The EV Reset: John Voelcker on What Works, What Doesn’t, and What Comes Next

The EV market isn't collapsing — it's resetting. In this episode of Field Frequency, automotive journalist and Car and Driver contributing editor John Voelcker breaks down what the so-called EV pullback actually means, why full-size electric pickups were a product planning misstep, and what it's going to take to get affordable EVs into the hands of everyday buyers.

John brings over 15 years of dedicated EV coverage — including 4,800+ articles as founding editor of Green Car Reports — and pulls no punches on where the industry got it right, where it got it wrong, and what comes next.

We dig into why profitability (not ideology) has to drive EV strategy, how Ford and GM are quietly rethinking their entire EV platforms, why the charging experience still isn't being explained to buyers, and whether convenience stores — not dedicated charging networks — might be the ones to finally normalize public charging.

If you follow the EV space, this conversation will challenge some assumptions.

In this episode:
00:00 — Intro
00:47 — John's path into automotive journalism
06:54 — What "EV pullback" actually means
11:23 — Profitability vs. ideology: why OEMs are resetting
15:18 — Cheaper EVs are coming — Ford, GM, and Slate
24:04 — Why full-size EV pickups missed the mark
29:13 — The state of public charging and consumer education
35:08 — Convenience stores and "Charging 2.0"
39:58 — Direct-to-consumer vs. the franchise dealer model
43:18 — Where to find John's work

Connect with John Voelcker:
LinkedIn: Search "John Voelcker"
Bluesky: @johnvoelcker
Side project: Tempting Fate Tours (YouTube)

About Field Frequency:
Field Frequency is powered by Field Advantage, an IT field services company specializing in the deployment, maintenance, and operation of critical infrastructure, including EV charging networks.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The EV conversation left the hype phase and has entered an uncomfortable but more useful reality. In this episode of Field Frequency, I'm joined by automotive journalist and car and driver contributing editor John Volker. In this episode, we talk about what an EV pullback really means, why some products miss the mark, and how charging and consumer education still shape adoption, and why profitability, not ideology, must drive strategy. This isn't an EV collapse, it's a reset, and John helps explain what the market has actually taught us. Let's get into it. Thank you for having me. It's uh first time I've been on field frequency, so it's always exciting to do a new shop. Yeah, well, glad, glad uh that you made time for us today. And this would be your first time on field frequency and hopefully not your last. But um, John, um want to just kind of start with some background entry point into your expertise in the industry, how you have got to this place where you're at. Take us through your path into automotive journalism. You got a a wide birth of background in that space, but I'd like to kind of narrow in what drew you to the space and how how have EVs become a central part of your fur focus over time?

