A Chat with Max Patten

[00:00:21] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving and much, much more. My name is Bodhi and I am your host and today I am joined by Max Patten. Max is with a bipartisan organization called EVs for All America and their goal is to depoliticize how your car is propelled.

[00:00:50] Which I've always thought is very silly. Not everything, you can like what you like. You don't, it doesn't have to be a political motivation for liking EVs, Star Wars or Pokemon. You know, it's, it's, you like what you like and that's okay. As a matter of fact, I asked Max and one of the first questions I asked him is how did we get here? How did we, how did we politicize electric vehicles over internal combustion vehicles? And he had a really good answer.

[00:01:19] So, before we get into the interview though, I do need to take one moment and thank Gene for putting this all together. Gene sent me an email and he's like, Hey, are you familiar with this organization EVs for All America? I said, I'm not.

[00:01:33] And he said, would you like me to see if I can get somebody on the show for you? And I said, I would love that. And within, I don't know, probably 24 hours I had someone booked. It might've been a little bit more than 24 hours. I think they said yes within 24 hours and then Max was booked soon after that.

[00:01:51] So, this is a really fun conversation. And if you're thinking that this conversation is going to end up being political, while we talk about political opinions or political ideologies, what we're really trying to do in those situations is set up why somebody might think this way or think that way. It's not to advocate for one political viewpoint over the other.

[00:02:16] All right. So, big thanks to Gene. Big thanks to Max. I really think you're going to enjoy this episode. Let's go ahead and welcome Max to the show. Thank you, Bodie. My pleasure to be on here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to chatting about this. So, I'm going to be honest. One of the listeners of this show, Gene, he emailed me and he's like, Hey, have you heard of this organization EVs for All America? And I said, No, I have not.

[00:02:45] And he's like, Would you like me to facilitate getting somebody on your show? And I was like, Absolutely. Gene does a lot of things in California. So, he's kind of connected. And here we are. So, first, thank you to Gene. And second, Max, what is EVs for All America?

[00:03:02] Sure. Well, I'll give also a shout out to Gene. Thank you for making that connection. And yeah, happy to be on here. I'll say EVs for All America is an education kind of focused nonprofit. And we do a lot of polling market insights and research again, though, nonprofit sector. Our goal is effectively destigmatizing EV adoption from a partisan point of view and looking at roadblocks to adoption that exist. And we'll sure get into detail about some of those and kind of lobbying EVs.

[00:03:31] To get those removed. And so, we have market insights and data. We have a sister group, the American EV Jobs Alliance that actually does more of our lobbying arm. We're just the kind of neutral education arm. And we look at trends like, Hey, more Republicans are buying EVs. Isn't that interesting? Right? And that's not something, you know, oftentimes it's data people wouldn't expect.

[00:03:51] And so, we get written up a lot in news stories. And we actually have a podcast we do that I host. It's a roughly monthly schedule loosely called Directly Current. And that's more on the policy end of things. So, we speak to guests on how the EV transition is going in the US.

[00:04:07] We talk to analysts and consultants and look at the US as compared to China and everything that's going on in Europe and the state of the world. And it's very fun, especially for the policy wonks out there. So, that's a great time, but always a pleasure to nerd out about EVs. So, great to be on here. Yeah. So, we'll talk about the partisan thing real quick and then we'll kind of move past it.

[00:04:31] I will say just from the interactions I've had with the people in the community, right? In this EV community, in Kilowatts community, I have a nice mix of people from a variety of different political backgrounds, right? Mm-hmm.

[00:05:16] Yeah, that's a great point, right? Why should a power trade be political? I'm going to give my boss, Mike Murphy, Stump's speech. He's the kind of Republican pollster and politician who started this whole thing. And his philosophy of it is it begins sometime around 2010, 2011, I want to say, with the Nissan Leaf in the US market.

[00:05:36] So, not the great Leaf we have today. This was very much the compliance car. For its time, very innovative, right? But that hatchback affordable vehicle they made, to market it, they had this series of ads with a polar bear in it where there's a guy who gets a Leaf in his driveway and this polar bear who's really sad about the ice caps melting swims all the way and ends up in this guy's driveway, not to attack him, but give him a big hug.

