October 7, 2025 • 33 mins
Listener Zoe asked whether she should buy an electric vehicle to save on fuel, or whether the initial spend and ongoing expenses would outweigh the financial benefits. Canna Campbell - a financial planner for 20 years - and Fear & Greed's Michael Thompson are joined in the studio by motoring journalist and car expert Trent Nikolic for a look at whether an EV will save you money - and the best ones to buy for any budget.
---
The information in this podcast is general in nature and does not take into account your personal circumstances, financial needs or objectives. Before acting on any information, you should consider the appropriateness of it and the relevant product having regard to your objectives, financial situation and needs. In particular, you should seek independent financial advice and read the relevant Product Disclosure Statement or other offer document prior to acquiring any financial product.
Canna Campbell is an Authorised Representative and Financial Adviser of Links Licensee Services Pty Ltd AFSL No. 700012 ABN 97 678 975 589.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to How Do They Afford That, the podcast that
peaks into the financial lives of everyday Australians. I'm Michael Thompson.
I'm an author and the co host of the podcast
Fear and Greed business news. As always, I'm with Canna Campbell,
the financial planner, founder of Sugar Mama TV, the financial
literacy platform that is on YouTube, podcast books, Instagram, threads,
TikTok and more. Hello, Canna, good morning, you are looking
(00:23):
excited today.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
I'm what a car person. I don't know anything about
a car other than it has four wheels and outside
of the car and a wheel in this side of
the car to turn. That's about the extent of my
knowledge around cars.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Well, luckily for you, Luckily for you, we have an
expert in the studio who's going to be helping today.
Because if I was asking you as the expert, this
would be a very very very short and highly likely
to be quite dull episode. But we have something we've
got to do today, right. It came as a result
of an email to you from a list Zoe, who
(01:01):
said she said, I listened to your podcast every day
and re listen to the podcast, which is great. I
need to include that part because it makes me feel good,
She says. Just recently, I was considering my fuel bill
of one hundred and seventy dollars a fortnight to get
to and from work. She says, I already used the
ruckus app and save between ten to fifteen dollars using
(01:23):
that car Pooling isn't an option as my colleagues don't
live nearby. My brother spends closer to two hundred and
fifty dollars a fortnite due to us living. I'm guessing
Zoe lives with her brother due to us living where
we want to live but having jobs further away. Okay,
all right, that's the background. It then got her wondering
if electric vehicles would outweigh these costs, or would the
(01:44):
increase in power plus the long term expenses make owning
one a good financial decision. Then I had a light
bulb moment. I wondered, if how do they afford that
has ever done a show on evs and maybe in
the near future you can get an expert in to
discuss this topic, to shed more light on something. So
she already knew that you weren't an expert on this one.
(02:06):
So Zoe has done us all the favor, and we
have asked an expert to join us, the best motoring
journalists and expert around, Trent Nikolic, Welcome to how to
they Afford that?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Hello Michael, Hello Canna. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Now, you've driven and written about just about every car
ever invented, which might exaggerate to the model to you.
You were telling us just before we started recording about
a recent car that you were driving, said anything just
to display the range of vehicles that you have driven.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
What was it?
Speaker 3 (02:37):
It was on the subject of how do people afford that?
It was an aston Martin Vanquish, which is a Canna
is going to start going to sleep here, But it's
a five point two later V twelve. It's twin turbo,
it makes an enormous amount of power, an enormous amount
of noise. It doesn't look obnoxious, So it's not one
of those cars that.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
People Yeah, it's not one of those it's understated.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yes, so you're not going to drive it down the
road and people are going to say, look at that
driving that car. But it does cost drive away one
point two million dollars, which I realized after I picked
it up and drove it back to the office and
safely parked it in the garage, and then thought, I
probably should have taken that into account before I left
the dealership, just to have that little bit of extra.
(03:19):
I don't know that that veneer of caution that you
have when they're driving a car like that that is.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Not a car that you park near the trolley base
in a shopping.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Centre, is not at all not a car you want
to curb the wheel when you're reverse parking it because
the wheels are probably thirty thousand dollars each or something.
You know, you don't you don't want to even put
the slightest mark on a car like that. So I
would test drive that, and then the next week I
would be driving something that was, you know, twenty eight
nine to ninety drive away kind of thing. So it
and everything in between.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That is amazing. So then you have seen the rise
of evs then, and you have seen the fact that
it went from really it was kind of the Prius
and the kind of the hybrids things coming into the
market to now an absolute influx of electric vehicles into
the market, and particularly the rise of Chinese brands like
byd Along with Tesla that's coming into Australia. So maybe
(04:13):
the best place to start is a good old fashioned
pros and cons list of evs.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
I think just quickly before I answer that what you
had to dig at Canna about when we started that,
she said she's not interested in cars and to the
letter from Zoe there, the problem with electric vehicles is
the level of complexity and detail with them that the
average person just can simply cannot understand. We have to
spend hours working out things like battery size and energy
(04:41):
consumption and charge rates and all of those things, so
you cannot and we do it every day, so you
can't possibly expect the average person to just look at
an electric vehicle and go yep. That makes sense to
me because there's a lot to take in starting with
the pros with that in mind, because it.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Really started with a con there.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
It's part of the research process, right, Like what I
probably should explain that a little better, I'm sorry. What
I mean by that is if you go and look
at a regular petrol car, because we've got decades and
decades of in depth research that sort of bred into us,
we understand what a petrol engine is, what a diesel
engine is we understand the difference between a four cylinder
(05:20):
and an eight cylinder, and we understand automatics and manuals.
Ye right, None of that applies to an electric vehicle.
So what applies to electric vehicles is that it's got
a battery pack and how big is that battery pack?
And then how far can you drive it with that
battery pack? And then does it have one electric motor
or two electric motors? Is it two wheel drive or
all wheel drive? There's all these other things that come
(05:40):
into it, and a lot of the time, I think
because it is so complex, people don't understand what it
is that they're trying to buy, which makes it even
more daunting.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, so half the challenge then for these ev makers
is education.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, sure, absolutely, spot on, absolutely, And that's what I
was going to say. I think if you started with
the cons, I think the cons are And I've driven
an electric vehicle around Australia. So I've done sixteen thousand
kilometer lap of the mainland of Australia in an electric vehicle,
which I do not advise anybody to do ever again
anytime soon because it was torture stressful. Yeah, not smart.
(06:15):
So I've looked at all of the coms. If you
can think of a stupid way to have to charge
in an EV, we've done it, like with an extension
lead out the window of a motel in a remote
campground somewhere in the rain, or using a caravan park.
You know their PowerPoint that's a little bit higher rated
than We've done everything to try to get to where
we needed to get. So the cons are the difficulty
(06:37):
of owning that vehicle if it's the only vehicle that
you've got. So if KNA says to me, I'm buying
a new car, I buy one car, and I don't
really ever want to have to think about where I
drive it. If I decide I want to get in
it and drive Dubbo, I don't want to think about it.
