Slowdown, What Slowdown? The EV Revolution is Just Getting Started!
My guest this week on Cleaning Up was Dr. Andy Palmer CMG: godfather of the mass-market EV, piston-head turned restless pioneer of all things BEV. Man behind the Nissan Leaf, ex-CEO of Aston Martin.
Why are electric vehicles set to dominate the transportation landscape? Can legacy automakers adapt quickly enough to the EV revolution, or are new entrants set to wipe them out? And how close are we to the holy grail of fully autonomous driving?
This week on Cleaning Up, I sat down with Dr. Andy Palmer CMG, a pioneer in the electric vehicle industry. With over 45 years of experience in the automotive sector, Andy has witnessed and helped drive the industry's transformation - from his early days as an apprentice to leadership roles at Nissan and Aston Martin, and then a number of innovative players in charging and batteries including Optare/Switch, Podpoint and Brill Power.
In the episode, Andy shares the fascinating story behind the development of the Nissan Leaf, the world's first mass-market EV. He delves into the challenges of bringing this groundbreaking vehicle to market and how it kickstarted his journey from "piston-head" to "battery-head."
We also explore Andy's time at Aston Martin, where he tried to steer the iconic British brand rapidly towards an electric future, but was forced out after the company’s unsuccessful IPO. We touched on Astongate, the discreditable episode just after Andy’s departure, in which wife of the company’s former Director of Government Relations and Corporate Affairs was found to be behind a sock puppet PR agency spreading anti-EV tropes.
Andy and I finished up by discussing autonomous driving. Why it is such a hard challenge, why no one has been able to produce a true driverless car despite a decade of promises, and whether that is all about to change. TLDR: Andy and I didn’t think so.
The fact is that society does not have flat safety expectations across different activities. We tolerate vast numbers of deaths from road traffic accidents, drugs and (in the US) guns; we tolerate no aviation, train, tram or fire deaths. Interestingly, we tolerate quite a bit of bus death (generally pedestrians and cyclists rather than passengers), especially in London, the least bus-safe city in Europe (there’s a fascinating episode of ExtraOrdinary on that: Institutionally Unsafe - The Episode TfL Doesn’t Want You To Hear which anyone living or working in London, writing paens to our Mayor, or just visiting, should listen to).
What this interaction between risk and personal control means is that if or when we do roll out autonomous vehicles, even if they are marginally safer (and by the way the data on that is still highly questionable) society will have no tolerance for their failure. Media will react very differently to "human messes up and kills family" than to "car company software messes up and kills family".
Already from the social media comments on the episode, it is clear that lots of people disagree. Some don’t just disagree, they get very angry, which seems weird, but there you go. I'm just telling you how it is, as a former board member and safety panel chair of TfL, one of the world's largest transit authorities. Many of the same people also seem angry that we got through the 67 minutes without mentioning Elon Musk, Tesla or FSD. That wasn’t a pre-arranged plan, it is just the way things worked out.
It’s a fascinating conversation, on track to be our most popular episode ever, and you should listen to it or watch it now!
Cleaning Up is supported by its Leadership Circle, whose founding members are: Actis, EcoPragma Capital, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation and Wärtsilä. For more information, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live
Listen to my conversation with Dr Andy Palmer, auto industry maven and EV pioneer, on your favourite podcast platform, or watch it on YouTube!
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