[00:06:00] And isn't that sweet? Oh, he bought a Nissan Leaf. He's a friend of the polar bears. And my boss, Mike, loves to point out that ad. It's just a moment in time showing, hey, particularly in the early days of the EV transition, who were you trying to get? You were trying to get the Prius customer. You were trying to get the left of center kind of progressive folks who believed in climate change.

[00:06:21] It's not to say, you know, climate change, scientifically, objectively. I think many listeners of your show, regardless of their political orientation, can see what is in that. Unfortunately, in the US, we don't have a partisan consensus on it. Like, I don't think it's a partisan issue in lots of the rest of the world. In the US, it is. And I think companies like Nissan and Hyundai in the early days didn't quite understand that.

[00:06:43] Because if you talk to them in Korea or Japan, they would say, oh, climate change is not this polarizing thing. Here in the US, as all of us US listeners can probably relate to, it is polarizing. It probably shouldn't be, but it just is.

[00:06:57] And unfortunately, the EV movement very early on got caught up in this idea of kind of a holier than thou, like greenwash marketing and saying, oh, EVs are great for the environment, aren't they? And like, you know, I happen to think, yeah, they are better for the environment. Even if you have coal power generation, there's been studies that show, oh, yeah, EV power trains are more efficient. So we don't need to litigate that. I believe they are. However, there's so many other benefits, including cost of ownership, driving experience and other things.

[00:07:25] And we saw Tesla's success in the early days was largely deviating from the environmental trend and just saying, hey, this is a great vehicle. We want to lean into that and hope the rest of the industry really adopts and sees that. I think they have come around on it. But we still see at times a partisan divide that I'm happy to go into more detail on.

[00:07:45] Have you noticed a shift in just in general and politicians when it comes to, you know, their I guess their I guess it would be more kind of Republican politicians if we're talking about the dismissal of EVs. But have you noticed a shift in the last few years? Because I'll be honest, I went from in 2000 and whenever the Roadster came out, was it 2012?

[00:08:13] I was sitting in a bar with a friend of mine who was my captain at the time, my boss. And we he sees it. Elon's on TV, gets in the car, drives away. He's like, that'll never last. And I was like, no, no, I think this is some there's something to this. And I'm going to use him as a bellwether. Right. Yeah. Very conservative guy drives. He has it owns a painting business, still owns a painting business.

[00:08:41] He drives an F-150 Lightning. He's had several in his is the time that I've known him. He went from that'll never happen. This is a stupid idea to now we talk about like he knows what an E-rev is. I mean, he's a he's a 70 year old man who had no interest in EVs when I met him. And now he knows what an E-rev is.

[00:09:03] And he's asking me questions about whether the new F-150 Lightning E-rev will be good for his business and save him money. So I think there has definitely been a shift, but we're still not there. So have you noticed anything in the in the political space with the politicians where there's there's maybe somebody who is an ardent detractor of EVs has kind of mellowed on that a little bit.

[00:09:34] Yeah, that's a great point you bring up there. You know, there's so many of those anecdotal stories of people who, regardless of their politics, just driving EVs and word of mouth. Suddenly it's their favorite thing, especially folks in the contracting realm. Turns out electric trucks with the power export, all that stuff can actually be really good, even if they have their limitations still of towing. That's not the only thing people do with trucks. So I would say, yeah, a lot of this is a little bit overhyped in the media. Republican politicians have actually been mixed on EVs.

[00:10:04] You're right that the stereotypical conservative perspective has been, oh, EVs were Obama mobiles then turned Biden mobiles, right? It became politicized in that way. And so it became kind of normal for Republicans to just bash on EVs because that was something for the lips. That's changed a little bit in the sense of what you actually saw in the period of the early 2020s, I guess the first part of this decade now. It sounds weird to say, but there was a huge investment in factories and battery plants, particularly in the Southeast.

[00:10:34] And that has to do with taxes and not having to be subject to union laws. But for better or worse, lots of companies decided we're going to invest in America. And of course, there was some incentives and there were some government pushes like the Bipartisan Past Infrastructure Reduction Act to do that.

[00:10:53] Basically giving huge tax credits and incentives for companies to invest in America, particularly as they went about in the next generation of transportation, building EVs, both the batteries and the trucks and the cars themselves. You saw, you know, huge plants like Hyundai's plant in Georgia. Kia has one there too. Ford's huge Blue Oval Project in Tennessee. You have Polestar and Volvo's effort in South Carolina. Very interesting too, given that company is owned by Geely, a Chinese conglomerate.