SPEAKER_01 1:21

So the first thing to know is that I was born a car nerd. Like many, if not most, automotive journalists. When you get any group of a dozen of us together, it gets esoteric really quick. And there's arguments about obscure, arcane points of things that happened 30 years ago. But it took me until I was about 50 to make it pay. I my so-called career has been nonlinear, I think is the best way to put it. But after a particularly bad job experience in the mid-2000s, I was at that sort of middle-age point where I thought, you know, am I happy doing this? What would I like to do? And fortuitously at that point, IEEE Spectre, which was the outlet that really taught me how to be a reporter, writer, editor, and a signing editor, the magazine of the electrical engineers professional society called and said, Hey, we are starting this feature called Top 10 Tech Cars. Would you like to write it? And I said, Oh yes. And so I did that for a while. It seemed to go well. And through about five years worth of freelancing and consulting and doing sort of acting magazine and internet jobs here and there, I really realized that was what I liked doing best. And in February of 2009, I got hired to be the founding editor of Green Car Reports, which at that point had, I think, a thousand page views or some irrelevant number. The idea was to do short hit news coverage of things in what we call then the green car world. I don't think that term gets used so much, but at that point it was higher fuel efficiency, which was very much a government regulatory thing going on, the growth of hybrids, specifically the Prius. And because I had had my first ride in a Tesla fortuitously in September 2006, it was actually number three. I knew that the electric car thing had some legs. And if you're gonna join an established industry, which is fairly competitive, at age 50, you gotta have a gimmick. And I looked around and found there wasn't really any good writing about green cars or electro cars with electrified powertrains, whatever sort. We also covered natural gas and hydrogen and you know, all the rest of it. But and I decided maybe that was a niche for me. And as electric cars came in, it worked fairly well. So I was editor of Green Car Reports for nine years, over which time I think I wrote something like 4,800 articles and edited about 6,000 more. I drove over 400 cars, I flew 400,000 air miles. We did a lot and loved every minute of it. The site got a certain amount of credibility, and we were lucky enough to sell the company to another larger uh internet company. And so when the payouts were done, I realized that not only was I fried, but I was 10 years older than anyone else in the company, including the CEO. So um I respectfully said, I'd like to take a sabbatical. And my boss was into it, and the CEO was into it. Then we hit the PR department of the new corporate overlords, excuse me, HR, who said, three and a half years ago, you signed that you had read and accepted all of our HR terms, and you clearly didn't read page 72, paragraph B, which says what you want is impossible. So I quit with the blessing of my boss again. Um bought a used Chevy Suburban off a car lot in Phoenix, filled it with old car parts, drove it around the country, and after a six-month break, became essentially a freelance writer about these topics, which is to my shock, where I've now been for seven years. But it's worked out. I publishing car and driver, I've had stuff in Wired, I've had stuff in the Burge, inside EVs, charged EVs, there's a there's a whole list. It has been rewarding for me just because we started out with me being a nerd, and I have aggregated an incredible volume of mostly useless, but occasionally useful knowledge about EVs, the industry charging, the whole energy ecosystem around them and sort of the global automotive world, how it comes together and how regulation hits that. So there's usually stuff I could not sure if that's a career path I recommend to anyone, but that's how it happened.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Yeah. Well, you know, it's amazing how we end up where we're at. It's never a straight line, it's always left and right turns and say steps forward, steps back. You know, all of those publications that you mentioned, uh, of course, uh seen see material as a contributing editor. You are a contributing editor to uh car and driver. I I've uh you know seen some of your work there. And of course you're you're you're very visible on on LinkedIn and other places. And you know, you just recently released an article in Car and Driver regarding EVs, and I thought it was very insightful. I thought it was well put together and and and pretty expansive. Yeah, yeah. So um, yeah, I um, you know, one of the topics in that in that article that just came out was uh was around the pullback. And I wanted to look at that in terms of defining what that means. Automakers say they're pulling back. We've seen the announcements with the Ford Lightning well, well publicized. We see other information coming on from different you know automo automotive OEMs. And is there a pullback? What is what are they actually pulling back from? Is this volume, is this timelines, is this capital risk? What is that pullback really look like from your perspective?

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Uh the word I'm I used for the title, didn't make it into the online title, but the word in the print title was reset. And I think essentially we have now learned 15 years worth of buyer information, production information, charging a lot of the business lessons around EVs, home charging, network charging. And I think that there have been some products that simply didn't take, and we can talk about those in a minute, but we now know better where electric cars work really well, where they may work, and where they probably don't, with today's technology, today's production, and today's pricing work. I don't want to say scattersh, but people have tried almost everything since 2011. There have been low-range, there have been a lot of compact hatchbacks, frankly. But there have been other things. We now have three-row electric SUVs, we have stupidly fast electric sports cars or performance cars, we have some magnificent technology startups, things like Lucid, which just makes lovely cars, very expensive cars, but um, I doubt anyone in the auto industry could have conceived of a luxurious, good-looking, four-seat, luxury sedan that will run 400 miles but also accelerate 060 in 1.9 seconds, which I have not done. And honestly, I'm not sure if I ever want to do that. But electric cars offer a lot in terms of performance as well as convenience. And I think it's becoming clearer where the lowest hanging fruit is, which quite frankly, I think is probably compact SUVs and maybe mid-sized SUVs. Sedans certainly for other markets, but this is America, we no longer want sedans. Sedans are falling as a portion of the market, so everything has become an SUV, even if they're actually hatchbacks. Backed up a little bit. Don't use the H-word, you'll scare the customers. But so I think we know that. We know that households that can afford to buy a new car, that have a household income, and that that is a smaller and smaller portion of America, to be honest. If you have the household income to walk in and buy a new car, you have a four out of five chance of having dedicated off-street parking, which means it's somewhere between four feet and twenty feet from electricity, which means you can charge your car at home overnight. Okay. That is how the vast majority of miles today on EVs get logged. And I'm talking about personally owned EVs. The fleet side is interesting in certain areas, even more compelling, but there's some different things going on there and it's much lower volume. But we know now that people do charge at home. And what we also know is that as we move from early adopters, and I'm probably one of them, but the person who walks into the showroom corrects the salesman when they make an incorrect assumption, tells the salesman in great painful, remorseless detail how the car works. Those folks already knew what they were buying. We're now into early mass adoption. These folks do not. They have learned about EVs through the same place everybody learns about everything. Friends, relations, neighbors, and coworkers. And increasingly, someone has an EV, right? And what's that? Aren't they weird? Don't they die? No, actually, it works fine. Here's what I do. I charge it at home overnight. There are many people who love the idea of never having to go to a gas station, of leaving home every morning with a quote, full tank. But fueling up with electricity requires a mindset change. No one has a gas pump or garage. So we are all used to thinking of I have a vehicle, I have to fuel it, and once or twice a week, I have to go to a place and do that, right? Somehow the cell phone on wheels metaphor never quite stuck because we're all used to plugging in our cell phones at night, right? Same thing with the EV. So we know those things. Certainly, the public charging networks have a ways to go. We can talk about that down the road. But I think to answer your question, there is a reset toward what works, what people will buy, and what will make money for the So yeah, agreed.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Okay, so you know, obviously EVs have their own narratives in terms of cleaner to make, cleaner to operate, and all the narratives around that. But when you strip away the the climate narrative, strip away the politics, just brass tacks, how much of the EV slowdown is really about cash burn becoming an unacceptable where companies aren't being they're dropping models. The forecast on the amount of models that they had were focused on has now been peeled back. Is was that because the all EVs by 2030, 100% EV by 2030 narrative was unmar unmoored maybe for market signals. It was it was the wrong message from the start. What is what does all that look like? Or is it just the OEMs aren't being profitable? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

