Discover the real reasons behind consumers' hesitancy to jump on the electric vehicle (EV) bandwagon as we unravel the UK's postponed ban on petrol and diesel cars. This episode peels back the layers of industry impact, from car manufacturing to insurance, and how this influences the public's readiness to switch gears to EVs. You'll get an enlightening perspective on the ambitious, yet daunting, target of 80% EV new car sales by 2030, and why meeting environmental goals isn't as straightforward as setting policy deadlines.
We're charging into the psychology of The Diffusion Of innovation adoption, breaking down buyer categories from the eager innovators to the cautious laggards. By examining these consumer segments, we uncover the crucial elements needed to accelerate EV acceptance – think financial incentives, home charging solutions, and the power of targeted marketing strategies. This discussion isn't just about cars; it's a roadmap for understanding how revolutionary products carve their path in the market, navigating the chasm between early adopters and the vast majority called the Early Majority and Late Majority.
Wrapping up, this episode zooms out to showcase how historic innovations, from smartphones to disruptive business models like Uber, have shaped industries in unexpected ways. We share stories of marketing triumphs and blunders, and how they've informed Tesla's electrifying journey in the auto sector. Strap in and get ready to shift your perception on EVs, technology diffusion, and the art of consumer education – this is one ride you won't want to miss.
To buy a copy of Electric Cars - The Truth Revealed visit grahamhilltraining.com
Discover the real reasons behind consumers' hesitancy to jump on the electric vehicle (EV) bandwagon as we unravel the UK's postponed ban on petrol and diesel cars. This episode peels back the layers of industry impact, from car manufacturing to insurance, and how this influences the public's readiness to switch gears to EVs. You'll get an enlightening perspective on the ambitious, yet daunting, target of 80% EV new car sales by 2030, and why meeting environmental goals isn't as straightforward as setting policy deadlines.
We're charging into the psychology of The Diffusion Of innovation adoption, breaking down buyer categories from the eager innovators to the cautious laggards. By examining these consumer segments, we uncover the crucial elements needed to accelerate EV acceptance – think financial incentives, home charging solutions, and the power of targeted marketing strategies. This discussion isn't just about cars; it's a roadmap for understanding how revolutionary products carve their path in the market, navigating the chasm between early adopters and the vast majority called the Early Majority and Late Majority.
Wrapping up, this episode zooms out to showcase how historic innovations, from smartphones to disruptive business models like Uber, have shaped industries in unexpected ways. We share stories of marketing triumphs and blunders, and how they've informed Tesla's electrifying journey in the auto sector. Strap in and get ready to shift your perception on EVs, technology diffusion, and the art of consumer education – this is one ride you won't want to miss.
To buy a copy of Electric Cars - The Truth Revealed visit grahamhilltraining.com
Hi, I'm Graham Hill and I'm the author of Electric Cars. To Truth Revealed. You can get a copy of that book by going to grahamhilltraining.com. You can download a copy of the book, which is an e-book, and you can also forward order the training that will be coming out next year (2024), which is full training course based on the book and a few other bits and pieces and updates added in. If ordered with the book you can get it for just a few pounds. Next year it will cost hundreds of pounds when sold as a stand-alone product. So by paying a few pounds now, you can save yourself a lot of money when the book comes out next year.
Now this is the second of two introductory podcasts that I wanted to put together. I shortened it down to two separate podcasts because I thought it would be easier to understand. In the first one, I was talking about the issues that we're having with the electric car industry including the ancillary services. The whole of the EV industry depends on the sale of electric cars, because with few electric cars on the road, all of the sectors suffer, not helped by the move from 2030 to 2035 by the government when we stopped producing and selling new ICE cars. The knock-on effect has been felt by not just the manufacturers of electric cars but all the companies that are associated with electric cars such as breakdown services, insurance companies, tyre manufacturers and distributors, driving schools, and so on. You don't see tyre manufacturers advertising EV tyres much on the TV because the numbers aren't there yet. And this applies to other industry players. I certainly found things slowing down through my brokerage arm. Both consumers and businesses were very keen to move into electric cars but many have suddenly pulled back and said do you know what? I'm going to carry on having petrol cars for the near future as the Government has given us more grace. So clearly that attitude won't help the manufacturers who have got to achieve 80% of new car sales being electric by 2030. So they've kept those targets and big penalties but delayed the 2030 ban. So for the cars that the manufacturers don't sell in 2024 between the 22% target and actual electric car sales, they will have penalties to pay. I'll be talking about that and how the agency model will help some manufacturers to achieve their target on another podcast.
