Why Petrol Is So Hard to Quit

Margaux Parker, breakfast host on Triple M Brisbane, announced last week that she would rather pay ten dollars a litre for petrol than drive an electric car. She’d also had enough of smug EV drivers.

When I heard that, I thought: who’s actually being smug here? The person who bought a car and said nothing? Or the person on the radio who decided to announce, at some length, how much they disapprove of other people’s purchasing decisions?

Margaux is not liberated from the EV but defined by her rejection of it. The smug EV driver she finds so insufferable has, by contrast, simply gone home and plugged in to a fuel source that can be made at home for 1c per km.

I could happily spend the rest of this post channelling my favourite modern philosopher, Alain de Botton, who has spent a career explaining why humans make self-defeating choices and then dress them up as principles, but I won’t.

Because underneath the performative EV-rage, there’s something real worth acknowledging.

The Real Reason For EV Hostility

For many people, the internal combustion engine is wrapped up in some of their most charged memories: a first car, a parent who showed them how engines worked, a version of themselves at 17 with the windows down and the engine roaring. There’s a genuine human attachment to something that is, slowly and undeniably, being replaced.

The hostility toward EVs is often grief in disguise. Grief for a tactile, mechanical world that felt comprehensible. Where you could hear the engine working, where mastery meant something physical you could adjust with a spanner. The EV, silent and software-managed, feels like a black box in comparison¹.

The combination of the loud derision and the quiet grief leads to an unspoken apprehension I’ve sensed recently, which I find genuinely interesting: the person who’s been running the numbers for eighteen months, who knows perfectly well that an EV would work for their life. Who has watched the fuel price climb with a growing sense that they’re on the wrong side of a slow-moving argument.

And yet they haven’t bought one because they’re worried about what other people will think.

Charging my Tesla instead of getting overcharged at the petrol station.

It’s Time To Accept Reality

But the imagined audience is almost always harsher than the real one. The family or friends who’d give you grief about an EV are, in practice, often at the servo forecourt, staring at the price board, running their own quiet arithmetic.

So if you’ve been sitting on the fence: buy the car. Buy it because it makes financial sense. Get it because you’re tired of watching the number on the pump climb. Get it because they are so nice to drive day-to-day. Get it because you did the research and you’re confident.

You’ve already made the hard decision. The social one. The one that required tuning out a Brisbane breakfast radio host and the ghost committee of imagined disapproval that’s been voting in your head.

Please, just go and buy the bloody thing.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.