How a Tesla and Elon Musk sceptic came to see the light on electric vehicles

I’m with them. Here’s my position: Tesla is an absurdly overvalued business whose stock is kept artificially high by gangs of fanboys who are in love with Elon Musk.

The electric vehicle revolution is never going to work – or if it does, not for decades yet.

A while back I wrote that Elon Musk wouldn’t be the second richest man in the world for long, prompting howls of anger from the fanboys, some of whom have as many as five followers on Twitter.

And I was right in a way – he went past Jeff Bezos shortly thereafter.

Noting my stance, Octopus Electric Vehicles got in touch and suggested I at least give the car and the chargers a chance.

So I did, over one long weekend. The short review goes like this: the cars are pretty amazing once you get used to them, and the charging experience is better than I expected while still clunky, but presumably they’ll get there.

The longer review is this:

The most striking thing about the cars is how fast they are. The acceleration is exhilarating or perhaps alarming, even dangerous. But I guess it isn’t Tesla’s fault that, given the chance, some of us will choose to drive like teenage boys.

The flip side of that is that when you take your foot off the accelerator the car slows down remarkably quickly.

Over four days, I reckon I used the brakes twice. That’s safer than a petrol car, I suppose, though possibly not for the person behind you.

My main journey is 130 miles north to Nottingham. My guide says the car will make this easily on one charge.

In the end it was a bit nerve racking. Going down to 20% on your iphone is a bit worrisome, on your car it is anxiety-making. How far away is Nottingham, anyway?

When I arrived at my destination there was 8% left on the battery – way too close for comfort.

Is that because I put my foot down, I ask. Octopus reckons consistency of speed is the key to longer battery power; so the trick is not to speed up and slow down the whole time, something you can’t always avoid, especially not when test driving a new toy.

Octopus says the nearest charging point to me is at a Morrisons. This turns out to be fenced off, not open yet. After that, most of the convenient charging points seem to be situated in pub car parks.

That doesn’t strike me as ideal, since there are some people who might find it difficult not to go into the pub and drink.

And charging is a drag, going at a rate of about 1% a minute, so a full charge takes 90 minutes. I never had that long to hang around, so found myself topping up incrementally.

You can have a charger installed at your house, but as electricity prices go up, so will the cost of fuelling your car. Octopus reckons the cost at the public charging points should stay low, since the power has been bought forward.

The electricity is definitely cheaper than petrol of course – about £30 for a full tank, as it were. Drivers who go electric are likely to save hundreds of pounds a year.

Once you are driving a Tesla, you notice how many others there are on the road. Tesla was the best-selling vehicle in the UK in December, so perhaps this is more than a passing fad.

On Wednesday night Tesla reported annual profit of $5.5 billion, an eight-fold increase as it delivered 940,000 vehicles in what it called a “breakthrough year”.

I’m still not clear how that makes the business worth $1 trillion, but perhaps my views on price-earnings ratios are laughably old-fashioned.

Back to the chargers. They are mostly slow, but there are many more of them than you realised when you weren’t looking.

Green motoring consultancy New AutoMotive predicts one in seven new cars bought will be pure electric in 2022 so we are going to need some more.

New AutoMotive’s State of Switch report shows the UK EV market requires 40 to 50 charge points to be installed per day between now and 2035 to meet demand. Work to be done, then.

Where is the electricity in the chargers coming from? The coal field down the road?

Octopus says: “The individual electrons are really hard to individually pin down, however all the chargers on the Electric Juice Network have electricity from Octopus Energy. Most other companies have renewable guarantees about the energy going into your car.”

Ok, but there still isn’t enough renewable power to go round. So the Tesla driver can only really be green because a bunch of petrol heads are intent on doing things the old way.

Fiona Howarth, CEO of Octopus Electric Vehicles, counters.

“Just a few short years ago, there was plenty of scepticism around electric cars. You couldn’t read a newspaper or look online without seeing the latest research on why they weren’t going to take off – with a lack of good cars and charge points.

“Today, it’s a very different picture. Drivers can choose from 50 different EVs that travel over 150 miles on a single charge, which is plenty when we do just 20 miles a day on average.

“Our mindset has changed as we start to realise electricity is everywhere and we can top up our car as we do other things – like sleep! Public chargers have rolled out at pace. It has been a whirlwind few years, and we’re not slowing down now.”

Still, for those buying a new car right now, the temptation must be to go for a hybrid and wait to see what happens next.

That hesitancy is plainly going to hit the UK’s attempts to hit net zero and maybe it is time for consumers to lead the market where they want it.

Back to Elon Musk, and an old quote: “For a long time, the rest of the auto industry was basically calling Tesla and me fools and frauds. They were saying electric cars wouldn’t work.”

He was right, they were wrong. I have seen the future. It nearly works.