In the end, it comes down to OEMs have to make money. Um couple of points I wanted to make. I'm not aware of any place in the U.S. that ever said all EV by 2030. California, which is the most aggressive state in environmental regulation, set a target of all EV by 2035 for light duty vehicles. Probably won't make that. But um 2030 was maybe a couple of European countries and or the UK. I'd have to go back and check. But 2030 was not a US number. Um, the climate narrative, thankfully, we have moved away from the idea that people buy EVs to save the planet. They have that side effect, but it turns out that it's a really, really bad idea to talk about how you should buy this car instead of the one you thought you wanted because it's better for the world. That is not a way people buy cars. They have to buy cars because they like them, because they make them feel good, because they make other people envious, because they're good to drive, and because they save them money. And different households have different prioritizations of that. But EVs can tick most, if not all, of those boxes. And so where they tick those boxes most often are where we're focusing on. Clearly, car makers have to make money. The example I'd like to use, Tota's the most profitable mass market car maker in the world, has been for a couple decades, if not longer, I'm not sure. That company spent north of$15 billion between 1995 and about 2004 on its hybrid program. They did not even break even on a single Prius until somewhere during the middle of the model run of the second generation Prius, let's say 2006 or something. If they didn't have so much profitability and so much cash, Wall Street would have been all over them and would have said, kill that program, you're losing your shirts. Unfortunately, the Detroit 2.5, Volkswagen, to some degree, the rest of the German industry also don't have that cash. And so they cannot simply say, we are going to spend money on this until we crack that nut. They have to invest more smartly. They have now pulled back the products that they knew were not going to make them money either ever or for a while. That's why Ford canceled its three-row electric SUV, which was some ways into development, because they said this is not going to be profitable soon enough for us. And actually, Ford's CEO Jim Farley has now said we will not sell any EV that isn't cash flow positive within a year, which is a fairly high bar. What is going on quietly in the background? And we're in we're in this weird sort of lull year right now, is that two of the Detroit two and a half are actually rethinking everything about EVs. So Jen's actually had its what we used to call the Ultium EVs, everything from the Hummer on the top end to the Chevy Equinox, the bottom end. So they've got actually 12 different EV models on sale for three of their brands, which people often sometimes don't add up, but they've got a lot going on with EVs. They are in the process, very quietly, of doing some version of what Ford is, which is saying, okay, how do we make a single EV platform that is much cheaper to run, that uses cheaper batteries, that's cheaper to build, and that we can sell at lower prices for higher volumes. Because I think I share the belief that if you get a plethora of EVs with starting prices in the 20s and topping out 39, I don't know, somewhere in there, you will see a huge surge of interest in EVs. Simply because we've all seen the numbers, the sales weighted average price of a new vehicle sold in the U.S. right now is 50 grand. Now, that's a whole lot of really fancy pickup trucks. Did you know there are now 96-month car loans? You are underwater for something like 88 of them. But um that's how those vehicles get sold, and they do last longer. There is, along with the sort of general societal wordiness here about affordability, there is an even graver concern with affordability of new cars because otherwise the US market is really in sort of a replacement phase. And so the one of the proof points I use, there's a company called Slate, um, a startup. There's some Detroit veterans, some Silicon Valley veterans, that has proposed to bring to market a really, really, really, really simple two-door single cab electric pickup truck with a range of either 150 or 240 miles, priced at 25 grand. One color, any color you like, as long as it's gray, because they don't have a paint shop, they have composite panels, they come in gray. You can wrap the car for money. Uh plate generated for for something that was very theoretical and has yet to prove that it's going to be real. Slate generated a prodigious amount of interest. I went to the went to the event, I saw the numbers on the social media. It was remarkable. And so Ford has gotten some interest with some very limited details on its own new platform for EVs, completely tearing apart and rethinking the assembly process. They are going to bring a compactor mid-sized pickup truck, all electric, to market on that platform in 2027. Probably the 28 miles a year. I'm one of the people who is fascinated to see that when it comes. And GM has some version of a new platform, much cheaper. Let's rethink every single piece of it, to do a version of the same thing. Kia and Hyundai are going to have small and inexpensive EVs. We were supposed to get one, except with the tariffs that sort of landed out of the left field. They have suspended uh Kia has suspended its EV4 for the moment. But there are going to be less expensive EVs coming. Will they be full-size pickup trucks? No.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Well, John, I was trying to track through. You you gave so much information. There was a lot to unpack. No, it's good. It's good. Lots of thought-provoking thoughts. One couple things I want to double-click on. Did I hear you say 93 month leases or excuse me, uh fancy packages?

SPEAKER_01 18:50

92 months, 84 months, 72 or 96, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Wow, that's so you're you're talking like seven years worth of financing. It just seems untenable for a vehicle that what's it going to look like by the time it's paid off?

SPEAKER_01 19:04

That's the payment below whatever number of hundreds that you think you can afford at this moment. Sign here. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

The other thing I had, you mentioned uh Detroit two and a half. For those that don't know what you're mean, what do you mean by that? Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Historically, back in my day, you used to say the big three, which was GM, Ford, and Chrysler in that order. GM is still GM, went through a bankruptcy, government-backed restructuring. It has now been steadily, consistently, remorselessly profitable for 10 years. Ford, it did not get rescued if you sort of overlook the$6 billion low interest loan that it got, but it has been through some ups and downs, but it uh it does interesting things with products and it's still very much a player. Those are the two. Yeah. The half is what we used to call Chrysler, which for a while was Daimler-Chrysler when the Germans bought it. The joke there was how do you pronounce Daimler-Chrysler? The Chrysler is silent. The that was not a happy marriage. They essentially offed it to a bunch of private equity boroughs. They got they went bankrupt too. Remarkably, it didn't get shut down or mashed into one of the other two. Sergio Marchioni from Fiat essentially took it on for free and used the cash from Ram and Jeep to rescue the rest of the company. This is a little bit revisionist. There's a lot more nuance here. So we had Fiat Chrysler from 2012 to for about 10 years. I forgot when the deal was done. And then PSA, which is a European company that was Peugeot plus Citron plus Oval, merged with Fiat Chrysler. So now we have something called Stellantis, okay? Which, if I remember, has its headquarters in the Netherlands and has a bucket ton of European brands, plus in the States, Ram and Jeep and Chrysler and Dodge. They have, I think, 14 brands, which is insane, but they have been the USR has been pushed and pulled by the European R. Sometimes used as a cash cow, sometimes told to make things it knows won't sell, but the USR knows won't sell. In this case, some electric vehicles that were not ready for prime time doesn't even begin to describe it. So I think of it as the half. Half of the company is in Detroit. And we no longer say the big three because none of them globally is very big anymore. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Well, th thanks for unpacking that. That's the cool thing when when I'm talking to an industry specialist that has a deep set of institutional knowledge, I sometimes have to translate for the audience. Like in we do the same thing when people are talking the EV acronyms, the EMSP, the CPO. We have to sometimes double click on what that means for those that may not understand. But thanks for runpacking that. Another comment that you made was about the acknowledgement of GM's product line from the Hummer to the Chevy Equinox and everything in between, and how your comments, CEO of uh Jim Farley, uh Jim Farley at uh Ford, you know, no EVs unless they're profitable. And that that consolidation to a platform that that means, okay, we're gonna focus on a product that is uh that's consolidated so that way there is profitability in that. And then the comments around Slate, I think, points to that. Slate is the is the almost jeep-looking vehicle where you can have it with a bed or with a camper. Is that is that the one I remember seeing something about that?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