[00:11:23] And yet there you have American Jobs in the South being created for EVs. And so what you've seen is a trend is lots of governors and people more local in politics, even at the level of some representatives and senators, though sadly not that many. Those Republicans realize, hey, these are jobs in my community and I actually, I like the extra tax dollars. And so we have seen that flip a little bit.

[00:11:46] Unfortunately, I don't think when you get to the national level and you look as more like U.S. senators, U.S. representatives, not state-level governors, those folks I think are still very partisanized in Congress. And it's still very popular to have a partisan narrative for EVs. See last summer with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We actually were hopeful that maybe some of these Republican senators would see, hey, there are things in my state going on that are huge for manufacturing.

[00:12:13] And those, they were addressed on the floor, but unfortunately when it came to voting time, they still voted mostly along party lines to pass legislation that, in my personal view, was really bad for the EV transition and undid a lot of the progress we made in the early 2020s. And so those factories are still there. They haven't disappeared. Even though you read about write-downs, there's still lots of jobs and there's this whole idea of a battery belt in the U.S., largely driven by these plants in the Southeast.

[00:12:41] So I think to the extent that we continue to see this bipartisan rhetoric of, hey, American manufacturing is a good thing. I don't think that's a right or left thing to say. And obviously, at least from a rhetoric perspective, the Trump administration has been very open to that. You can argue about how they've implemented it, and I have many thoughts on that, but that is part of the rhetoric. And so it doesn't seem like, to your point, anathema to say, hey, would be four EVs.

[00:13:07] Unfortunately, my point is basically, and the rambling here, at the national level, we just haven't seen Republican politicians get on board yet. Maybe that's because they need permission from the chief executive. Maybe it's because of the cultural issue still. It's warming, and you're right at the individual level. Folks who have owned a Lightning, folks, you know, just normal people, I think, understand this. The more experience they have with EVs. Unfortunately, politicians, particularly non-local ones, still don't.

[00:13:37] Governors, it's a different story. I think they're more on board. Mayors, totally on board. But again, it's very specific, right? If people have an economic benefit and they can realize it, they'll see it. If they can drive the vehicle for themselves, they'll absolutely see it. Yeah, and I mean, at the national level, it's also easier to campaign off of a boogeyman, whether, you know, it's the right or the left. Somebody's going to be the boogeyman.

[00:14:00] And so if you're making the boogeyman EVs, you know, voting for it, it maybe is not in your best interest personally. With that, what are some of the things that EVs for All America is doing in terms of kind of changing hearts and minds through policy and just conversations? Just information.

[00:14:27] So we do a lot of polling and we, you know, I'll give a link to you to share with your listeners for this episode to the work we do on our website. But we release lots of basically what are like focus groups and market studies that we get using polling methods that, you know, my boss used back in his days in a purely political sense. Now we use it from a market perspective of figuring out who's buying EVs, who isn't, why are they buying EVs, why are they not? And what we find is really interesting beyond the partisan angle.

[00:14:55] We've actually seen that healing a bit in the sense of particularly with Elon's whole adventures and stuff that actually has made Tesla owners in particular much more 50-50 Republican Democrat. So even though a lot of left-wing people were really turned off by Tesla now, very anti-Elon because of Doge and all of that stuff. What we actually saw, and we confirmed this with a recent guest on our podcast who has a separate consulting firm, Auto Pacific, their data also showed this. Tesla has moved more right in the sense of their customers.

[00:15:24] And we actually view that as a good thing because guess what? The people who had Teslas before and don't want to buy Teslas, now they're buying EVs from Ford or General Motors. They're still very much on board with EVs. The people who never thought they would have an EV, maybe they want a Cybertruck now because that's become the thing in their red county. And so we actually see that as a good thing in the sense of, hey, not every vehicle is going to be for everyone, but there is some interesting kind of brand opening up there.

[00:15:54] Also in terms of like OEM and brand influence, we find that guess what? People really like Toyota and they really want a Toyota EV, even though up until this point, that company has not made many compelling EVs. That's changing pretty quickly, but it shows you brand loyalty still has a huge effect. And then when people think of what the most American make is, they still say things like Ford. And so I think there's absolutely an appetite for people who want to buy a Ford EV.