What I really want to talk about on this one is something I mentioned in the first podcast, which has to do with the Diffusion of Innovation, a theory that we use to identify who's likely to be buying the cars in what sequence, and then approaching those potential customers in a way that they find appealing and attractive and causing them to actually spend their money. So let me just cover off the Diffusion of Innovation. I wrote an academic paper before the pandemic and I didn't get it far wrong either, so I may put that up onto the internet for people to download if that's something you may want to read. I'll have to update it a little because some of the things that I predicted have actually happened now. So we'll maybe update that and get that up on the internet for those who are interested. But let me tell you exactly how this operates. It actually goes back to like the Stone Age, the Iron Age and so on, with new products coming out, such as wheels and tools and things like this, which caused people problems it was hard to get them adopted in numbers. Initially they didn't like the idea of these innovations that may upset the gods. That was a big problem until people saw them in action causing them less effort with wheels and more food with weapons. Then came the Industrial Revolution. That was the next level where we were introducing new ways of producing things, producing them cheaper, which meant that more people could afford to buy them, and therefore these new innovations were becoming accepted more easily than they had been previously. It was a huge period of change.
It wasn't until the 1960s, until a gentleman called Everett Rogers, an American, who put this all together in a theory, and he identified five different groups of buying public. Now, first of all, I need to explain what the buying public is. These are the people that potentially would buy the product. So if you're looking at electric cars, for example, if you're a kid and you're under 18, then you won't be interested in an electric car, because one you probably won't be able to afford it and secondly you won't have a driving license anyway. And, again, anybody of any age who hasn't got a driving license will not be interested in an electric car. Or if you're driving a company car, chances are you won't want one, unless you're going to buy one for family use. So generally these people will be considered to be outside the boundaries of interest in the product or the service. Not part of the Buying Public. We now move on to the five sectors Rogers identified as representative of the buying public by percentages.
So let’s start by looking at the entry level, known as Innovators. The Innovators are the first group and they represent about 2.5% of the buying public. So the innovators are the ones that just have to have any new product or service. Anything that they can boast about to their neighbours, families, friends and their work colleagues and so on. They will be the first with say a DVD player boasting how great they are probably without knowing how it works. They can’t help themselves. It also means that they can’t be relied upon to explain how brilliant or disastrous the product is. They won’t admit to buying a pile of junk. They are the innovators. They're the first off, the first out of the traps, so to speak, and they want to have the product straight away.
Now, following up behind the innovators, there's another group that represents about 13.5%. They have the same attitude and these are known as the Early Adopters. They want to have the product, but they're normally looking at one particular feature. So it might be the smartphone that's just being launched by one of the smartphone manufacturers, but it's got a billion pixels. We don't talk about pixels these days, do we? But a billion pixels that make you look 10 years younger when you take a photograph using this new camera phone makes it a must have feature. So on that basis alone, they will go out and get one. They're convinced that they want to have one, but it's mainly because the product has got one particular feature. Take the massive air fryer movement. The Innovators went straight out to buy one but the Early Adopters looked for a feature. A lot of people and I would be included in this would like to get an air fryer. Once you've seen the pictures on the TV of the air fryer producing pork with the most amazing crackling, that feature alone would be enough for me to want to get one. For the Early Adopters it doesn't matter about all the other features that may be part and parcel of the product, they tend to have one or two in particular that they want to get their hands on.
The next level takes us to the big numbers and that's where all the manufacturers and sales teams look to get to, accounting for 34% of the buying public, known as the Early Majority. The next 34% after the Early Majority is Late Majority. I'll explain a little more about these groups shortly. At the very end is the last group that represents just 16% of the buying public, known as the Laggards, they're the last people that are likely to take on board the innovative product or service.
When you're talking about electric cars, these are the people that are convinced that hydrogen is the way forward. They may not want to get out of their petrol car because they think it's no more damaging to the atmosphere than electric cars. They have all these different opinions, which is great. That's entirely up to them but those trying to promote electric cars waste far too much time on them because they won’t be convinced so why try? Leave them alone. They are in a little world of their own, and I'm not saying that they're wrong, right or indifferent. At the end of the day, these people are not going to be buying an electric car any time soon. Eventually they may come round or they may just stick with what they've got with their petrol or their diesel car. It's entirely up to them.
Now let's get back to the Early and Late Majority. The Early Majority are the people that are convinced that they are keen on getting this new technology or new innovation, but they need something more as they're the pragmatists. They need more information. They want to know a bit more about the product. How serious a product is it? Is it actually going to save the planet? Can the sellers provide all the information they need before they're prepared to part with their money. Do you actually achieve the range that the manufacturer says it will achieve, known as the WLTP range? Will it actually do the things that are being claimed? They Early Majority needs the information to show them that it either will or it won't, and then they can make their decision as to whether they want to go ahead with it or not based on the information provided. So these are the people that are the pragmatists.
Then you've got the late majority. Now they also need information, but they want to give it a bit more time. They want to see what happens with the early majority. Do they end up having problems? Do they get resolved straight away? Is there an issue that causes them to say no? When I’m explaining the difference between Early and Late Majority there is a simple difference. The Early Majority consists of people that are looking for reasons to say yes. The late majority tend to be those looking for reasons not to say no. And yes there is a difference. It’s all about the amount of information provided with the addition of proof for the late majority.
Generally, if you look at the two sectors, the early majority are quite happy to get straight into it, but they need enough information. There's no such thing as a confused buyer, because confused buyers never buy, so hence there's no such thing as a confused buyer. Makes sense. Now, if a buyer of an electric car has asked a question and he hasn't got an answer, he may turn to the dealer or the manufacturer with the same question. However, if they don't give him the answers to the questions he’s asking, once he's got to three unanswered questions, the general consensus is that they're just not going to bother. They'll put the decision back until they have the answers they’re looking for.
So this is crux of the problem. We need to get more and more information out to the Early Majority customers, and I mean seriously more information, because this is where Everett Rogers identified a gap between the Innovators and the Early Adopters and the Early Majority. This gap has been referred to by Rogers as the chasm. Now, the chasm is a problem because this is where you need to get from those first two groups into the third group and it's normally down to two things. First is information in order to generate interest in the product. Next is finance making electric cars affordable. Affording the cars will be dealt with in another podcast or series of podcasts. The priority is information and finding ways to get it out there. The Early Majority must have more information before they're prepared to make the transition, and this is where we're falling apart. At the moment there's a lot of information out there that is misleading and unhelpful which I’ll be dealing with shortly. At the end of the day, we really need to get to that group by providing more information. There's a lot of well-intentioned information out there that isn't really positive, it's negative and it's called myth-busting. The Myth-busters wait until something occurs in the press and then they try and rip it to pieces claiming that it's a load of nonsense without providing too much proof. What we really need to do if we're going to start moving the numbers up is find ways to get more basic information out to potential buyers.
One of the big issues raised by potential electric car buyers is that of home charging versus public charging. There's a lot of social media talk about VAT and pressure on the Government to cut the VAT on all public chargers from 20 to 5%, which is a saving of £3.12 a week for those who have no ability to fit a home charger. It's ridiculous, it's a stupid argument and we should never be having having it. The reason for the claim is to try and equalize the costs for those charging at home and those using public charges. The fact of the matter is it makes such a small difference to what it costs to use a public charger, even if the VAT is dropped to 5%, charging at a charge station is still more than twice what it costs to charge a car at home. That is not going to get people rushing down to their local dealer to buy an electric car. So what we should be aiming at and I know it's unfair to those who haven't got access or won't be able to access a home charger are those that are able to fit a home charger, which is still the majority of households. Having said that even if you can’t install a home charger buying an electric car could still be cost-effective if you are on very low annual mileage. As a result you will only need to charge the car maybe once a week at a high-speed charger what they call a rapid charger taking just half to three-quarters of an hour to fully charge the car that may last for a couple of weeks before needing another top up. Yes it will cost more per mile than home charging but with low mileage it’s relative. The government has proven that most people travel many more short trips than long trips. On average only 1% of trips that we take each year are over 100 miles with only 1% between 50 and 100. So the number of long trips you're going to be taking is really so small that it should not dictate whether you should buy an electric car or not. But I'm going to be talking about that again in the next podcast.
Now let me just throw a few figures at you. There are 28.2 million households. There's also 41.7 million people with full licenses. That's about one and a half per household. Using Quentin Wilson’s figures 62% of households have the ability to install a home charger. Unfortunately he revealed the figure in a completely negative way. He complained that 38% of households can't have access to home chargers. I say that the good news is that 62% can have access to electric car chargers. A more positive interpretation of his figures. It means that we have 17.5 million households or 26.2 million drivers that can install and access home chargers before we need to come up with solutions for those who don’t have the ability to install home chargers.
Now, not all of those people with the ability to install a home charger will want electric cars. There will be others who won't want to have a charger fitted at home and so on. So we're not going to capture everybody. At the end of 2023 we still haven’t sold a million electric cars. According to the Government we've got to get to 8 million electric car registrations by 2030. So we're not exactly talking massive numbers. So, out of the 26.2 million drivers that could access a home charger, we've got years to go before we have to start considering those who won’t be able to access a home charger. By then, there will be an excess of super rapid chargers and cars that will be able to charge less than five minutes with a range of 250-300 miles, which, for most people, will be enough. With more and more charge stations going in virtually daily the situation's got to improve just by virtue of the fact that cars, charge stations and roadside charging will continue to develop making charging cheaper for those who can’t access home charging. But the low-hanging fruit at the moment is those people that have got access or can access a home charger because they've got the ability to install one. They're the people that we need to be encouraging at the moment as an industry. That's where the manufacturers should be aiming their attention because they are the people that will come on board quicker than those that haven't got access to home charging but will potentially come on eventually.
Something else I’ll be talking about is the difference between economists and creatives. I'm a creative, although my background is accountancy. I was a Cost of Management Accountants and so I had to come up with solutions to problems in companies that I worked for. I had to come up with ways and means of improving the business, not by cutting staff but by maybe improving the products and procedures. I've also worked for a number of companies as a consultant. I'll be talking about those in due course and my podcast and how we can use creativity rather than playing around with numbers to improve the number of electric car registrations. So we'll be going through a few ideas that will achieve the registration goals. In the meantime I just want to take you through a couple of examples of how the diffusion of innovation has been useful in directing marketing to achieve the desired results.
So the first one that we all know about is the smartphone. The first question I normally ask during a presentation is Who knows who invented and started selling the first smartphone? Most people reply, It was obviously Steve Jobs and Apple in 2007, when he launched the Apple iPhone which was obviously the first smartphone. In fact, it wasn’t. IBM invented the smartphone in 1992, 15 years earlier. It had a touchscreen, it had predictive text, it had access to the internet so you could send and receive emails and more. As well as being a mobile phone. It had other features on it that eventually found their way into the iPhone that it was way, way ahead of the time. Whilst the phone, called the Simon, was created in 1992 it was launched in 1994. But unlike the iPhone it wasn’t sold as an innovation. They sold it as a progression. They were talking about other phones in the marketplace and how this was a move down the road to the next product. It's because their involvement with telephone companies and computers, it was particularly seen as a progression rather than an innovation. When Steve Jobs came along, although he was a computer expert, he had now moved into communications and this was the difference. He sold it as an innovation. It was changing the world. IBM didn't do that. That's where they failed. You can only apply the theory to innovative products if they are considered to be an innovative product, not the latest development of an existing product.
Now let’s look at another such as the Dyson vacuum cleaner. It could have easily been marketed as the latest vacuum cleaner development. But it was marketed as a new innovative product. And to draw the distinction they priced it much higher than any other vacuum cleaner. Peter Dyson didn't have a background in vacuum cleaners. He was in a workshop one day, a wood workshop, and he saw the extractor and how it extracted all the dust and wood particles in the air out through the roof, and he thought this is a brilliant idea. Why don't we use that technique in a vacuum cleaner? Which is exactly what he did. He had no knowledge of vacuum cleaners at the time, it just seemed like a good idea. The genius part was putting the container that held all the dust and the dirt that it picked up in a clear container so that you could see what the dust was and how much was being picked up. The see-through container was great marketing and it was the key reason why innovators wanted it straight away. The early adopters saw the dust and got the impression that the Dyson was massively more efficient than vacuums with dust bags. That was the main feature that they bought. It was an innovation.
