The EV Musings Podcast Nov 3, 2025

274 - The Nudge Episode

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Hi, I'm Gary and this is Evie Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things

that are interesting to electric vehicle owners.

This season of the podcast is sponsored by ZAPMAP, the go-to app for EV drivers helping you

find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Our main topic of discussion today is nudges. Back in 2012, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein,

who are two respected behavioral economics professors, released a book called Nudge. The

basic concept behind the book was that it's often much easier to affect people's behavior

using simple methods rather than more complex methods. Two examples. If you want kids

at school to choose healthier food options at lunch, rather than changing the menu and

taking all the bad food off the menu, which is seen as mandating food and taking choice

away, it's often easier just to rearrange things. If the French fries are prominently

displayed instead of carrot sticks, guess what? Kids choose French fries. Put the

desserts at the start of the line instead of the end and guess what? Kids choose

more desserts. Common sense, really, isn't it?

The other famous example from this book relates to workplace pensions. In many places in

the US, pensions are opt-in. A person has to physically tick a box on a form to opt-in

to a specific workplace scheme. Research has found that many people weren't doing this

and were missing out. By changing the form to opt-out rather than opt-in, the rate

of workplace pension enrollment rose dramatically. If you didn't do anything, you were automatically

enrolled. If you didn't want to enroll, you could easily make the decision yourself.

These things are known as nudges and there are thousands of examples in everyday life.

Now I'll put an affiliate link to the book in the show notes in case anyone wants to get

a copy for themselves. A well worth a read. But it did get me thinking. What sort of

nudges can we put in place to help people make the switch to electric vehicles, solar

panels, battery storage and heat pumps? And more to the point, how many of these

nudges are behavioural, i.e. there's something individuals will react to psychologically and

how many can be legislative, i.e. there's something in law that makes the choice inevitable.

I recently read a post from someone talking about one of the manufacturers pulling back

on their electric vehicle ambitions. And his comment was, some slash many people just

don't like electric. Now my response to him was, many slash most people have never

driven electric. And I think this is a key thing to understand when it comes to the transition.

There's a lot of people out there who have thoughts and opinions on EVs with absolutely

zero knowledge and experience about them. I, for example, have never walked the Appalachian

Trail in North America. I've heard it's long and arduous but with lots of great scenery.

Now I have walked the Pennine Way, some of it in Yorkshire and I hated every minute

of it. But does that mean the different paths in a different country with different terrain

and different weather will be the same? I doubt it. So if I were to decide to walk the Appalachian

Trail, I'd do lots of research and I'd speak to people who have done this rather than dismissing

it because of an unrelated experience I had in my youth. And it's the same thing with

electric vehicles. So let's start with the legislative aspect. We currently have regulations

in place in the UK that mandate which cars are allowed to be sold to the public by year.

It's known as the Zedd mandate. And in 2030 80% of all new cars sold to the public will have to be

zero emission vehicles. Now this is not a nudge. In fact it's the exact opposite of a nudge.

But am I saying it shouldn't be there? Absolutely not. What I am saying is that

there is a lot of pushback from certain segments of society who object to the fact

that they are being told what they can buy. It's not that they don't want an electric car,

it's that they want to choose an electric car rather than be forced to buy an EV. So

what sort of a nudge can be applied to help this move along? Well the primary nudge relates to

availability and accessibility of vehicles. Electric vehicles in particular. Simple things

like the green stripe on EV registration plates. Now for those listening abroad,

all newly registered EVs in the UK are provided with a license plate that has a thin green strip

down one edge. Now this instantly identifies it as zero emissions at the tailpipe. Seeing more and

more cars with this green stripe is a subtle nudge to people that there are a lot more of these

on the road than you probably imagined. Although the overall percentage versus the

total number of cars on the road is still relatively small. Most lay people won't know

whether a car is electric, unless it's something obvious such as a Tesla, but they'll easily

recognise the green strip. Another nudge is the peer pressure one. Authority endorsements

can sway public opinion. If we encourage public figures and celebrities to publicly choose and