[00:16:20] Now I'll nuance that and say, when we look at younger demographics, people are less brand sensitive or they're more price sensitive. And that's where we find people are not only open. We do find younger people, as you might expect, are more open to EVs and powertrains. They're also more open to the idea of Chinese brands. They don't necessarily have as much affiliation or nostalgia for a Ford or a Toyota. They'll say, hey, you know, I've got to buy a house eventually.

[00:16:50] I want to save money if BYD can come in here and I can get a $15,000 cheaper car that charges in 10 minutes. Sign me up. You know, that's my crude summation of it. But that's effectively what we've seen is the younger the demographic, both the more open to EVs. But also I think the American automakers should pay attention to this, the more open people are to foreign brands and new brands like Chinese entrants.

[00:17:16] I think that all of those things you're speaking my heart right now. All of those things I agree with. Like one of the things that I found interesting this quarter is, and we're talking on April 10th. I'll release this a little bit in a week or two. But on April 10th, in the first quarter, Toyota with one brand, one mediocre, in my opinion, EV, they sold more or one model.

[00:17:42] They sold more EVs than Ford did with two. And the Lightning was still in those sales numbers. So brand loyalty means a heck of a lot, especially for Toyota folks. And with the Highlander coming out and some of the other things that Toyota's doing, I think Toyota might be the sleeper. I think they might be the apple of the EV space for right now.

[00:18:07] Like they waited and waited and now they are making their moves when everybody else is pulling back. That might be a huge mistake. But Toyota, for all of it, like I have friends who own Toyotas and they're insufferable. I don't have a problem with Toyota, the brand. But my friends are just awful. Like their cars are fine. They're not the cars that they're claiming them to be. They're great cars, but they're not amazing cars.

[00:18:33] But anyway, my thing is, is I think Toyota might end up, at least maybe for the second half of the 2020s, winning the EV war. Because, you know, they're really good at engineering. They're really good at building a good car that 90% of the people love. But, you know, it's not something that is a spaceship. It's just a really good car. Yeah.

[00:19:01] And that shows you, right, it's the lived experience matters so much to people in the sense of what do their neighbors drive? What have they had good experiences with? And if people have realized, hey, everyone in my neighborhood has a Route 4. They're able to drive 200,000 miles or more with normal scheduled maintenance. That's great. And they also associate Toyota heavily with hybrids. That explains, I think, a lot of why people are so receptive to Toyota EVs, even though you're right.

[00:19:31] I agree with you. Particularly their early EV efforts were very half-baked. They've been improving quickly. They're coming out with new EV product. They're building a lot of it in America, which is great. But it's been, you know, yeah, they haven't been the most cutting edge. They haven't been spaceships. At the same time, people like what they know. And they see a Toyota. They can understand that. They look at certain other EVs. You get into, of course, you know, not even excluding factors like cost.

[00:20:00] But you look at something like a Rivian or a Tesla. And these vehicles are full of screens. They're full of what we call software-defined features. That's very exciting, especially maybe for those younger customers. But when you look at the average demographic of the new car buyer currently today, many of them are in their late 40s or their 50s. They have some money, right, to be able to buy a new car. And it turns out that they want something that is a little bit more familiar to them and they'll have more confidence in.

[00:20:30] And we find that to be a pretty high factor in what people buy. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So with that, what do you see when it comes to polling? Elon is a symbol on the right now. Are you seeing other folks, people on the right, giving other EVs a chance as well? Yeah, sometimes it's hard to look at the causation that specifically. We do the polling quarterly. And so what we notice is a trend. And it's probably a bit of a lagging indicator.

[00:20:58] I think your intuition is right that as people warm to Tesla, as particularly Republicans, we have noticed overall Republican resistance to EVs is lower. Now, that's not necessarily when we give our respondent answers. They're not answers like, oh, I'm going to buy an EV tomorrow. But it's like we have this response of EVs are not for someone like me. And that used to be much higher for Republicans. We noticed that dropped 20 points.

[00:21:24] And so Republicans now, at least broadly speaking, from our polling are in the position of, okay, maybe I'm not buying an EV tomorrow. However, there's less of this kind of like immune response to like, I'm never buying an EV. That's gone down a little bit. Now, that might also be from comfort level. Well, if you look at the polarized times, and we're still in polarized times. But if you look at the Biden administration, right, obviously very public messaging that EVs are the future. They're here to stay.

[00:21:53] Get them or get out, right? And, you know, you go back in time to, I think, some of these political matters. I think people felt really threatened by that and the idea of consumer choice going away. And, of course, that awakened all of these partisan instincts of people saying, oh, I disagree with the government in charge. They're pushing EVs on me. It's a scam. I don't want it. Now you go into the market we're in now where, frankly, the U.S. has lax to know environmental regulations of emissions.

[00:22:22] There's no immediate threat. Now, if you look globally, our market probably can't exist like that forever. But we are in this stasis point right now where there is much less federal scrutiny over regulations. People don't feel the burden as much. And, you know, topically now, we don't have the polling date on this yet because this is obviously much newer. But you look at the headlines and the state of the world being what it is, gas prices being much higher. Turns out people do warm to EVs on those economic points.

[00:22:51] And I wouldn't be surprised when we do this polling again to see people being even more receptive once they realize what they're paying at the pump. We've noticed a similar trend where, despite your stereotype and what you may think about government stimulus, when the tax credit existed, Republicans liked that too. Because it turns out everyone likes money. Everyone likes getting a deal. And so Republicans were more likely back then to buy EVs just on the basis of a tax credit or an affordability measure. What they didn't like was the messaging.

[00:23:21] And so that's a lot of the work. Also, to your earlier question of what we do at EVs for All America, we take this polling and we try to advise you. We advise automakers, their focus groups, and in our conversations with them, hey, you need to change your marketing or consider programs that focus on affordability metrics for customers. Because red or blue, everyone wants a good deal. And we've really noticed that trend. Yeah. And they want to keep as much money in their pocket as possible. Like in the fire service, I'm a firefighter.

[00:23:50] I don't know if I tell that to everybody. But in the fire services, there's a lot of folks who are conservative. There are a lot of folks who are like, why are we buying oil from foreign countries and all this other stuff? Why do we have so much reliance outside of ourselves, right? Yeah. And my argument to that is, why don't you drop by an EV because your power is local? Unless you live in one of the bordering states. But in most cases, your power is local.

[00:24:17] You can power directly from your solar panels, which many folks that I know have because this is Arizona and the sun is out here all the time. It kind of drives me nutty because then you're just not relying on that at all. And it's not like oil jobs. I came, we talked about this earlier, I was born in Alaska. All of my family made their money in some way or form or another from the oil industry.

[00:24:46] Like I don't think the oil industry is going to go away just because, you know, we increased the number of EVs we have. We still need plastic in those interiors. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. And there's other things that oil is used for. It's not just powering cars. What's one of the things that kind of, when you do the polling, what's one of the things that has surprised you when it comes to just kind of looking at the, what the sentiment around EVs?

[00:25:14] When that can come from either party side. I would say the thing that, I mean, the partisan gap is surprising. I think the generational divide is also illuminating. Another thing I'll say is also the knowledge. Uh, and it's the sense of, and this is some of the other work we do. A lot of this is based off, uh, you know, I think there's the now an industry term for this. It used to be range anxiety. Now it's the charging anxiety.

[00:25:40] I think folks are well aware now that many EVs on the market can reach 300 miles of range, uh, or more, right. Uh, using EPA data and on a highway, it's close to that high, if not even higher with some vehicles. The issue is with charging. Many people can't charge at home. And so, but I think it was surprising in particular, realizing how many people, um, weren't really quite aware of the convenience.

[00:26:07] For many people, the EV thing felt like sacrifice because it's this idea of an extra burden, an extra thing you have to do to go and fill up. When you tell people how home charging works, they love EVs. And maybe that feels intuitive, but I feel like the industry hasn't reckoned with this enough.

[00:26:24] And I do want to give another shout out, um, to Ford who I think a year or two ago started the program of giving people EVSEs or, you know, charging equipment for their EV when they bought a Mach-E or a Lightning, uh, RIP discontinued for the moment. Right. But they, when, when they buy a Mustang Mach-E to this day, still, you can get a charging equipment from Ford free of charge, uh, not just the equipment itself, but they'll cover reasonable electrician install costs. You know, barring if you live on a ranch with like 10 miles of conduit. Right.

