synergy down there. The other aspect you’ve got is the cost of the environment again, To get this hydrogen, you know, it’s about four times the amount of electricity to get the hydrogen produced in the first place, unless you do it naturally. And there’s some talks with the UK Government, I think the coast of Scotland working on wave technology to make the hydrogen. So this thing is in the mitts, but it’s really too early to tell what’s behind the scenes with the manufacturers and how they want to drive this. But I think it’s definitely part of the solution to what we’re trying to do,
Matt Nally
I think probably ties back to what you said around risk appetite. And therefore leasing being quite a good route at the moment around it, we’ve got no idea where we’re heading in terms of, you know, all these different technologies, I suppose. In terms of adoption, then AROUND ELECTRIC at the moment, where do you think we are in the curve? Are we still early adopter stage? Or are we sort of closer to the sort of getting towards the mass adoption? But as it Yeah, where do you think we are in terms of that, and wherever things might go to think
Shane Pither
there’s big swing, I don’t think everybody’s necessarily ready for it. And again, depending on who you speak to, there’s various opinions about where we are on that curve. What we are seeing is we’re seeing a steady increase in people who want to adopt, we’re seeing a greater model choice and costs coming down. And I think that’s going to speed up that even even further. Is it right for everybody? Maybe not, maybe not everybody’s ready for that. And that’s where the plug in hybrid is a nice step in that direction is why exactly is there for, so you can experience it. And that may for a lot of people, when they’ve had their first plug in my neighbours the same, by the way, it’s gone to a plug in hybrid and go Well, actually, we should have gotten a full electric because I’ve actually been using only the electric part of that rather than the wet fuel. So you know, I would have been perfectly fine. So it’s just a nice transition over I think for these people are not quite ready for it yet.
Sarah Worthington
I think it’s really interesting as well from customers that we speak to that have gone electric. And for me, for example, I’m definitely converted, I could see myself now in electric vehicles for many, many, many years to come. And that’s a lot of the feedback that we’ve kind of had from people that have kind of took that step to electric and actually, we see very, very rare I’ve seen not even a handful of cases where actually they feel that and I’m talking long distance kind of company car kind of drivers that have been ones that have kind of struggled with the EVS but the vast majority, when they make that step to levy, they’re converted. I’m sure you’ll agree Shane as well.
Shane Pither
Yeah, I mean, the the the stats that have come out on this, that when they’ve been surveyed people got EVs, you hear a very few people saying they’re gonna go the other way. Again, once they’ve made that step. I can’t think of why they would want to go back to it. Yeah. I think logically, if we were all in EVs and someone told us we had to go into combustion engine, we’d question the logic in that, right. Because of what it what it does.
Matt Nally
Yeah, I mean, the thing I found most interesting, the first time I got an Eevee was I’ve ever had that happen at the moment, I’m sort of maybe soon be at a point where I have to make the decision as to whether I move on or not, but just how quiet it was, isn’t really on. That was the surprise I had. But my only other question, I should just turn back to the charging point that you mentioned, peer to peer charging, how does that practically work? So if I’ve got a charge on my house, for example, I let three neighbours use it. They might give me a coffee in return. But how do I get paid for the electricity.
Shane Pither
There’s various platforms that work with this, we were partnered up with a company called co charger, by all means you can continue after after the podcast and get this on on our site to have a look out there. So you can download an app, put yourself up there or request that you use somebody you can see what there’s charging costs are and you effectively book it or and you are in control as well, you can choose who was using that unit. So the risk aspects slightly reduced down there. And again, I think for security, you imagine if you’re not there, for example, and someone’s using it, it also appears that someone’s actually in the property. Right. So again, I think there’s a there’s a lot of pluses to this as well, not just the fact that you’re doing something helpful for the environment, the planet and your neighbours is I think there’s a great solution to some some of the issues that are out there, because I say that there is not a solution at the moment currently in place. For everybody that works. One size doesn’t fit all, if that makes sense. No,
Matt Nally
no. And I don’t think they’ll ever be, you know, a vehicle of any type that will be a one size fits all. That’s why we have motorbikes cars, lorries, you know, even on that level. So I spend the final question that are on the future of cars generally, and maybe transport is there things around legislation changes that you’re aware of that? I know we’ve had some legislation pushed recently around, you know, when petrol and diesel can no longer be sold. But are there other sort of bits of legislation you’re aware of that could change the shape of of the market and how soon
Shane Pither
it’s a difficult one in which direction as that’s changing. As you can see the we already know that the US zones are expanding, they’re gonna expand more. So I think there’s there’s probably potentially more of this to come. You know, this is monitored on a regular basis and government level, as I’m sure you’ve probably noticed what the environmental impact the air quality looks like. And if things aren’t working, then you start imposing these to incentivize that move to that, that new technology. So I think that’s one of them. I think that other things that are going to help move it as well as taxation, we’ll see seeing a fleet big drive into this because people have seen the benefits of this electric car, as opposed to what business were doing before with combustion, and now driving into electric. That’s, that’s also helping with that as well. The move from 2013 to 2035, by the government to allow an extra five years. That’s an interesting one, that one because you can imagine the manufacturers already started this transition. And I think regardless of what the government do with that date, is still gonna happen by that date. You only want to turn the TV on look at the adverts. I don’t see any new combustion engine models being advertised, it’s all electric plug in, that we’re talking about right now. So it’s really hard to see any further than that to what the government is doing, other than what we what we can see out in the in the main really,
Sarah Worthington
I think we’ll see some, I think we’ll see some changes as well, there’s going to be huge pressures on the OEMs in the next kind of five years as to driving down that kind of emission targets in the vehicles they’re producing, and actually also where the suppliers of their vehicles are coming from as well around kind of like route rules of origin. So that kind of could have impacts on tariffs, which some of those yet haven’t been decided. So
Shane Pither
yeah, I agree, Nick, I mean, you’re touching onto that, again, that the net 00 as well is that, you know, manufacturers are also responsible for making sure that their suppliers and where these are coming from, or quite completely aware of their carbon footprint. So I think this is going to have a big play in it.
Matt Nally
Awesome was that thank you very much for all of your insights across the three topics. It’s been really fun to even myself to learn more, if anyone ever wants to get in touch to learn more about leasing from you, or you know, the realities of different cars, etc. But how do they get in touch?
Sarah Worthington
So it’s probably first quickest route is via our website. So via web dot select colleagues in Dakota, UK, we are kind of experts in our field in leasing. Obviously, for myself and the corporate team within fleet. We’re having these conversations with customers on an hourly basis. So yeah, please do get in touch even if at this stage, if it’s just a genuine inquiry, a general query before you even kind of get to kind of what the costs look like stage. Yeah, we’d be happy to have a conversation. Okay, well,
Matt Nally
Yeah, thanks again for coming on. And hopefully we’ll do another one in the future once we see how our markets and legislations have changed.