Battery electric vehicles and climate change
to the mass ICE market (IEA, Global EV Outlook, 2019, p.212), built on an increasing number of model launches from Nissan, Peugeot, BMW, Renault, and Smart through the early 2010s towards a tipping point of product introductions in the late 2010s ( ‘ List of electric cars currently available ’ , 2020). This analysis shows that despite the opportunity to both stimulate and gain share in a $1.5 trillion global market (LMC Automotive, Global Sales Data , 2019) of new car sales, automotive manufacturers were unable to entice customer demand and, fearful of low customer take-up, collectively took fifteen years to build the market to a point where a BEV offering has become close to being a mandatory requirement within their overall model line-ups. The reason? Manufacturers have only recently been able to offer vehicle propositions that can catch consumers’ attention and that can effectively p lay to the combination of rational, emotional and ethical decision-making factors that influence new car sales. Customer needs in the global automotive market vary considerably, driving 80 million new car sales globally every year across broad-range model segments: small cars, family hatches and sedans, mini and large SUVs, convertibles, roadsters, themselves all tiered by price point and brand positioning, and body design choices that whilst often built on similar underlying platforms are clearly targeted at different geographic tastes (exhibit 2.2). Indeed, a brief perusal of any car magazine rapidly highlights this manufacturer- centric market segmentation of vehicles (exhibit 2.3) as a way of ‘speaking’ to new car purchasers. And yet, underpinning this extraordinary array of vehicle choices – vastly expanded over Henry Ford’s ‘as long as it’s black’ (Ford & Crowther, 1922, p. 72) mantra – is a relatively short list of seven rational buckets of customer needs (exhibit 2.4) that all automotive manufacturers must translate into their vehicle design choices and assessments for volume demand and profit margin: economic needs (upfront price, and the ongoing running costs that come with fuel efficiency, insurance, taxes et al.); performance needs (acceleration, top speed, driving dynamics); comfort (ride, vehicle noise, wind noise); practicality and convenience (number of seats, luggage space, range on one tank of petrol or diesel); safety (NCAPP rating, driving aids etc); and, with the growth of environmental awareness, environmental impact (fuel efficiency, emission ratings, carbon impact). Adjacent to these rational needs are emotive needs: social signalling to others (brand impact, vehicle type), self-status (frugal versus luxury; practical versus frivolous), and even broader messaging (support of national brands, environmental considerations). Early BEVs failed tomatch their ICE competitors on nearly every dimension bar environmental benefit. Economics meant that they could only be introduced at the upper end of the market, and even then they were 30%+ more expensive than their direct equivalents. They struggled on many performance (acceleration, speed) or practicality and convenience (luggage space, range) metrics (exhibit 2.5), which translated into a lacklustre proposition for muscle-car aficionados, as interviewees in Who Killed the Electric Car noted: ‘People don’t want a mini, tiny, car that has fifteen inch wheels on there. How is he (sic) going to fix that up and go round the town and parade it? ’ (Paine, Paine, Deeter, & Sheen, 2006). Furthermore, they introduced a whole new practical consideration to the consumer, which was for the moment only badly delivered: with no underlying charging infrastructure, consumers would be dependent on installing home charging stations and, coupled with a battery technology that provided a lower range than ICE equivalents, vehicles would run the risk of running out of charge mid-journey. BEVs simply weren’t practical for the masses and, with environmental concerns not sufficiently hitting a broad social agenda to warrant consideration in vehicle choice (exhibit 2.6, Lane, 2005), take-up was limited to an early-adopter niche, keen to demonstrate to others their own environmental awareness.
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