I'd say, don't buy an electric vehicle because you're going
to have to plan where you stop, where you charge,
how long you stop, for all of those things. So
(06:57):
the range at the moment for people who are one
car family, or primarily one car families, is problematic. The
cost is another real issue for people in that they
are still even though the price has started to come down,
they're still significantly more affordable than a comparable vehicle in
that class that is not electric. So if you look
(07:17):
at a MEDIUMSUV that's hybrid and then you look at
a MEDIUMSUV that's electric, the suv that's electric will be
fifteen to twenty thirty percent more expensive. At the moment,
prices are coming down, but they're still more expensive. And
then the other impediment I think to buying them is
that the public charging infrastructure, and again I've experienced this
(07:38):
across the whole of the Australian mainland is nowhere near
where it needs to be for what would be a
very fast uptake of the vehicles. So in the last
couple of years, the new car sales in Australia sort
of between six and eight and a half percent of
them are electric. We already don't have enough charging infrastructure
for those vehicles. Jumped up to twenty or thirty percent
(08:01):
of new vehicle sales being electric, you'd have serious problems
with public charging. So I think you need to take
all of that into account as the negatives.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Because it's also the speed then of those public charges
as well. Because I experimented recently with an EV and
I picked the wrong charger. Basically, it was as simple
as that. And I didn't realize that the charge or
that there were fast charges and super fast charges. And
then the one that I went to, which was apparently
a snail equivalent and it was, I plugged it in
(08:30):
and went away, and it charged for eighty minutes and
it gained thirty percent in its battery or something. And
then I realized that if I'd gone to understand the road,
if I'd plugged it in for twenty five minutes, I
would have been at one hundred percent charge. That was
just that was a mistake. But it probably goes to
the idea of what you were talking about that there's
a lot of complexity.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yea, there is. There is absolutely And if any of
us go to a petrol station this afternoon, you stand
there for you know, two three minutes, fill the tank up,
you go in and pay for it. You know that
your tank full. To drive home with an electric vehicle,
I've plugged them in and gone yep, it's plugged in,
walked away, come back half an hour later. It hasn't
charged because the connection hasn't worked properly, and it hasn't charged.
It hasn't spoken to car or vice versa. You plug
(09:12):
it in and you think it's going to take forty minutes,
and it takes an hour and forty minutes. There's all
sorts of little things that can happen with that is.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
The holy grail. Then for evs to get to the
point where it takes as long to charge an EV
as it does to fill up a take of fuel.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, reckon, I reckon. If you had that there, so
even even sort of within that window, like if it
was five to ten minutes to go from say twenty
to eighty percent of your battery power, I think people
would start to go yep, that makes sense. And then
the other one is the price, because I think a
lot of people, you know. I had a girlfriend of
mine from university contact me yesterday and say, my husband
(09:48):
and I two kids, we need a new car. He's
saying I should get an EV. I'm thinking hybrid. And
I said to her, I wouldn't get an EV yet
because of the cost. And she said, that's what worries
me is that, you know, in her conversations with a husband,
they're talking about the fact that it's more expensive. So
I think charge time and then cost are the two
keys there.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I have enough trouble remembering to charge mobile phone. Imagine
how I go.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
With and can I tell you, can I tell you
that's gone now? Five percent years ago I test road
one of the first electric scooters that came into the market,
so like a big Vespa style scooter. Registered one. Every
single day I got home, I rode it into the garage.
I forgot to plug it in. I came down the
next morning and I went I didn't charge it. So
(10:35):
you have to again you have to change your behavior, right,
And that's that's another thing. You actually have to change
your behavior because at the moment when you're driving a car,
fuel light comes on, broadly speaking, unless you're in the
middle of nowhere, you can find a petrol station within
five to ten minutes of your house that is open
and put fuel in it and you go on your
way with an electric vehicle. If you do that, you're
(10:56):
going to have to plan around it. Because I've crept
into a charger with four kilometers range left in the
middle of nowhere, and I can tell you that is very,
very nerve wracking.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Because it's not as easy as if you run out
of fuel two k short of a of a petrol station.
You can just hike up with a Jerry Cannon away
you go. It's a little bit harder, Okay, So I
want to get to the pros. We'll do the pros
in a little bit. We'll talk more about pricing, because
you mentioned the prices there, and I want to get
an idea of ballpark figures and some of the brands,
some of the cars that we should be looking at,
(11:31):
particularly if you are looking at the more affordable end
of the market. So i'll do that in a second.
But first we've got to balance out all the negativity here.
What are the pros?
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Pros? Pros are very broad actually, and better now than
they ever have been. Right, So, once you own an
electric vehicle, they're silent, they're lovely to drive. The majority
of them are really really good to drive, and everybody
who drives one for the first time says it was
so quiet, it was so refined, the complete of drive
train noise. You know, you don't realize when you drive
(12:03):
a regular car. You've got engine noise, you've got gearbox noise,
you've got drive shaft noise, You've got all sorts of
things coming at you from underneath the car. With an
electric vehicle, all that goes and it's tire noise and
a bit of wind noise. That's all you'll hear. So
the silent operation of them, in theory, you're running costs
will drop away significantly, really really significantly. I've spoken to
(12:27):
engineers from various manufacturers around Australia who said to me
that with a lot of electric vehicles they've got what
they call one pedal driving. So you put a setting
into the drive mode and you effectively don't have to
use the brakes. So as you lift off the accelerator,
the car starts to decelerate itself because it's using the
electric motors in reverse to slow the car down. That
(12:47):
also harvests back some charge, right, But what that means
is you're rarely using your brake pedal once you get
used to it, and in fact, within a couple of
days of driving them, generally speaking, I'm not using the
brake at all with it one pedal stuff unless you
absolutely have to have an emergency stop. I've had engineers
tell me, for argument's sake, the brake pads will go
out of date and need to be replaced before you
(13:09):
will use them. Compared to a normal car, where your
brake pads might last depending on how hard you are
on them. Forty thousand k's, thirty thousand kays whatever. Right,
So with an EV servicing cost, when you go back
to the dealer, there's no oil changes, there's no oil filters,
there's none of that complexity. It's plug the thing into
a computer, check the brakes and tires, make sure there's
(13:31):
no system faults on your way. So running costs are
really good. And then the other pro for me, the
real big one, is put aside the environmental part of it. Right,
because governments are especially our federal government at the moment,
are yelling at us all about buying electric cars and
renewable energy and all of that stuff. Put that to
one side. We're just talking to you if you're thinking
(13:52):
about buying an electric vehicle for the practicality element of
using it, if you've got a really good deal with
your energy provider, if you've got solar panels on your roof,
even better, you put in a very simple charger into
your garage, and you drive your EV home, and you
get home at six point thirty after work, you plug
it in and it'll slow charge overnight. At a very
(14:14):
low rate and by the morning you'll have one hundred
percent charge that hasn't cost you a lot of money.
So if you can charge largely like that, it will
cost you a lot less to do one hundred kilometers
than it would if you were using petrol, even in
an efficient vehicle, So that part of the running cost
will start to make a lot of sense. That changes
if you're using fast charges like we were talking about before,
(14:37):
in public charging, because you have to pay for them.
Now they were free for a little while, you have
to pay for them, and depending on where they are,
how fast they are, what part of the country you're in,
that can be just about as expensive as putting petrol
in the car. But if you're broadly doing what most
of us do, which is go from A to B
to work and cup side trips Monday to Friday, and
(14:58):
you're charging at home to save a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Said, you're looking fascinated by all this. Someone who does
not care about car Suddenly.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I suddenly suddenly invested, heavily invested, And hopefully I think
we're at least part of the way towards answering Zoe's question.