promote EVs, that has a positive effect on perception. Although it has to be a public

figure that we respect, politicians don't necessarily get a pass with this. But it's also applicable

when the nudging is very simple. For example, in the TV series Good Omens, a streaming offering,

all the cars shown in that show are electric apart from the main character Crowley's car,

which is a fossil fuel guzzler, which is quite appropriate as he's a bad guy. In a recent

film I watched, the main character drove a Rivian as their everyday vehicle. In several

recent police shows in the UK, the main characters drive electric cars, I saw a Skoda Enyaq in one

and an Audi e-tron in another. And these are all subtle nudges to normalise EVs and make them a part

of everyday life. Remember, the vast majority of people driving cars in the UK have never

driven an electric vehicle. These are still big, scary things that they don't understand or

know anything about, so subtle nudges like this mean they become normalised.

So how about the way cars are sold? If I go into a car dealership and I see that there are 10 cars

on the showroom and only one of them is in an electric car and that's somewhere at the back,

away from the window, it's signalling to me that I might want to consider another petrol car first.

It's like the kids in the french fries at school. Conversely, if all the cars near the

entrance are electric and the fossil fuel burners are way down at the back of the showroom,

it sends a different message. It's a subtle nudge. Likewise, if I stand outside the dealership

and I see that there are a lot of fossil fuel vehicles on the four court and no EVs,

it nudges me in a certain direction. If I go to a dealership or a lease company website

and the first cars I see are petrol or diesel ones and I have to go searching through the

website for electric vehicles, that's a nudge in the wrong direction. So let's take a look

at some of the other things that can be done to help increase the uptake of electric vehicles.

How about advertising? Now there are of course two aspects to this. Firstly,

there's the concept of advertising electric vehicles themselves and then there's the

concept of advertising the electric vehicle experience. I talked extensively about these on

episode 271 with James McKee-Me and I would recommend you go and have a listen to that

episode for more details about what I'm talking about. However, there is another aspect to this

which is advertising of fossil fuel vehicles. Do we still need to be seen adverts for the latest

Toyota Prius, Volkswagen Passat, BMW 3 Series or Kia Sedona on our TVs? Why are we still

advertising fossil fuel cars when, by definition, if you're looking for a new car,

you'll go to a dealership and ask about the range available? Has anybody sat at home and

seen an advert for a BMW 3 Series and thought, hmm, that's it, I want a 3 Series. Now I would

maintain that it might have pushed them towards a BMW dealership but the actual car being advertised

has probably not made that much difference, which means advertising an EV will get someone

into a BMW dealership as well or as effectively as advertising a 3 Series. So let's get that

nudged place and remove adverts for fossil fuel vehicles. Now, while we're on the topic of advertising,

why do airlines need to advertise? The general consensus seems to be that we need more

runways in this country to accommodate all the extra flights that are coming in and if this

is the case, these extra flights mean we don't need to advertise the airlines, do we? Are

people suddenly going to stop taking their £12 weekend breaks to Prague because Ryanair

stop advertising them? I don't think so. Get airline adverts off the TV.

But if we're looking at behaviours that will help things move towards a more sustainable future,

we need to make sure that if a sustainable option is available somewhere, it is the default,

not the option. Let's take solar panels on new houses, for example. The default should be that

if you are building a new house or converting slash extending an existing one, the default

should be that solar panels and perhaps a storage battery should be the default. Without that,

planning permission should be more difficult. If you can specify a legitimate reason why solar

panels shouldn't be installed, then that's fine. But it shouldn't be the default and that's

another nudge. I've said many, many times on this show that the easiest way to get someone

into an EV is to physically get them into an electric vehicle. Get a test drive organised.