The Diffusion of Innovation not only applies to products it also applies to services. As an example take Uber. Uber doesn't own a taxi. They don't have a driver working for them. They're all self-employed. The creators were two guys that sold their companies then decided to get together to develop a new product, and it was only when one of them was reported to get the idea whilst watching a James Bond film, or that's how the story goes. I'm not sure it's 100% correct but here goes. One of them was supposed to be watching a James Bond film in which James was following behind Goldfinger and he had the car in front tracked on a dashboard tracker. James could see exactly where the car was in front so able to follow without being detected. After watching this he said, Well, wouldn't that be a great idea if we could put that in a smartphone app and connect to a tracker installed into a taxi that you’ve ordered? And that's exactly what they did and sold it as an innovation with two main benefits. One was that they could track the cab as it got closer to you. If it was stuck in traffic, you knew you could have another cup of tea or you could watch a bit more of TV or whatever, before you walked out the front door. There was none of this having to stand outside the front door looking in all directions in case he had stopped down the road. Panic can set in because you've got to get to the airport or somewhere urgently. But with Uber you can see exactly where she is and know exactly what time is left before the car arrives. The other benefit is paying in advance, no messing about in the taxi before you can exit the car. And with no cash in the car the driver is much safer. Again Uber was sold as an innovation not just a progression from your local cab firm. As a result it changed the taxi market becoming the biggest taxi firm in the world. Started by two guys who were never taxi drivers. Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos. He didn't have a bookshop before he started Amazon. People forget that it started off as an online bookshop. But like Dyson, innovations are often created by people new to the industry.
Look at the air fryer, developed by an engineer who came up with this idea of speedily cooking things. One of the early manufacturers of the product was Phillips. Phillips had a history of other electrical products and it nearly failed because when the product was sold through stores they placed it near to its deep fat fryer as though it was a progression from its existing deep fat fryer. It nearly collapsed. It wasn't until a creative suggested that they place the air fryer alongside healthy products such as juicers, microwaves and slow cookers as a new healthy food cooking innovation. And, of course, when they moved it across there and changed the story sales exploded. With TV shows dedicated to air fryers they're well into the early majority now. So this is how it works with the Diffusion of Innovation, but we need to get across this chasm of information. We need to get the information out there, which I'll talk about shortly.
I'm going to round off this section by talking about Tesla. Now Elon Musk is a Marmite person, you either love him or hate him. I've changed my attitude because, as much as I think he's as daft as a doughnut, his ability and his foresight is phenomenal. He is a man of brilliance. Now, when he decided to start manufacturing electric cars, he had SpaceX and had just sold his shares and his involvement in PayPal. He had no background in cars whatsoever. That's why he could bring out cars as an innovation. And what did he bring out? A two-seater sports car. One and a half percent of the cars in America are two-seater sports cars. So he was entering a market that was minuscule. But that wasn't the point. He wanted to sell a concept, not the car. He wanted to sell the innovation and not the means of transport.
Now, about the same time, Nissan brought out its Leaf. Now, when I saw that, I have to say, even though I'm a creative, I was looking at that and thinking they're onto a winner. It's a small, compact family car. There's a huge market out there. There's bound to be lots and lots of people that are prepared to spend a bit more money to get into an electric car. It's brilliant. Tesla didn’t look as though it had much of a chance. However, of course, this is where the brilliance of the man kicked in.
With Nissan, when they brought out their Leaf, they were competing in the marketplace against their own two cars. They had a Juke, which had just come out, and a Nissan Note, which were roughly the same size, small family hatchback or compacts as they say in America. Unfortunately, the price of this electric car was twice that of the Note and the Juke. So for many possible buyers it wasn’t attractive, certainly not in terms of price. The other thing was charging. They didn't have their own network of chargers. Charging the Leaf wasn't brilliant and it had a very low range. The best they could do was about 80 miles range, which was fine if you're only going to use it around the town and locally but it really wasn't very practical. Whereas the Tesla came out with a long range, they went into the marketplace and they sold it as an innovation. And enough people liked it.
Now here's the brilliance. I think that he held back the sale. He was saying there's all sorts of issues with finance and so on and so forth causing delays. I think that he didn't want to launch that car before another car was launched. Not a lot of people know this but:
Around the same time as he launched his car, Ferrari launched the California. Now, bear in mind that the Tesla was based on a Lotus, so a much cheaper car. But that wasn't his aim. That wasn't his objective. His objective was to challenge Ferrari and it was a simple way to challenge them. When Ferrari bought out their California, it did 0-60 in 4.1 seconds. The Tesla, dependent on what model you bought, would do 0-60 in either 3.7 or 3.9 seconds. They were faster than a Ferrari. Job done. It'd proven the concept as being better than anything else out there. The other thing was that, of course, compared to a Ferrari the Tesla was cheap at about $40,000 cheaper than the Ferrari.
Whilst Tesla created an innovation, Nissan created and sold a natural progression from their ICE cars. The sports car buyers wanted the car and the idea of electric was sold. Tesla immediately started to think in terms of an electric saloon car which had been their plan from the start aiming for the bigger market and the early majority. Even at that stage, when I asked the question, how many Tesla Roadsters do you think were sold worldwide given Tesla’s huge success? He only sold the roadster for a couple of years. Even so, most suggest sales in the region of a million cars worldwide. In fact he sold just 2,500 roadsters. He never intended to sell massive volumes, he wanted to catch the imagination of those interested in the transition. He wanted to sell the electric concept. He needed the attention of the press. He needed the attention of potential buyers of electric cars and he did it via a two seater sports car. Genius. He always intended to move into the mass family saloon car market, SUVs and so on. That's where he saw the market moving, but he needed an acceptance of the concept. That's what he did in a move of pure brilliance. So that's the Diffusion of Innovation.
And we're in that situation at the moment. We are not actually really in the chasm, but we're reaching it very quickly but without recognising it we are very short of information out there. So, with not enough people knowing enough about electric cars to cause them to want to buy one we have a lot to do to get the messages out to the buying public. On the other hand costs are coming down. When you take out a PCP or PCH known also as contract hire, the monthly rates are reducing quickly. Following 2 year order times we're now finding that there are electric cars in stock, even some of the more popular cars are finding their way into dealer stock. So we need to get the information out there to get people buying the damn things using the range of finance available. But first we need to get more information out there.
But what information is necessary for buyers to feel comfortable buying an electric car? The answer is simple. It’s what I've included in my book Electric Cars – The Truth Revealed. It contains tons of information, everything you'd need to know before you decide on an electric car. So what I've done is I've taken one of the headings out of about 50 headings in the book. The heading I’ve selected is Insurance. I did it randomly, I just took out a heading and under this heading I've produced a number of podcasts. They've already been done. They'll be going out over the next few weeks and as they go out you'll learn a little bit more about the implications of insurance on electric cars. So I explain the implications in the podcasts. It's important to understand the implications as much of the information that I share is not really known by too many people, but you should know these things before you actually get into an electric car and I'm telling you all this stuff up front. So you need to be listening or watching the podcasts on any of the various platforms, signing up or following the podcast, and share and like and do all the things that you do on the podcast platforms and the social media platforms, wherever you find it. I've also created a chatbot but more of that in time.
My background was Accountancy, then IT and I introduced computers at the time when computers weren't very common. I ran a large team of computer and IT experts which meant that I had to become an expert myself. I learned how to program, system design, problem, solve all the sorts of things that you need to do in order to run an IT division. So I'm very IT orientated. Which has led me to understand the latest AI implications resulting in my new electric car chatbot.
The chatbot is based on my book, industry surveys, blog postings, reports and so on, because the one downside of chatGPT is that it scrapes information from the internet and, as most people know, when it comes to electric cars there are many contradictions on the Internet and lots of inaccurate information. You compare different sites and one will say one thing and the other say the complete opposite, and ChatGPT is supposed to make sense of that but it can’t, hence the warning on the ChatGPT website to check any facts as they could be inaccurate. So it was clear to me that I would have to fully research the information that we were providing via the chatbot. We put 3,000 hours plus into researching the information that's gone into the book and into the various reports and surveys. My chatbot scrapes all of that information to answer questions that get asked on the chatbot. You are now able to load the chatbot onto your website, whether you're a driving school, whether you're a tyre distributor, whether you're an insurance company, car dealer, car manufacturer, insurance comparison site etc. you can have this on any page of your website. It's just a simple bit of code that your IT specialist can paste into your website and you’ll immediately display the chatbot. Contact me for more details.
We've now taken it a little bit further than that. You can now ask your questions in any language. So if you're in Wales and you speak Welsh, or if you speak Arabic and you have an Arabic keyboard you can type your question in and the chatbot will interpret the question, find the answer from my English database then provide the answer in your language. We've already got to that position and the software is in beta testing whilst developing the chatbot further. We've also looked at the questions that potential electric car drivers will need to ask and provided sample questions. If you have the chatbot installed on your website you will also get to see the questions asked on your website. This means that you can pick out any questions that apply to your particular product, helping you to identify problems and put them right. You can also create a landing page first so that people visit landing page on which you can explain a little bit about what the chatbot is all about, ask for their name and email address following which they can be redirected to the page containing the chatbot having added their details to your contact list. Useful for newsletters, blogs and surveys that you may want to carry out yourself.
We've also got 250 pre-created questions, because you don't know what you don't know, so a lot of people don't know the questions to ask in the first place. We can provide you with those. You can put them in drop-down boxes from which visitors can decide on the questions to ask as well as any other questions that come into their heads. Now, obviously there might be stuff that's hot off the press and we haven't been able to give an answer straight away. We see everything that comes through. So when a question gets asked, as long as it's not stupid or irrelevant such as What day follows Wednesday, we will respond to legitimate questions and ignore the others. Obviously, if there is a question that needs to be answered, we may well come back to you because it might be your sector, it might be someone else's sector in which we have a partner. In this case we will ask them the question and pass on the answer to the visitor and update our database.
Reports are currently in beta testing. We are able to produce a PDF of all the questions that are asked via the chatbot on your website so you can see all the questions that have been asked on your chatbot. It's your chatbot. You will be generating a lot of critical data. In the pipeline and possibly in the next iteration we're looking at the possibility of maybe scraping your website and producing information so they can ask not just questions about electric cars in general. They can ask any questions about your business, your company, what it is you do, how you do it, who's involved, who's in charge, who they should contact etc. So they can actually ask about your business via the chatbot on your website and get the business specific questions answered without having to search through your website. So you’ll have an all-encompassing chatbot on your website. There's a registration fee upfront and then an ongoing monthly fee. We have to pay for the searches that are carried out each month and that's not cheap. So we'll have to maybe look at that, and if it goes over the figures, then we may have to increase that on a month by month assessment, but we're looking to try and keep your costs down and provide everything as cheaply as possible for you. There'll be, as I say, a registration fee and then a monthly fee thereafter.
We're all in this game together. We should therefore be working together. One of the problems that I see is where the charge stations have got information that they should probably be sharing with each other. But it would seem that they don’t and that's sad, because we should all move forward together. There are enough electric cars out there, or there will be enough cars out there, for every single charge station and charging operator to make money. Now they may not make it initially, but in the long term it will happen, and so, therefore, why don't we all try and work together in order to achieve our goals. If we can get this information out into the marketplace and flood it with information, then that will get more people buying electric cars and we'll all gain. We're also looking into creating a logo and a brand that can be placed on your home page to show that you're a member of this group and people can come on, and by clicking that logo be taken to the landing page or your chatbot page and then they can ask their questions.
The government came up with something, the EVA logo showing that the dealership displaying the logo is EV Authorized. They've introduced the minimum standards into two areas. One of them is service and maintenance and the other one is sales. On the sales side, they've got the Energy Saving Trust auditing the different dealerships that have applied for this EVA authorization. Now, I'm sorry to say this, but it's pathetic. The scope is very narrow and only requires sales staff to have a very small range of knowledge in order to be approved. Minimum standards require nowhere near the amount of information that you should be given if you're looking to buy or finance an electric car.
So our authorized participants in this scheme will be the companies to turn to. These are the places where people will go to in order to get the information necessary. It doesn't matter which sector of the industry you're in. Customers won't have to go to a main dealer or in order to understand what they have to do if the car is stuck in a flood, or what to do on the M25 when they're caught up in a queue of traffic, or whatever else customers are concerned about when stuck in traffic. What should we do when it's cold? Should we turn the heater on? Should we turn it off? Should we rely on the heated seats? So there's all sorts of questions that people need answering and you won't get those generally through a main dealer, certainly not all the content of my book. So, as I say, if you want to get a copy of the book, go off to grahamhilltraining.com and you can get a book straight away.
I'm going to be talking about ways of increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road on the next podcast and then we get into the insurance podcasts. So I hope you found this enlightening and you now understand the Diffusion of Innovation. I'm quite happy to work with any organisation for a reasonable fee, in order to move things forward and actually apply some of the psychology of the Diffusion of Innovation to their operation, I'm more than happy to get involved and try and help you because at the end of the day, as I keep saying, if we can move it forward and get more electric cars on the road, we all benefit. Okay, I'm going to finish there. Thanks very much for watching. I really appreciate it. I'll see you on the next one when we'll be talking about how a creative mind comes up with a suggestion that I haven't seen anybody else mention. Hear what I've got to say, thanks for watching. Catch you on the next one.