That's right. It's got some clever design. You can buy one of two kits to turn it from a two-door standard cab pickup into a two-door SUV with big long windows. Um, there's a fastback one, but the square or more EV one just takes the back of the cab and moves it back, which is actually a neat design flourish. My suspicion is A, they will sell a lot more of the 240-mile version with the bigger battery, which they have not priced, and a lot more of the SUV version, simply because if you look at Rivian, another of the EV startups, they launched with a pickup truck, but they are now selling about two of their SUVs for every pickup they sell.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah. You know, your good, good call out. Your your article had kind of referred to full-size EV pickups as as a product planning snafu, and the you clarified what you meant. You know, the full-size electric pickups were supposed to be a breakout moment because that was to bring to market a product that it goes beyond the Chevy Bolt and Nissan leaf size or the constraints around Tesla's products. And so, you know, the the EV truck was supposed to take us to a place in the market that we hadn't been. What did the experiments, whether we're looking at through the framework of workhorse, um, what was the other one? Ah gosh, I cannot remember the name of that truck, but they they came, they and then they they disappeared. It wasn't workhorse, maybe it was workhorse, but either way, the pickup trucks, whether you're looking at Rivian, you're looking at uh the f the F. I know the one you mean. Yes. I will think of the name directly after we sign off. After we've signed off, we'll both remember it.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

I actually drove it. Car and Driver has my road test of the thing, I think. But yes, well, those are those are what they are. Workhorse, I think, was only a commercial vehicle, as well as this other one that I can't remember. Yeah. I'm not convinced they ever seriously targeted the retail ones. The retail ones, as you said, Ford F-150 Lightning, and then still in production at lower numbers than planned, I think, are the GMC Sierra EV and Chevy Silverado EV, and then of course the Hummer. Um, I think what we learned from this experiment is a couple of things. The people who have lightnings, by and large, love them, or at least the ones I see and the most vocal ones seem to love them. I've driven it. It's by far to me the best F-150. But one of the interesting things about the pickup truck market in North America is that it is unique to this continent. Um, there are there are some interesting comparisons to these sort of weird specialized vehicles in other places around the world. There are these things called K cars, KEI cars, tiny, tiny little cars, limited in length, width, height, weight, engine size, and power in Japan, and they have some licensing advantages because they're so small. Something like a third, maybe close to half of Japan's market is K cars. For this reason, they're unsellable in the rest of the world. Ditto Brazil, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on ethanol-fueled vehicles, so much of Brazil's car fleet now runs on ethanol, which is great because they can build their own fuel at home from sugarcane, but they can't sell most other places in the world. My worry, frankly, is that full-size body-on-frame pickup trucks and SUVs become the North American version of those cars. They are simply too honking big to sell in any kind of volume in the rest of the world. I was staggered to see one when I was driving through Amsterdam a couple summers ago, and I cannot imagine how you drive a Ram 1500 in a country like Holland. But in the US, we are now using them as commute vehicles. But they have to be supremely capable commute vehicles that have massive torque, massive towing power, whether or not you actually ever use those capabilities. My truck friends tell me it's called shiny bed syndrome. The people whose truck pickup beds have no scars because they've never actually put anything other than soft luggage into it. How many pickup truck owners tow? Probably about half. Ford, I'm sure, has data to the decimal point. But a lot of people want to have that capability for the boat they want to buy. And this sounds like a diss on truck owners. It's not meant to be, but what it is is that a large portion of America is buying very profitable vehicles from its two and a half makers that give them far more capabilities than they need and do it by using prodigious quantities of fuel. Less now. But remember, in the emissions rules that came in in 2012, it was all about footprint. And the bigger the vehicle, the lower the ramp on raising your gas mileage. So it's easier to make trucks comply than it was to make small hatchbacks, unless they didn't emit anything at all, hence EV hatchbacks. But it's very, very hard because electric cars are so efficient to get the amount of energy into an electric truck required not just to move the truck around. That's easy math. To move the truck and an 8,000-pound trailer, which also leads to the aerodynamic problem, because the thing that eats most of the energy in an electric car above 30 miles an hour is not moving mass because you get some of that back in regenerative braking, it's pushing air aside. And that is an exponential increase in energy. Yeah. Like I said, I'm in there.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah. No, hey, it it's it's all good. You're you're you're educating us, and it's Lordstown Endurance. I had to look it up. It was buggy me. Yes, yes, yes. Lordstown endurance. Yeah. Well, so and you know, to to the comment of of the vehicle that is really able to pull, it's it's it's always that variance between actual use case and aspirational, i.e., the boat you want to buy, the boat you intend to buy. But, you know, it's it's it's well, and again, it's it it echoes some of the resistance to, hey, how far can I go in this car? Can I go across the country in this car? Maybe I don't want an EV. Well, do you did you go across the country in a gasoline-powered vehicle? Or how often do you do that? I mean, it's again, but use case and and ride application.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