We're going to take a quick break, and when we
come back, I want to get into more of the
money side, the pricing, which ones we should be looking
at price points and resale value as well, which is
(15:29):
another big question.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I also want to know about ongoing costs. So I'm
going to squeeze that one in there if you don't
mind done.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Okay, all right, quick break back in a moment. Can
We are talking today about evs electric vehicles and trying
to help our listener Zoe, who was wondering whether it
is a good financial decision to be buying one. And
we are joined in the studio by Trent Nikolic, motoring expert,
motoring journalist, just all around motoring guy.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Which which is boating really well given Cannon was half
asleep before we started, Like walks through the door, not
interested in you, mate, go.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I actually got caught yawning, actually, and we were discussing this.
We were during the break, just briefly about the fact
that that you are typical of a lot of people
that you are just cars are not your thing, but
you still need one.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
It's just such an expense and it's not you know,
I've like Michael, I have young kids who trash my car,
and I'm just I'm not in the market to buy
a car. You know. It's the sort of thing I
will go in research when I need to when it
comes to that crunch time, you know, particularly like Zoe here,
and that is I think when you do that deep dive,
(16:47):
but it is very overwhelming to try and find out
like what the genuine correct So You're lucky to have
you here and suddenly I'm now wondering, now you're interested.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, well that's the point of which would be less
about the passion and the fun of driving, and so
that's probably not a pro for you hearing how kind
of when we're talking about evs about just because they
are fun to drive because they are so fast.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, well you've driven one now, so you know what
they're like. I think what you're talking about here is
fascinating and just listening to the way Canter articulated that
research part. This is the challenge for us as motoring
journalists is that when you talk about electric vehicles, they
start to move more towards the way you would approach
buying an appliance than they do the way we used
(17:35):
to buy a car. So when you buy a fridge
or a washing machine or a dryer, or a new computer,
or a television ryer or an air fryer. You don't
spend You don't spend five years consuming every bit of
editorial coverage you can find and watching YouTube videos and
stuff because you love them. You just six months before
you buy one, you go, right, I need an air
(17:55):
fry I'm going to start doing my research. You'd look
at people who've used them and whatever, and then you go, OK,
I'm going to buy one, and then you don't research
it anymore. And I think electric cars for a large
percentage of the population are exactly that.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
How much is it going to cost?
Speaker 2 (18:10):
How much?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Big question?
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Right, it's a big range.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
What I think is really what I think is really interesting.
And I was double checking this to make sure that
nothing had changed, because it does overnight. What your real
benefit at the moment is that you can buy some
quality stuff under fifty thousand dollars, right, that's the first point.
If you step it up to one hundred thousand dollars,
that brings things like what you would broadly say is
(18:35):
the most I guess rounded electric car at the moment
that is affordable for people, which is a Tesla model
three and I'll tell you why I say that in
a minute, and that sort of sits in that seventy
thousand dollars range under fifty thousand dollars. They're going to
be from the Chinese manufacturers you mentioned previously, like BYD
and MG, and there's a few others that have started
(18:57):
to enter the market. Keep in mind that the tess
that we get a built in China as well, so
you're not there's no difference there. So the whole don't
want to buy something built in China is a little
bit silly because we're getting large, large amounts of things,
not just cars that come from China anyway, but we
are getting cars out of China that you might not
have thought come from China.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Can I ask you about BYD because they are in
terms of EV's they are the biggest selling EV in
Australia at the moment and for the first time in
August I think it was we had four Chinese manufacturers
in the top ten most sold cars in Australia new cars.
So this is clearly a growing market. Bid is probably
(19:39):
well statistically we can see it the one that people
are most likely to be buying, is it a good investment.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Investment, I would say no in terms of what we
know about things like resale value, retained value, all of
those things. Not because the product itself is no good
at all. I'm not saying that. What we have come
to realize in Australia is that I buy a car,
I keep it for five years. It's from a manufacturer
(20:08):
that's got decades of history in Australia. When I go
to sell it, I've got some idea of what it's
worth and the retained value, and then it's easy for
me to get rid of. On the second hand market,
we're talking here about Challenger brands that are new to
the market, that haven't been here for a very long time,
that don't have that history in our market. So I
(20:28):
can't tell you with any insight what that car is
like when it's five to seven years old with one
hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it. Not the battery
pack and things like that, but just how the car is,
how does it hold together? I don't know because we
don't have that data and we can't necessarily trust what
they would tell us. The cars are doing in China,
(20:50):
where they've been around for a lot longer than they
have been here. So I think that sort of stuff
does affect value on the second hand market. Whereas if
you said to me, I'm buying a Mazda or I'm
buying a key, or we've got decades to say, well,
a ten year old one kind of looks like this
and kind of does these things with these challenger brands,
that is problematic. The second part of that that people
(21:11):
are worried about is what happens to the battery packs
over time. Now, it's a little bit simplistic to say,
and I have used this example before just to try
to make it easy for people to understand. It's a
little bit simplistic, but does the battery on your mobile
phone last as long as it did two years in
as it did when it was brand new? No, generally speaking, Now,
(21:34):
even if it's only five percent or only ten percent,
whatever it might be, you degrade, you've still lost something.
It's very hard to get accurate data from manufacturers or
anybody really about what happens to the battery pack on
an electric vehicle, and every use case scenario is different,
because if you fast charge them all the time, that
definitely has an effect on them more so than slow
(21:56):
charging them in your garage overnight. So if you're the
kind of person and who just goes, I don't want
to put a charger in at home, or I don't
have off street parking, or my apartment block won't let
me or whatever, and you have to use a fast
charger and you do that over the years, that will
degrade the battery to some degree, whereas if you're slow
charged it at home, you won't have that problem. So,
because it's very hard to estimate what that looks like
(22:18):
after five or ten years, the retained value of them
is very difficult to work out.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
There's a lot of unknown.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Risky variables that there is. There absolutely is, and I
can sense that you with your financial planning brain, you'd
be computing all those things thinking, well, I know what
I'm doing if I get a conventional vehicle, and here
is the great unknown over this side.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I'm leaning towards safety in reason exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
In terms of so bid obviously at a lower price
point than say Tesla, how do the two stack up
against each other?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Pretty impressive byd is really impressive. I've got on one hand,
you've got all of the conventional manufacturers. Now you know
we spoke about or Fia, Volkswagen. They've got some really
impressive electric vehicles, Mercedes, Benz, BMW, Toyota, Lexus, you know
the Korean manufacturers. There's all those over there. Tesla will
always be the one that effectively started the segment, so
(23:19):
they got the head start, and even a decade later,
or more than a decade later, Tesla still has smarts
with the way that it uses its battery power more
efficiently than just about any other manufacturer. That gives them
an edge. So the Tesla ecosystem when you buy the
car still is better than any other manufacturer. So the
(23:42):
app on your phone works better than anybody else's. I
can lock and unlock the car off my phone. I
don't need a key. I just walk up. It's a
proximity thing. It knows i'm there with my phone. Opens
it go things like controlling the vehicle the air conditioning
for argument's sake, from the app, like I can look
at it and go the during the cabin outside on
the street. Now it's fifty degrees because it's a hot day,
(24:03):
I'll put the airconn on because I'm getting in the
car in half an hour. You get in it's cool
that stuff works better with a Tesla than any other brand.
Their supercharger network around Australia is better than anybody else's,
and they always work. Because they're Tesla branded, built by Tesla,
it's in their best interest to make sure they're working.
So Tesla sort of sits there as the gold standard
by which all the others should be judged. And then
(24:25):
you've got the likes of BYD and they're a perfect
example because now they've got a version that's under thirty
thousand dollars, so twenty nine nine ninety, and then into
that thirty and forty thousand dollars range. And when you
drive them, you don't feel like you're driving a cheap
car at all, you don't. It feels like it's put
together well. The technology works, it's got big screens, the
(24:47):
smartphone connectivity is great. The way that the car drives
is perfectly fine. They're comfortable, they've got storage, they've got
all the stuff that other electric cars have. And the
point you made earlier, Michael about China and Chinese manufacturing
is unequivocal. This is the start of the tidal wave
and it's not going to change anytime soon. And the
(25:10):
share of the market that these Chinese manufacturers have is
going to keep growing and growing, and the product onslaught
is mind boggling. If you go to Beijing Motor Show,
I'm constantly getting messages from friends and family going, Hey,
what's this badge on this car? I just thought, because
it's like a Chinese car, they don't recognize, and I'll
say it's a Zekra, it's an XP, it's a Deepal,
or it's Elite Motor, or any of these new ones
(25:31):
that have come. For every one of them, if you
go to Beijing Motor Show, there'll be twenty that we've
never heard of. Oh wow, it is staggering. The amount
of manufacturing and the scale of manufacturing is utterly staggering.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
My goodness, that is amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
So in that case, then if we go back to
Zoe's question, should she be doing this? And I don't
know Zoe's financial position, but it's human nature to look
at the cheaper end first and then kind of work
your way out. If you're working your way through going
from the cheapest to the most expensive, where can you stop?
(26:09):
Where would you stop?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Look? You don't nowadays for what Zoe would want to do.
You don't need to spend more than fifty thousand bucks.
If you want to spend seventy or eighty, you can
go and buy a Tesla or Volkswagen or whatever else.
But you don't need to spend more than fifty thousand dollars.
That's the first thing. Things like Byds and mgs fantastic
little cars. There's Zekas and Expangs as well. They're pretty
good little cars too, So I think fifty grand would
(26:30):
more than get you what you need. The other point
of that is if Zoe does what we spoke about before,
largely so, if she's got a pretty regimented sort of
driving routine that she has where she doesn't have family
that live three hours out of a major city that
she goes to every second weekend, or she has to
park on the street a five hundred meter walk from
(26:52):
her apartment or something. If she's got off street parking,
can charge the car at home and can do that
reasonably easily, I think she should absolutely consider an electric vehicle.
I really do think she should. However, if she's buying
one car for the next five to seven years, because
as the cost of living goes up, we know people
will hang on to their cars for longer than they
(27:13):
have for the last decade or so. You're buying one
car for five to seven years. You might be thinking
about having kids soon, or you've just gotten married, or
you're in a relationship where the kids might come up,
or you're in a relationship where one of you have
family that live outside of Sydney, and you're using one
car to do all of those things. I probably wouldn't
get an electric vehicle, but I think the majority of
(27:35):
us who live in the city and do the same
sorts of things Monday to Friday, it's absolutely worth considering.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So I drove the Volkswagen ID five.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Great car.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
It was great and full disclosure, Volkswagen were advertising with
us on fear and greed at the time, and so
they gave us there's cars to drive for a fortnight.
I have never had more fun driving a car. Yeah,
it was just it was I would jump back into
one in a hardbeat YEP. There is so much going
for evs, but I come back to where we started
(28:09):
and just say I don't know enough about them. I
don't know enough to actually understand. It took me a
little while to figure out kind of what everything is
and how it all works and where I'm going to
charge it, and you just think, Okay, in a year's time,
in two years time, in five years time, it feels
like everything else is going to catch up. The infrastructure
is going to catch up with the number of cars
that actually are available.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
The one thing that we haven't touched on as well
is the pace of change. So if you've got a
five year old mobile phone, it's pretty out of date
compared to the new one that comes out, and the
same with smart TVs and computers and things like that.
You could face a situation where you go and buy
an electric vehicle at the tail end of the development
process and then the next one's got all new battery
(28:52):
technology and your one is way out of date by
that point. You need to keep that in mind as well,
because the pay of change is very quick with electric vehicles.
It's a lot easier to develop the drive trains in
an electric vehicle than it is a petrol or a
diesel car. It doesn't take as long, and in China
they just do things so quickly. They just come out
with the tech, So you need to take that into account.
(29:14):
But you're absolutely right as the infrastructure catches up, and
if more and more people buy electric vehicles, there's just
going to be this ground swell.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I have a quick question, go for it. What about
the ongoing costs? An Eve had the same Red Joe
and insurance costs.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
Insurance is a problematic one, to be honest with you,
because fixing them can be quite expensive in the event
of an impact or an accident, so insurance is probably likely.
If you're comparing an Apple with an Apple, insurance is
probably more expensive. Your ongoing running Red Joe's the same.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Broadly, even though they're heavier cars.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, at the moment, Yeah, at the moment, that's broadly
the same. There'll be a little bit of an uptick
because they're heavier, and your Redgo is based on weight.
But it's not like it's going to be double, right,
because cars are pretty heavy these days generally, But those
to a side, you're at your every day running costs
next to nothing in real terms, Like as I said,
if you can charge at home, you're not paying much
(30:08):
at all, and your servicing costs are very low as well,
So I think again, yeah, you need to take that
into account too. I would I would probably get some
insurance quotes before I bought one as well, just to
see because if you've got you know, if you're driving
around in a mas to three and it costs you
seven hundred bucks a year to ensure, and you're looking
at one of these byds, which is similar sort of money,
(30:30):
and it's going to cost you two thousand dollars a
year to ensure. You need to understand that before you
go and do it, because that's something that we all
do after the fact. We all go, I've got to
get insurance. Now, you don't think about it before I do,
because you're smarter than us, a lot smarter than us.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Clearly leave, I get a quote before I make a decision.
Oh my god. Hello. I have one question though, as
a motoring all around the expert, how do I stop
my kids from trashing of my car? Three large dead cockroaches.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Where my kids don't let them in exactly, make them walk,
catch the roof, put them in a little box trailer.
Kids have an ability to destroy cars that adults could
not comprehend. It's it's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I do have a partner who is disgustingly messy. I
even found a gas cook top in the back of
his Master three, learning from him different bad examples Michael
reselling the value of my car Ram got upgrade.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Trent, thank you so much for coming in today.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Thank you man.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
That was motoring journalist Trent Nikolic Canna. I was going
to ask you, are you converted? Are you kind of
on board or at least you are now intrigued?
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Right I am? I am? Yeah. I I feel like
I now know enough not to want to buy one.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
OK.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
I'm actually I'm turned off buying one because I know
I now know enough not to want. No, that's not
right for me, and I think that's a smart decision itself.
But I mean, I have my lifestyle is a bit
different than I have three big dogs. I need to
put them in the boot of my car. And an
EV doesn't do a big SUV car that could work
for me. And I have trouble. As you know, I
(32:18):
don't charge my phone, so I'm like a car crash
waiting to happen with that is charging. So there we go.
We know no EV for me yet.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, unless you can prove that you can keep your
phone charged beyond twenty percent.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
And we know that change is rapid, so maybe in
six months time, there is.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
The perfect car for me and I hope that we've
answered your question Zoe adequately and that we've helped inform
your decision. Now it canor if anyone has a question
that they want to send in, we can address how
do they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Best place is Instagram, a Sugar Mama TV or Canna Campbell.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Official and you can hear me every day with Sean
Aylmer on Fear and Greed business News. You can use
thank you for listening to how do they afford that?
Remember to hit follow on the podcast. And the best
thing you can do is tell somebody else Betty Yet
send them this episode. If they are thinking about buying
an EV and just want a little bit of advice,
then send them this episode and spread the word about
how today for that, Thank you for your company. Join
(33:11):
us again next week
Welcome to How Do They Afford That, the podcast that
peaks into the financial lives of everyday Australians. I'm Michael Thompson.
I'm an author and the co host of the podcast
Fear and Greed business news. As always, I'm with Canna Campbell,
the financial planner, founder of Sugar Mama TV, the financial
literacy platform that is on YouTube, podcast books, Instagram, threads,
TikTok and more. Hello, Canna, good morning, you are looking
(00:23):
excited today.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
I'm what a car person. I don't know anything about
a car other than it has four wheels and outside
of the car and a wheel in this side of
the car to turn. That's about the extent of my
knowledge around cars.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Well, luckily for you, Luckily for you, we have an
expert in the studio who's going to be helping today.
Because if I was asking you as the expert, this
would be a very very very short and highly likely
to be quite dull episode. But we have something we've
got to do today, right. It came as a result
of an email to you from a list Zoe, who
(01:01):
said she said, I listened to your podcast every day
and re listen to the podcast, which is great. I
need to include that part because it makes me feel good,
She says. Just recently, I was considering my fuel bill
of one hundred and seventy dollars a fortnight to get
to and from work. She says, I already used the
ruckus app and save between ten to fifteen dollars using
(01:23):
that car Pooling isn't an option as my colleagues don't
live nearby. My brother spends closer to two hundred and
fifty dollars a fortnite due to us living. I'm guessing
Zoe lives with her brother due to us living where
we want to live but having jobs further away. Okay,
all right, that's the background. It then got her wondering
if electric vehicles would outweigh these costs, or would the
(01:44):
increase in power plus the long term expenses make owning
one a good financial decision. Then I had a light
bulb moment. I wondered, if how do they afford that
has ever done a show on evs and maybe in
the near future you can get an expert in to
discuss this topic, to shed more light on something. So
she already knew that you weren't an expert on this one.
(02:06):
So Zoe has done us all the favor, and we
have asked an expert to join us, the best motoring
journalists and expert around, Trent Nikolic, Welcome to how to
they Afford that?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Hello Michael, Hello Canna. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Now, you've driven and written about just about every car
ever invented, which might exaggerate to the model to you.
You were telling us just before we started recording about
a recent car that you were driving, said anything just
to display the range of vehicles that you have driven.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
What was it?
Speaker 3 (02:37):
It was on the subject of how do people afford that?
It was an aston Martin Vanquish, which is a Canna
is going to start going to sleep here, But it's
a five point two later V twelve. It's twin turbo,
it makes an enormous amount of power, an enormous amount
of noise. It doesn't look obnoxious, So it's not one
of those cars that.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
People Yeah, it's not one of those it's understated.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Yes, so you're not going to drive it down the
road and people are going to say, look at that
driving that car. But it does cost drive away one
point two million dollars, which I realized after I picked
it up and drove it back to the office and
safely parked it in the garage, and then thought, I
probably should have taken that into account before I left
the dealership, just to have that little bit of extra.
(03:19):
I don't know that that veneer of caution that you
have when they're driving a car like that that is.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Not a car that you park near the trolley base
in a shopping.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Centre, is not at all not a car you want
to curb the wheel when you're reverse parking it because
the wheels are probably thirty thousand dollars each or something.
You know, you don't you don't want to even put
the slightest mark on a car like that. So I
would test drive that, and then the next week I
would be driving something that was, you know, twenty eight
nine to ninety drive away kind of thing. So it
and everything in between.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
That is amazing. So then you have seen the rise
of evs then, and you have seen the fact that
it went from really it was kind of the Prius
and the kind of the hybrids things coming into the
market to now an absolute influx of electric vehicles into
the market, and particularly the rise of Chinese brands like
byd Along with Tesla that's coming into Australia. So maybe
(04:13):
the best place to start is a good old fashioned
pros and cons list of evs.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
I think just quickly before I answer that what you
had to dig at Canna about when we started that,
she said she's not interested in cars and to the
letter from Zoe there, the problem with electric vehicles is
the level of complexity and detail with them that the
average person just can simply cannot understand. We have to
spend hours working out things like battery size and energy
(04:41):
consumption and charge rates and all of those things, so
you cannot and we do it every day, so you
can't possibly expect the average person to just look at
an electric vehicle and go yep. That makes sense to
me because there's a lot to take in starting with
the pros with that in mind, because it.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Really started with a con there.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
It's part of the research process, right, Like what I
probably should explain that a little better, I'm sorry. What
I mean by that is if you go and look
at a regular petrol car, because we've got decades and
decades of in depth research that sort of bred into us,
we understand what a petrol engine is, what a diesel
engine is we understand the difference between a four cylinder
(05:20):
and an eight cylinder, and we understand automatics and manuals.
Ye right, None of that applies to an electric vehicle.
So what applies to electric vehicles is that it's got
a battery pack and how big is that battery pack?
And then how far can you drive it with that
battery pack? And then does it have one electric motor
or two electric motors? Is it two wheel drive or
all wheel drive? There's all these other things that come
(05:40):
into it, and a lot of the time, I think
because it is so complex, people don't understand what it
is that they're trying to buy, which makes it even
more daunting.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Okay, so half the challenge then for these ev makers
is education.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, sure, absolutely, spot on, absolutely, And that's what I
was going to say. I think if you started with
the cons, I think the cons are And I've driven
an electric vehicle around Australia. So I've done sixteen thousand
kilometer lap of the mainland of Australia in an electric vehicle,
which I do not advise anybody to do ever again
anytime soon because it was torture stressful. Yeah, not smart.
(06:15):
So I've looked at all of the coms. If you
can think of a stupid way to have to charge
in an EV, we've done it, like with an extension
lead out the window of a motel in a remote
campground somewhere in the rain, or using a caravan park.
You know their PowerPoint that's a little bit higher rated
than We've done everything to try to get to where
we needed to get. So the cons are the difficulty
(06:37):
of owning that vehicle if it's the only vehicle that
you've got. So if KNA says to me, I'm buying
a new car, I buy one car, and I don't
really ever want to have to think about where I
drive it. If I decide I want to get in
it and drive Dubbo, I don't want to think about it.
I'd say, don't buy an electric vehicle because you're going
to have to plan where you stop, where you charge,
how long you stop, for all of those things. So
(06:57):
the range at the moment for people who are one
car family, or primarily one car families, is problematic. The
cost is another real issue for people in that they
are still even though the price has started to come down,
they're still significantly more affordable than a comparable vehicle in
that class that is not electric. So if you look
(07:17):
at a MEDIUMSUV that's hybrid and then you look at
a MEDIUMSUV that's electric, the suv that's electric will be
fifteen to twenty thirty percent more expensive. At the moment,
prices are coming down, but they're still more expensive. And
then the other impediment I think to buying them is
that the public charging infrastructure, and again I've experienced this
(07:38):
across the whole of the Australian mainland is nowhere near
where it needs to be for what would be a
very fast uptake of the vehicles. So in the last
couple of years, the new car sales in Australia sort
of between six and eight and a half percent of
them are electric. We already don't have enough charging infrastructure
for those vehicles. Jumped up to twenty or thirty percent
(08:01):
of new vehicle sales being electric, you'd have serious problems
with public charging. So I think you need to take
all of that into account as the negatives.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Because it's also the speed then of those public charges
as well. Because I experimented recently with an EV and
I picked the wrong charger. Basically, it was as simple
as that. And I didn't realize that the charge or
that there were fast charges and super fast charges. And
then the one that I went to, which was apparently
a snail equivalent and it was, I plugged it in
(08:30):
and went away, and it charged for eighty minutes and
it gained thirty percent in its battery or something. And
then I realized that if I'd gone to understand the road,
if I'd plugged it in for twenty five minutes, I
would have been at one hundred percent charge. That was
just that was a mistake. But it probably goes to
the idea of what you were talking about that there's
a lot of complexity.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yea, there is. There is absolutely And if any of
us go to a petrol station this afternoon, you stand
there for you know, two three minutes, fill the tank up,
you go in and pay for it. You know that
your tank full. To drive home with an electric vehicle,
I've plugged them in and gone yep, it's plugged in,
walked away, come back half an hour later. It hasn't
charged because the connection hasn't worked properly, and it hasn't charged.
It hasn't spoken to car or vice versa. You plug
(09:12):
it in and you think it's going to take forty minutes,
and it takes an hour and forty minutes. There's all
sorts of little things that can happen with that is.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
The holy grail. Then for evs to get to the
point where it takes as long to charge an EV
as it does to fill up a take of fuel.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, reckon, I reckon. If you had that there, so
even even sort of within that window, like if it
was five to ten minutes to go from say twenty
to eighty percent of your battery power, I think people
would start to go yep, that makes sense. And then
the other one is the price, because I think a
lot of people, you know. I had a girlfriend of
mine from university contact me yesterday and say, my husband
(09:48):
and I two kids, we need a new car. He's
saying I should get an EV. I'm thinking hybrid. And
I said to her, I wouldn't get an EV yet
because of the cost. And she said, that's what worries
me is that, you know, in her conversations with a husband,
they're talking about the fact that it's more expensive. So
I think charge time and then cost are the two
keys there.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I have enough trouble remembering to charge mobile phone. Imagine
how I go.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
With and can I tell you, can I tell you
that's gone now? Five percent years ago I test road
one of the first electric scooters that came into the market,
so like a big Vespa style scooter. Registered one. Every
single day I got home, I rode it into the garage.
I forgot to plug it in. I came down the
next morning and I went I didn't charge it. So
(10:35):
you have to again you have to change your behavior, right,
And that's that's another thing. You actually have to change
your behavior because at the moment when you're driving a car,
fuel light comes on, broadly speaking, unless you're in the
middle of nowhere, you can find a petrol station within
five to ten minutes of your house that is open
and put fuel in it and you go on your
way with an electric vehicle. If you do that, you're
(10:56):
going to have to plan around it. Because I've crept
into a charger with four kilometers range left in the
middle of nowhere, and I can tell you that is very,
very nerve wracking.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Because it's not as easy as if you run out
of fuel two k short of a of a petrol station.
You can just hike up with a Jerry Cannon away
you go. It's a little bit harder, Okay, So I
want to get to the pros. We'll do the pros
in a little bit. We'll talk more about pricing, because
you mentioned the prices there, and I want to get
an idea of ballpark figures and some of the brands,
some of the cars that we should be looking at,
(11:31):
particularly if you are looking at the more affordable end
of the market. So i'll do that in a second.
But first we've got to balance out all the negativity here.
What are the pros?
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Pros? Pros are very broad actually, and better now than
they ever have been. Right, So, once you own an
electric vehicle, they're silent, they're lovely to drive. The majority
of them are really really good to drive, and everybody
who drives one for the first time says it was
so quiet, it was so refined, the complete of drive
train noise. You know, you don't realize when you drive
(12:03):
a regular car. You've got engine noise, you've got gearbox noise,
you've got drive shaft noise, You've got all sorts of
things coming at you from underneath the car. With an
electric vehicle, all that goes and it's tire noise and
a bit of wind noise. That's all you'll hear. So
the silent operation of them, in theory, you're running costs
will drop away significantly, really really significantly. I've spoken to
(12:27):
engineers from various manufacturers around Australia who said to me
that with a lot of electric vehicles they've got what
they call one pedal driving. So you put a setting
into the drive mode and you effectively don't have to
use the brakes. So as you lift off the accelerator,
the car starts to decelerate itself because it's using the
electric motors in reverse to slow the car down. That
(12:47):
also harvests back some charge, right, But what that means
is you're rarely using your brake pedal once you get
used to it, and in fact, within a couple of
days of driving them, generally speaking, I'm not using the
brake at all with it one pedal stuff unless you
absolutely have to have an emergency stop. I've had engineers
tell me, for argument's sake, the brake pads will go
out of date and need to be replaced before you
(13:09):
will use them. Compared to a normal car, where your
brake pads might last depending on how hard you are
on them. Forty thousand k's, thirty thousand kays whatever. Right,
So with an EV servicing cost, when you go back
to the dealer, there's no oil changes, there's no oil filters,
there's none of that complexity. It's plug the thing into
a computer, check the brakes and tires, make sure there's
(13:31):
no system faults on your way. So running costs are
really good. And then the other pro for me, the
real big one, is put aside the environmental part of it. Right,
because governments are especially our federal government at the moment,
are yelling at us all about buying electric cars and
renewable energy and all of that stuff. Put that to
one side. We're just talking to you if you're thinking
(13:52):
about buying an electric vehicle for the practicality element of
using it, if you've got a really good deal with
your energy provider, if you've got solar panels on your roof,
even better, you put in a very simple charger into
your garage, and you drive your EV home, and you
get home at six point thirty after work, you plug
it in and it'll slow charge overnight. At a very
(14:14):
low rate and by the morning you'll have one hundred
percent charge that hasn't cost you a lot of money.
So if you can charge largely like that, it will
cost you a lot less to do one hundred kilometers
than it would if you were using petrol, even in
an efficient vehicle, So that part of the running cost
will start to make a lot of sense. That changes
if you're using fast charges like we were talking about before,
(14:37):
in public charging, because you have to pay for them.
Now they were free for a little while, you have
to pay for them, and depending on where they are,
how fast they are, what part of the country you're in,
that can be just about as expensive as putting petrol
in the car. But if you're broadly doing what most
of us do, which is go from A to B
to work and cup side trips Monday to Friday, and
(14:58):
you're charging at home to save a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Said, you're looking fascinated by all this. Someone who does
not care about car Suddenly.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I suddenly suddenly invested, heavily invested, And hopefully I think
we're at least part of the way towards answering Zoe's question.
We're going to take a quick break, and when we
come back, I want to get into more of the
money side, the pricing, which ones we should be looking
at price points and resale value as well, which is
(15:29):
another big question.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I also want to know about ongoing costs. So I'm
going to squeeze that one in there if you don't
mind done.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Okay, all right, quick break back in a moment. Can
We are talking today about evs electric vehicles and trying
to help our listener Zoe, who was wondering whether it
is a good financial decision to be buying one. And
we are joined in the studio by Trent Nikolic, motoring expert,
motoring journalist, just all around motoring guy.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Which which is boating really well given Cannon was half
asleep before we started, Like walks through the door, not
interested in you, mate, go.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I actually got caught yawning, actually, and we were discussing this.