Back in the COVID times, this was actually quite difficult because there simply weren't enough

electric vehicles in the country. Waiting lists were long and cars were sold as soon as or even

before they arrived on the forecourt. Nowadays, this isn't the case anymore and as a result,

there are opportunities to test drive electric vehicles. However, there needs to be nudges

that will influence people to drive one of them. Maybe people are reticent to head

to a dealer and ask for a test drive and because this will put them onto a dealer's radar and it

can lead to follow-up calls and questions that may not be welcome, they just wanted to test drive

a vehicle and see what it looked like and felt like. But if there are opportunities for people to

take cars out for test drives without the need to visit a dealership and hand over your details,

this will certainly encourage the sort of uptake we're looking for.

It's a simple nudge. Organise events where members of the public can turn up,

talk about electric vehicles with people who know what they're talking about

and physically drive them. I've been to several of them recently. Harrison Hughes

and Bill Murray and Brighton have done a couple of these and we'll be talking to Bill Murray

later on in the season. Barcha County Council organised one in Winnurch a month or two back

and of course the Everything Electric show provides the opportunity to drive multiple

different EVs at every one of their shows around the world and they've now done something

in the region of 160,000 test drives across all their events which is absolutely fantastic.

So what else would be considered a nudge? Well if you're getting your vehicle as a company car

then the tax regime is often a useful way of nudging people towards electric cars. The UK

government had reduced the tax applicable to people who drive company cars if they're electric.

For a BMW 3 Series for example and I'm not picking on BMW 3 Series for any reason other than

it's a BMW 3 Series. For a BMW 3 Series for example each year the driver is taxed on a concept known

as benefit in kind in other words the company car forms part of your salary and should be taxed as

such. For the benefit in kind or BIC as it's called they take the value of the car and they

apply a tax rate and this is the amount you need to pay in tax each year on that car.

A 3 Series Sport with a list price of £41,310 where the employee pays all the private fuel

would have a tax liability £5,783 for a higher rate taxpayer that's around seven and a half percent.

Now for an equivalent electric car the benefit in kind payment is three percent

and for a time it was zero percent and those are exactly the kind of financial nudges

that can help. The other one related to buying cars is salary sacrifice

and this is the way of using your pre-tax income to buy a car at a reduced rate

and pay tax on only the remaining money rather than your full salary. Salary sacrifice models

apply to zero emission vehicles only not fossil fuel cars and that's definitely another nudge.

I did a whole episode on salary sacrifice with John Burdkin in episode 152 and we also covered it

on the EV101 part 1 episode this season where I talked with Cheryl Clements from Tusca about

this. So I think it's fair to say that there are numerous things that can be done to

nudge people towards either driving, using or considering electric vehicles. Did I miss any

major ones that you can think of? It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with you

listeners. Tesco has added its 1000th electric home delivery van and this one is at the Cardiff

extra store. The fleet now includes 20 vans at that store and Tesco plans to nearly double

its online delivery vans to about 1250 by spring 2026. Tesco's aiming for a fully electric home

delivery fleet by 2030 to cut emissions and improve air quality. Now as an ex-grocery

delivery person myself I reckon that's a load of good news. What if Tesco would be willing

to let me tag along with the driver for a shift? Would you have any interest in that?

We'll see. Let me know.

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About this episode

Exploring the concept of 'nudges' from behavioral economics, this episode discusses subtle ways to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles and renewable technologies. From legislative mandates like the UK's ZEV sales targets to small behavioral cues such as green license plates, media portrayals, and dealership layouts, the host examines how these influence public perception and choices. The episode also highlights financial incentives like tax benefits and salary sacrifice schemes, and the importance of hands-on experiences like test drives. Additionally, it touches on the impact of advertising and corporate fleet electrification efforts, offering a comprehensive look at strategies to accelerate the EV transition.

BMW 3 Series Toyota Prius Volkswagen Passat

Original notes

In this episode, Gary explores the concept of 'nudges' and how they can be applied to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy.

He discusses examples from behavioral economics, such as rearranging food options to promote healthier choices, and applies these ideas to the EV market.

Gary also examines legislative nudges, like the UK's ZEV mandate, and the role of advertising and peer pressure in normalizing EVs. The episode concludes with practical suggestions for increasing EV uptake, including test drives and tax incentives.

The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.

Links in the show notes: