The myth about electric car owners

Every time I write about electric cars, there is an explosion of hostile comments online in which readers angrily denounce electric vehicles and the people who drive them. Much of this animus rests on a plausible yet mistaken assumption – that EV owners are all passionate environmentalists, sanctimoniously swanning around in their zero–emission vehicles while disdaining the ghastly, planet-killing masses burning dinosaur juice.

Let me disabuse you of this. That stereotype was perhaps partly fair when applied to the Toyota Prius – although even then I suspect it concerned only a minority of owners. In the case of fully electric cars, however, I would be willing to bet there is no correlation between tree-hugging beliefs and EV ownership – if anything, the correlation runs in reverse. The modal electric car buyer does not give a damn about the planet: they are buying electric cars because they like technology, or because they like cars, or both. You may imagine they are eyeing your tailpipe with disapproval – in truth the typical electric car driver doesn’t care what car you drive: they are too busy enjoying their own car, and for entirely selfish reasons. This is as it should be.

There is an Aesop fable called ‘The Farmer and His Sons’ in which a dying landowner tells his sons not to divide the family land, since a treasure lies hidden somewhere beneath it. After his death, they dig over every inch of the land in search of the promised riches, but come up empty–handed. Only when the resulting crops grow abundantly do they realise they have been tricked into doing the right thing for the wrong reason. All the while they had been greedily searching for treasure, they were inadvertently ploughing the land.