We were during the break, just briefly about the fact
that that you are typical of a lot of people
that you are just cars are not your thing, but
you still need one.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
It's just such an expense and it's not you know,
I've like Michael, I have young kids who trash my car,
and I'm just I'm not in the market to buy
a car. You know. It's the sort of thing I
will go in research when I need to when it
comes to that crunch time, you know, particularly like Zoe here,
and that is I think when you do that deep dive,
(16:47):
but it is very overwhelming to try and find out
like what the genuine correct So You're lucky to have
you here and suddenly I'm now wondering, now you're interested.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, well that's the point of which would be less
about the passion and the fun of driving, and so
that's probably not a pro for you hearing how kind
of when we're talking about evs about just because they
are fun to drive because they are so fast.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, well you've driven one now, so you know what
they're like. I think what you're talking about here is
fascinating and just listening to the way Canter articulated that
research part. This is the challenge for us as motoring
journalists is that when you talk about electric vehicles, they
start to move more towards the way you would approach
buying an appliance than they do the way we used
(17:35):
to buy a car. So when you buy a fridge
or a washing machine or a dryer, or a new computer,
or a television ryer or an air fryer. You don't
spend You don't spend five years consuming every bit of
editorial coverage you can find and watching YouTube videos and
stuff because you love them. You just six months before
you buy one, you go, right, I need an air
(17:55):
fry I'm going to start doing my research. You'd look
at people who've used them and whatever, and then you go, OK,
I'm going to buy one, and then you don't research
it anymore. And I think electric cars for a large
percentage of the population are exactly that.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
How much is it going to cost?
Speaker 2 (18:10):
How much?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Big question?
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Right, it's a big range.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
What I think is really what I think is really interesting.
And I was double checking this to make sure that
nothing had changed, because it does overnight. What your real
benefit at the moment is that you can buy some
quality stuff under fifty thousand dollars, right, that's the first point.
If you step it up to one hundred thousand dollars,
that brings things like what you would broadly say is
(18:35):
the most I guess rounded electric car at the moment
that is affordable for people, which is a Tesla model
three and I'll tell you why I say that in
a minute, and that sort of sits in that seventy
thousand dollars range under fifty thousand dollars. They're going to
be from the Chinese manufacturers you mentioned previously, like BYD
and MG, and there's a few others that have started
(18:57):
to enter the market. Keep in mind that the tess
that we get a built in China as well, so
you're not there's no difference there. So the whole don't
want to buy something built in China is a little
bit silly because we're getting large, large amounts of things,
not just cars that come from China anyway, but we
are getting cars out of China that you might not
have thought come from China.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Can I ask you about BYD because they are in
terms of EV's they are the biggest selling EV in
Australia at the moment and for the first time in
August I think it was we had four Chinese manufacturers
in the top ten most sold cars in Australia new cars.
So this is clearly a growing market. Bid is probably
(19:39):
well statistically we can see it the one that people
are most likely to be buying, is it a good investment.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Investment, I would say no in terms of what we
know about things like resale value, retained value, all of
those things. Not because the product itself is no good
at all. I'm not saying that. What we have come
to realize in Australia is that I buy a car,
I keep it for five years. It's from a manufacturer
(20:08):
that's got decades of history in Australia. When I go
to sell it, I've got some idea of what it's
worth and the retained value, and then it's easy for
me to get rid of. On the second hand market,
we're talking here about Challenger brands that are new to
the market, that haven't been here for a very long time,
that don't have that history in our market. So I
(20:28):
can't tell you with any insight what that car is
like when it's five to seven years old with one
hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on it. Not the battery
pack and things like that, but just how the car is,
how does it hold together? I don't know because we
don't have that data and we can't necessarily trust what
they would tell us. The cars are doing in China,
(20:50):
where they've been around for a lot longer than they
have been here. So I think that sort of stuff
does affect value on the second hand market. Whereas if
you said to me, I'm buying a Mazda or I'm
buying a key, or we've got decades to say, well,
a ten year old one kind of looks like this
and kind of does these things with these challenger brands,
that is problematic. The second part of that that people
(21:11):
are worried about is what happens to the battery packs
over time. Now, it's a little bit simplistic to say,
and I have used this example before just to try
to make it easy for people to understand. It's a
little bit simplistic, but does the battery on your mobile
phone last as long as it did two years in
as it did when it was brand new? No, generally speaking, Now,
(21:34):
even if it's only five percent or only ten percent,
whatever it might be, you degrade, you've still lost something.
It's very hard to get accurate data from manufacturers or
anybody really about what happens to the battery pack on
an electric vehicle, and every use case scenario is different,
because if you fast charge them all the time, that
definitely has an effect on them more so than slow
(21:56):
charging them in your garage overnight. So if you're the
kind of person and who just goes, I don't want
to put a charger in at home, or I don't
have off street parking, or my apartment block won't let
me or whatever, and you have to use a fast
charger and you do that over the years, that will
degrade the battery to some degree, whereas if you're slow
charged it at home, you won't have that problem. So,
because it's very hard to estimate what that looks like
(22:18):
after five or ten years, the retained value of them
is very difficult to work out.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
There's a lot of unknown.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Risky variables that there is. There absolutely is, and I
can sense that you with your financial planning brain, you'd
be computing all those things thinking, well, I know what
I'm doing if I get a conventional vehicle, and here
is the great unknown over this side.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I'm leaning towards safety in reason exactly.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
In terms of so bid obviously at a lower price
point than say Tesla, how do the two stack up
against each other?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Pretty impressive byd is really impressive. I've got on one hand,
you've got all of the conventional manufacturers. Now you know
we spoke about or Fia, Volkswagen. They've got some really
impressive electric vehicles, Mercedes, Benz, BMW, Toyota, Lexus, you know
the Korean manufacturers. There's all those over there. Tesla will
always be the one that effectively started the segment, so
(23:19):
they got the head start, and even a decade later,
or more than a decade later, Tesla still has smarts
with the way that it uses its battery power more
efficiently than just about any other manufacturer. That gives them
an edge. So the Tesla ecosystem when you buy the
car still is better than any other manufacturer. So the
(23:42):
app on your phone works better than anybody else's. I
can lock and unlock the car off my phone. I
don't need a key. I just walk up. It's a
proximity thing. It knows i'm there with my phone. Opens
it go things like controlling the vehicle the air conditioning
for argument's sake, from the app, like I can look
at it and go the during the cabin outside on
the street. Now it's fifty degrees because it's a hot day,
(24:03):
I'll put the airconn on because I'm getting in the
car in half an hour. You get in it's cool
that stuff works better with a Tesla than any other brand.
Their supercharger network around Australia is better than anybody else's,
and they always work. Because they're Tesla branded, built by Tesla,
it's in their best interest to make sure they're working.
So Tesla sort of sits there as the gold standard
by which all the others should be judged. And then
(24:25):
you've got the likes of BYD and they're a perfect
example because now they've got a version that's under thirty
thousand dollars, so twenty nine nine ninety, and then into
that thirty and forty thousand dollars range. And when you
drive them, you don't feel like you're driving a cheap
car at all, you don't. It feels like it's put
together well. The technology works, it's got big screens, the
(24:47):
smartphone connectivity is great. The way that the car drives
is perfectly fine. They're comfortable, they've got storage, they've got
all the stuff that other electric cars have. And the
point you made earlier, Michael about China and Chinese manufacturing
is unequivocal. This is the start of the tidal wave
and it's not going to change anytime soon. And the
(25:10):
share of the market that these Chinese manufacturers have is
going to keep growing and growing, and the product onslaught
is mind boggling. If you go to Beijing Motor Show,
I'm constantly getting messages from friends and family going, Hey,
what's this badge on this car? I just thought, because
it's like a Chinese car, they don't recognize, and I'll
say it's a Zekra, it's an XP, it's a Deepal,
or it's Elite Motor, or any of these new ones
(25:31):
that have come. For every one of them, if you
go to Beijing Motor Show, there'll be twenty that we've
never heard of. Oh wow, it is staggering. The amount
of manufacturing and the scale of manufacturing is utterly staggering.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
My goodness, that is amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
So in that case, then if we go back to
Zoe's question, should she be doing this? And I don't
know Zoe's financial position, but it's human nature to look
at the cheaper end first and then kind of work
your way out. If you're working your way through going
from the cheapest to the most expensive, where can you stop?
(26:09):
Where would you stop?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Look? You don't nowadays for what Zoe would want to do.
You don't need to spend more than fifty thousand bucks.
If you want to spend seventy or eighty, you can
go and buy a Tesla or Volkswagen or whatever else.
But you don't need to spend more than fifty thousand dollars.
That's the first thing. Things like Byds and mgs fantastic
little cars. There's Zekas and Expangs as well. They're pretty
good little cars too, So I think fifty grand would
(26:30):
more than get you what you need. The other point
of that is if Zoe does what we spoke about before,
largely so, if she's got a pretty regimented sort of
driving routine that she has where she doesn't have family
that live three hours out of a major city that
she goes to every second weekend, or she has to
park on the street a five hundred meter walk from
(26:52):
her apartment or something. If she's got off street parking,
can charge the car at home and can do that
reasonably easily, I think she should absolutely consider an electric vehicle.
I really do think she should. However, if she's buying
one car for the next five to seven years, because
as the cost of living goes up, we know people
will hang on to their cars for longer than they
(27:13):
have for the last decade or so. You're buying one
car for five to seven years. You might be thinking
about having kids soon, or you've just gotten married, or
you're in a relationship where the kids might come up,
or you're in a relationship where one of you have
family that live outside of Sydney, and you're using one
car to do all of those things. I probably wouldn't
get an electric vehicle, but I think the majority of
(27:35):
us who live in the city and do the same
sorts of things Monday to Friday, it's absolutely worth considering.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So I drove the Volkswagen ID five.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
Great car.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
It was great and full disclosure, Volkswagen were advertising with
us on fear and greed at the time, and so
they gave us there's cars to drive for a fortnight.
I have never had more fun driving a car. Yeah,
it was just it was I would jump back into
one in a hardbeat YEP. There is so much going
for evs, but I come back to where we started
(28:09):
and just say I don't know enough about them. I
don't know enough to actually understand. It took me a
little while to figure out kind of what everything is
and how it all works and where I'm going to
charge it, and you just think, Okay, in a year's time,
in two years time, in five years time, it feels
like everything else is going to catch up. The infrastructure
is going to catch up with the number of cars
that actually are available.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
The one thing that we haven't touched on as well
is the pace of change. So if you've got a
five year old mobile phone, it's pretty out of date
compared to the new one that comes out, and the
same with smart TVs and computers and things like that.
You could face a situation where you go and buy
an electric vehicle at the tail end of the development
process and then the next one's got all new battery
(28:52):
technology and your one is way out of date by
that point. You need to keep that in mind as well,
because the pay of change is very quick with electric vehicles.
It's a lot easier to develop the drive trains in
an electric vehicle than it is a petrol or a
diesel car. It doesn't take as long, and in China
they just do things so quickly. They just come out
with the tech, So you need to take that into account.
(29:14):
But you're absolutely right as the infrastructure catches up, and
if more and more people buy electric vehicles, there's just
going to be this ground swell.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I have a quick question, go for it. What about
the ongoing costs? An Eve had the same Red Joe
and insurance costs.
Speaker 3 (29:28):
Insurance is a problematic one, to be honest with you,
because fixing them can be quite expensive in the event
of an impact or an accident, so insurance is probably likely.
If you're comparing an Apple with an Apple, insurance is
probably more expensive. Your ongoing running Red Joe's the same.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Broadly, even though they're heavier cars.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Yeah, at the moment, Yeah, at the moment, that's broadly
the same. There'll be a little bit of an uptick
because they're heavier, and your Redgo is based on weight.
But it's not like it's going to be double, right,
because cars are pretty heavy these days generally, But those
to a side, you're at your every day running costs
next to nothing in real terms, Like as I said,
if you can charge at home, you're not paying much
(30:08):
at all, and your servicing costs are very low as well,
So I think again, yeah, you need to take that
into account too. I would I would probably get some
insurance quotes before I bought one as well, just to
see because if you've got you know, if you're driving
around in a mas to three and it costs you
seven hundred bucks a year to ensure, and you're looking
at one of these byds, which is similar sort of money,
(30:30):
and it's going to cost you two thousand dollars a
year to ensure. You need to understand that before you
go and do it, because that's something that we all
do after the fact. We all go, I've got to
get insurance. Now, you don't think about it before I do,
because you're smarter than us, a lot smarter than us.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Clearly leave, I get a quote before I make a decision.
Oh my god. Hello. I have one question though, as
a motoring all around the expert, how do I stop
my kids from trashing of my car? Three large dead cockroaches.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Where my kids don't let them in exactly, make them walk,
catch the roof, put them in a little box trailer.
Kids have an ability to destroy cars that adults could
not comprehend. It's it's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
I do have a partner who is disgustingly messy. I
even found a gas cook top in the back of
his Master three, learning from him different bad examples Michael
reselling the value of my car Ram got upgrade.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Trent, thank you so much for coming in today.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Thank you man.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
That was motoring journalist Trent Nikolic Canna. I was going
to ask you, are you converted? Are you kind of
on board or at least you are now intrigued?
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Right I am? I am? Yeah. I I feel like
I now know enough not to want to buy one.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
OK.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
I'm actually I'm turned off buying one because I know
I now know enough not to want. No, that's not
right for me, and I think that's a smart decision itself.
But I mean, I have my lifestyle is a bit
different than I have three big dogs. I need to
put them in the boot of my car. And an
EV doesn't do a big SUV car that could work
for me. And I have trouble. As you know, I
(32:18):
don't charge my phone, so I'm like a car crash
waiting to happen with that is charging. So there we go.
We know no EV for me yet.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yeah, unless you can prove that you can keep your
phone charged beyond twenty percent.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
And we know that change is rapid, so maybe in
six months time, there is.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
The perfect car for me and I hope that we've
answered your question Zoe adequately and that we've helped inform
your decision. Now it canor if anyone has a question
that they want to send in, we can address how
do they get in touch with you?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Best place is Instagram, a Sugar Mama TV or Canna Campbell.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Official and you can hear me every day with Sean
Aylmer on Fear and Greed business News. You can use
thank you for listening to how do they afford that?
Remember to hit follow on the podcast. And the best
thing you can do is tell somebody else Betty Yet
send them this episode. If they are thinking about buying
an EV and just want a little bit of advice,
then send them this episode and spread the word about
how today for that, Thank you for your company. Join
(33:11):
us again next week
Popular Podcasts
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com