That to me is the perfect segue, though, into one of your questions about charging. So let us say you are a household who can buy a new vehicle. So you buy a nice electric, compact, or knit sized crossover, and you're quite happy with it. It turns out you love plugging it in every night and you realize you haven't been to a gas station in four months and so forth. Great. Time to go to grandma's. Now, you probably have the same average 2.4 vehicles in your family. So if you're nervous, you're not going to take the EV. But a lot of people turn out to like driving their EVs better than driving their other non-EV vehicles. There is a fast charging network out there growing rapidly across America. It is almost unknown to anyone who is not already an EV driver. And I think it's fair to say that the salespeople at the independently owned and operated third-party franchised auto dealerships that are the only way legally to buy most of the cars in this country, including most of the EVs, Tesla aside, um, are not particularly good at explaining what fast charging is, what, say, the top six networks are, how they differ, how it works, how you validate or not the session, and so on. It is less primitive now than it was five years ago, but there is still work to be done because Tesla set the pattern in 2012. You drive up to the station, which your car has navigated you to. Okay, you don't have to figure it out. The car is like, okay, you have to go 500 miles. I need to stop for 22 minutes here and 18 minutes here. I'll take it. You drive up to the charging dock, you pull out the cable, plug it in, and you walk away. All the billing is done, all the validation is done, all the rest of it. That's great for Tesla because they controlled the car and the charging station and the software. Not so easy when Ford built the car. The charging station is run by a company called Electrify America, and there's a third-party transaction validation somewhere in there for your credit card or whatever. There's a way around this, but no one knows that. And it's you do not get this stuff explained to you in detail how it works at the salesman's discussion. You may learn it from your friends and your neighbors, etc. And over time, people internalize it. You know, I've done various long trips in EVs. I can always find a fast charging station. It may be fast, fast, it may be slower fast. The reliability, which initially was hit or miss, I would say three, four or five years ago, maybe two out of three of my charging attempts work. We're now up to four out of five. That's not good enough because when was the last time you drove up to a gas station and could not fuel, period, right? Especially if it's the only gas station within 12 miles. So it's getting better. There are more charging stations out there. So there are more alternatives, and the reliability is inching up. They're not trivial problems, but they are solvable problems. And one of the challenges is just getting people past this mindset of how you fuel. You're gonna fuel at home, or if you live in a multi-unit dwelling, and that's sort of the next bit, you're gonna fuel in your parking lot. Or if you have a townhouse, if you have a garage, great, you can set up a charging station. Otherwise, you know, there's various ways to do it overnight, or also fueling at work, which is one that people always forget. But the important thing is for those road trips, there is high-speed charging out there, but most people only use it once or twice or three times a year. So they're not as familiar with it. They don't have the muscle memory like you do. Okay, driving at the gas station, fillers on that side, drive up to the pump on this side, credit card, plug it in, stand there and whistle. I live in a state where you have to hold the pump. Some states still have handle jockeys. And we will get there. Remember, we've only been fast charging EVs for 13 years. But at this moment, it is a little bit less obvious. And most of all, the buyers aren't getting an explainable time.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah, there's so many friction points that I think is part of the reason why it's not being explained. Early on, of course, there was a knowledge gap at the dealership level. But even as we've moved past that and there's been more intentionality in developing the dealer to be able to speak to the product and how the product is used, both in a home charging context or if that's not an option in a public charging context. It's all about that information exchange, it's all about that knowledge sharing. So dealers have gotten better, but we know there's plenty of proof, and it's people many people have experienced it early on. Going to a dealership, they there was an intention to convert away from the the EV, if that's what the prospective buyer was looking at, to something that made sense to the salesperson. And charging has been a part of that. Where do I charge? How do I charge? And you mentioned about, you know, kind of the top, no one's really trying to speak to the education aspect of how many networks are out there. I I if we zoom out and take take the top, you know, five, ten out of the equation, we we zoom far out. I want to say that it's close to 70 types of networks that are out there, mid-tier, national, regional operators that maybe have less than 100 ports in their portfolio, but but they're out there. And that that's a lot. But again, how does the consumer know that? How does those that aren't, you know, you said it on early on. Those that are not an EV operator now, the way that they get to even close to considering it is they've got four resources in their life family, friends, coworkers, someone that knows about the experience and can talk to them through the practical steps. How long does it take to charge? Where do I charge all of that?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

I think one of the interesting things is going to be the continuing spread of EV charging past its current model. My colleague Lauren McDonald of Charge Nomics uses the phrase charging 2.0. But basically, the first 12, 15 years of charging were find a parking lot where they'll let you have a strip on the outside that is somewhere within spinning distance of a high voltage line. Drop in a bunch of electrical equipment six weeks before you launch, figure out the user interface, which has been, quite frankly, one of the pain points. And lo and behold, you have a charging station. But as we know from fueling at gas stations as opposed to fueling with electrons, gas stations make some money. I always thought they didn't make money selling gas. They actually make maybe 10, 20 cents a gallon. Not a ton, but enough. But you're right. Driven by their throughput, yeah. Well, driven by throughput, but also the bulk of their profits come from selling salty snack food, sugary sodas, beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. Okay. Now, if you have three times the dwell time, I mean, all my friends are like, oh, I can be in and out and fuel in five minutes. I'm like, did you pee? Did you buy something to eat or drink? Really? But if you are staying, let's say, for 20, 25 minutes, what is the higher-end, higher dollar thing that they can squeeze out of you? Maybe, I don't know, custom coffee drinks or fancy sandwiches, whatever it is. So that's an opportunity. You still need the real estate, but what we are seeing now is this move away from pure CPOs, which means charging networks, public charge networks that sell charging to the public, and into charging as an ancillary. And as a friend of mine who has he actually started in the mini storage business, but he's made a very great deal of money in mini storage. So he said, don't ever count out this convenience stores. They measure this stuff, they have the real estate, they know where the traffic is, they only locate them in places where there is a lot of traffic. And he said, they will start to see business models in charging. Well, he said this probably three years ago. Lo and behold, I now have a convenience store chain to my shock that has a Tesla row of chargers in one, and then 12 miles up, a row of Electrify America chargers in my little town in the Hudson Valley. So, you know, this is gonna start to happen, and that way it doesn't have to be live or die on selling electricity because, quite frankly, sorry, there's a lot of hardware, but electricity is kind of fungible, and you're never gonna get rich, let alone pay off the VCs who thought you were going to make them rich by selling electricity alone. What else can you do? What else can you sell those drivers? What else can you and sorry? The point I started at, my apologies. The point I started at was when convenience stores have electric charging, there is a way for them to wrap it in and normalize it because they have loyalty programs. I'm I'm fairly non-loyal or profligate with convenience stores. Wherever I can get stuff, I'll stop in on a road trip and get it. There are people who frequent the same ones over and over again. They get discounts, etc. When you get a discount on your EV charging, boom.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

Yeah, that's that is one of the things that's compelling to to the retailer, the the petroleum retailer, is to make sure that if they're going to offer EV charging, that it integrates with all their loyalty programs well. So that way the the EV driver excuse the EV driver has the same experience as as the gasoline or diesel customer. Except stays longer. Yeah. Yeah, well, and the the conversion rate is higher too, because uh for the EV driver for the petroleum retailer versus you know two, three minutes at the pump and you're done, um, you may not go in the store. The EV driver's going in the store potentially twice. But um, yeah, well, uh thanks. Uh you know, John, this has been a great conversation. I got one more thing I want to ask you as we get ready to kind of round this out. I I I would like to hear your comments on the on the direct consumer versus the dealership model. We know Tesla and I know this is kind of shifting from our conversation about charging infrastructure, but I I wanted to hear your your um your comments and and insights on this. Tesla and Rivian, of course, bypass the dealer model entirely. While legacy OEMs, we know they're they're they're locked into managing franchise economics as it relates to getting their products in the market. Does the direct consumer model materially help EV adoption? Or maybe this is a broader question for automotive in general, but does that direct to consumer model help EV adoption, or is it just shifting the pain to different part of the system? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

What are your thoughts on that? I'm not sure we have enough experience to make that call right now. Certainly, I think the pain moves to different places. I would point out that automobiles are, as far as I'm aware, the sole consumer good, high-volume, high-dollar consumer good, where you are not allowed to buy them from the manufacturer under most state franchise laws. That is, in fact, illegal. You must buy them through a third-party retailer. Now, Apple seems to be able to sell very expensive phones and computers, both at its own stores and through retailers. But auto dealers and their lobbyists will tell you and have certainly told me over 15 years, exactly why that's a totally wrong comparison. And people actually love haggling for their cars. They don't call it haggling. I don't happen to believe that. And if you look at the consumer data, in fact, even if someone walks into a car dealership and gets an objectively good deal compared to the average price for that car, more often than not, they will feel taken advantage of. And it's the process, it's the worst dealers who are dragging everything down. Um, you're only as good as your worst employee. Um, so where I think dealer or franchise dealers may come into their own is service. Because what we're now seeing with Tesla in particular, and I expect Rivian to go through some of this as well, is that, hey, for Tesla, you cannot talk to a human about servicing your car. You must use the app, book an appointment. The machine will spit out based on what you say the problem is. I'm sure there's AI in there because it's 2025. The machine will spit out, okay. If you're very lucky, or if you're a friend of Elon, we will send a guy in a truck around tomorrow. If you're less lucky, but still sort of lucky, okay, next Monday, bring it in. And if it's something non-mission critical, we'll give you an appointment nine weeks from Thursday. They are simply overwhelmed. Now, Tesla, like any car maker with new models, any startup, has had its share of quality issues. I'm increasingly tired of Tesla fans explaining that everything will be solved with over-the-year updates. Some of it can be solved with over-the-year software updates. Cracking suspension arms cannot. And so I think it's very much a work in progress right now to sort out if Tesla can keep up with both adding large volumes of new EVs on the road and servicing an increasingly aging volume of EVs that they have sold. That's, I think, going to be our first case. Rivian really only started producing and buying a few years ago. They might have the same. I don't know. Hopefully, they'll take lessons from Tesla. Um, but clearly, people like the non-franchise dealership salesperson model, where you go in, you have people who will explain everything, go through it as much as you need. And so I think, you know, ask me again five years, maybe 10 years from there.

SPEAKER_00 42:58

Fair, fair enough. Well, John, appreciate you coming on Field Frequency and sharing these insights. It's been a great conversation. For those that want to connect with you, uh, how can they reach out to you? How can they follow your work? Obviously, contributing editor, and driver, you are your materials out there, but if someone wanted to connect with you, how would they how would they do so?

SPEAKER_01 43:18

The great thing is I have a surname that is very search optimized. If you remember all the letters in it, and I'm assuming they'll be in this, I will spell it. It's V like Victor, O E L C K E R. First name, John J O E Chen. Just Google that name, spell it properly with EVs, and you will get a bucket ton of links. Okay. And, you know, certainly I'm on social media, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Blue Sky. And so feel free to follow me. Love comments, actually. One of the one of the interesting, because basically I sit at home in a room. When I'm not driving or flying to drive, I'm sitting at home in a room by myself, but um, love. Interacting with actual human readers. I know they're out there. And the last thing, I'm going to trespass on your hospitality. My side gig, when I'm not writing about EVs, is something called Tempting Fate Tours, which is a YouTube channel about highly questionable, stupid road trips in very dubious old cars, Finn British. And I'll give you one example. We drove a 70 and a 75-year-old car with 30 and 27 horsepower, respectively, thousand miles through Europe and the UK. Slowly. So anyway, temping fei tours if you like old cars and people doing stupid things with them. And otherwise, search for my name.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

Yeah. No worries. We can link to that channel on our landing page, on the Filled Frequency Landing page. Well, John, thank you for being on Filled Frequency. It was a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you for having me. Take care. This episode was produced and edited by the team at Atozi. To find out more, visit autosy.co, a u t o z y dotco.