[00:26:54] But like up to some reasonable limit, they will pay for your charging install. That is a huge adoption barrier. And it's something I think the industry still needs to do a better job of. We've done a great job, I think, of selling people on like, oh, this truck is fast or has lots of range. And the new affordable stuff is exciting. Can't wait to see the next generation of products. But guess what?

[00:27:15] You can put someone into, uh, you can put someone into a last generation, uh, lesser technology EV and they'll actually, I think, be happier. This is my opinion. Uh, if they have home charging versus giving them a state of the art EV, but they have to go to Electrify America every week or twice a week, you know, depending on how much they drive. The convenience factor of home charging is huge. And some of the work we've done, uh, specifically in California has been looking at policy measures to actually break that down.

[00:27:44] Because when you think of folks who live in what's called multifamily units or like condos and apartments, many of those people cannot, uh, do the overnight charging thing because their landlord doesn't know what to do. It's hard to get it permitted. There's all these barriers to installing that when frankly, particularly what we call level two charging in the nerd sphere or like that kind of overnight EV charging. That is not that expensive to install compared to DC fast charging. And we're of the opinion we need much more of it.

[00:28:12] And I think some of the polling data bears that out, that the convenience of home charging is a huge barrier. And once you get over that hump, people are way more willing to go into EV. I agree. I've had a couple of folks on that are trying to find what the ultimate solution is for EV charging in apartments.

[00:28:32] And one of the things that I think is, um, one of the things that kind of out the gate, out, out of the gate, like if you have an established apartment complex and you want to have this space in, on the property that is, this is reserved for EVs, but it's really far away from the panel. And then you want more space than what your panel can handle. And you get, you'll get some company out there that will give you this astronomical bill.

[00:29:01] Like it won't, it won't be as much as a DC fast charger. You're right. But it's going to be a high tens, if not the low hundreds, depending on how far away it is and how much they have to trench and all that stuff. But there are other, um, options available. Like orange chargers, a company for instance, that will just install a regular outlet. At a normal charging spot and you can, you know, slowly charge off that outlet.

[00:29:27] They have a whole system that charges you the money so that the apartment complex is announced. Um, is there a, a kind of a better way to get the, the information to property owners or property managers that. Yes, you can do it the way that this company who wants to charge you $90,000 to install five chargers. You can do it that way.

[00:29:49] Or you could actually work with some of these other companies that have found a, a more reasonable and more affordable way of doing kind of the same thing. Maybe you don't have one area for charging. Maybe you have multiple areas for charging and maybe they don't charge at 48 amps. Maybe they charge at 20 amps. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to be technology agnostic to your point. There's companies like orange and I think there's also Panda electric.

[00:30:13] There's plenty of folks who are doing really innovative things in making installs cheaper by not, uh, overbuilding or by challenging assumptions of what people used to have about level two sharing power more intelligently. Uh, you know, grid distribution is a big bottleneck, uh, and with our aging grid and lots of areas of the country, including urban parts of California, where you think lots of people will be ready to adopt TVs, but they can't yet because of this multifamily bind.

[00:30:41] Um, and so I think, yeah, being open-minded, the technology is important. And to that extent, what we want to do is when the state helps, let's say subsidize and install or make it easier with permitting, there should also be some guidance or some flexibility that allows for different kinds of technologies. It doesn't say, oh, you must install this 48 amp charge point unit. That'll be $6,000. Thank you very much. Um, you know, this industry. Yeah. A lot of people will pad their pockets for sure.

[00:31:10] And, and we're not against packet pot, uh, pocket padding. It's capitalism. And so I think there's a, to the extent that you can have policy levers that work, incentivize the electricians to want to do this. Because let me tell you, if you get the electricians and the installers who are unionized or whatever your state priorities are, but if you get them on board and you incentivize them heavily to do this, they're going to do the sales pitch themselves.

[00:31:34] And suddenly the landlord doesn't need to worry about it because he's going to have people knocking on his door saying, Hey, I can do this for this bid X, Y, Z. Uh, and we want to make it easier for the tenants too. And one more thing I'll say in the polling data is we found, uh, it's people aren't against, they don't expect free charging. They're willing to pay for it. Uh, and many of these apartment folks already pay like a hundred dollars a month for parking.

[00:31:56] We found in general, people are willing to pay about $35 a month for a flat rate for charging, not including the energy, just for the convenience of having a charger in their spot. Then you tack on the energy cost and charge something reasonable. Let's say in California, energy is more expensive. The neighborhood of 20 to 30 cents a kilowatt hour with maybe some off peak accommodations. People are fine with that. That's still a lot cheaper than fast charging.

[00:32:21] And you can imagine, you know, uh, Arizona or Colorado or elsewhere in the U S where we're blessed with cheaper electricity. It's an even better deal. Uh, people can save a lot of money. And so I think innovative solutions are great, but from a point of policy leverage, uh, you want to just kind of get on board with, um, with getting the installers and getting the labor to want this because that's the big bottleneck. And right now they have to deal with so much permitting and the way the, um, regulations are written in certain States.

[00:32:51] A lot of the incentives are really only equity driven, which is fine. Like it's based on income. But when you think of, let's say a pragmatic environmental standpoint, if you're a state and you want more people driving EVs to drive down emissions, does it really matter how much income they have? Or does it matter that they can get a charger if they live in their luxury condo or if they live in a rent subsidized condo? Doesn't really matter. They should all have charging. That's our take on it. No, I think that's great. I think that's great.

[00:33:19] One, it's funny that you say get the electricians on board because every single person I've had on to talk about charging infrastructure, they say, well, we're, we're making money, but it's really the electricians that make all the money. And I don't know if they're really pushing that off onto the electricians. My dad was an electrician. I know that electricians make good money. But on the other side, the, the, it's just every single company that comes on to talk about what they're doing. They're like, oh, well, the electricians, they make all the money.

[00:33:47] So, I mean, yeah, for sure. You know, incentivize those folks and, you know, make it more streamlined. I don't, I don't think that we need to throw more roadblocks up to, to charging infrastructure, but we definitely need to make sure that whoever's putting that in the infrastructure, infrastructure in is, is, is, you know, doing it in the way that they should.

[00:34:09] But more so, you know, just, I, not haphazardly, they're just not just throwing stuff into the ground without thought or care. But, um, I do think, you know, maybe easing up on some things. I know just installing the charger in my garage, uh, the installer was like, oh, we don't need to tell the city that they're doing this. And I said, no, no, no, no. I'm going to sell this house one day.

[00:34:36] I need the city to make sure that this is cool because I'm not going to go back and pay for something later. So we're going to make sure we're going to do this right. But, uh, you know, I think the city of Tempe, which is where I live, I think they, they did a decent job of making it easy, but I know not all cities do that. Yeah. And, I mean, you look at the way many condos and many unit, uh, many of these, uh, for rent apartments are done, particularly in California.

[00:35:03] The ownership model is pretty private in the sense of a lot of it is based off, uh, you know, complicated property agreements that go back generations. And that makes the logistics of getting this paperwork to install a charger is really difficult. That's where we think the power of government is actually best used. Let's try to streamline this as much as possible. Remove as many, obviously still prioritizing safety installs.

[00:35:28] And you can advance policy priorities of keeping journeymen and electricians employed, uh, and making sure they're certified ones. But at the same time, remove the excessive, uh, red tape and considerations that we think have been slowing things down. Uh, and that'll vary a lot locality to locality, but there, there are a lot of those considerations. And that little bit of friction makes it much, much harder for anyone living in an apartment right now to, uh, to live happily with an EV.

[00:35:56] Agreed. Hey, Max, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Where would people go to find out more about EVs for all America and then your podcast directly current? Yeah. Well, thanks for the shout out. Happy to be on, uh, people can go to EVs for all America.org. That's our site where we have all our info. The podcast is directly current. Uh, and so that's in YouTube and all of the podcast apps. And like I said, we try to have monthly guests on there. We're not as regular as you guys.

[00:36:24] We're not in the newsy business, but when we do have conversations, we focus on these kinds of policy issues, uh, and what kind of roadblocks that are happening. So love to talk EVs been a pleasure, uh, being on. Thanks for the invite. Uh, thank you so much. And I don't know if you can hear my cat in the background, but she's upside for some reason. So I should probably go make sure that the other one's not stuck somewhere. Maybe she's a Toyota owner. All right. First of all, I want to thank some, I want to thank Max for joining me.

[00:36:54] And I forgot that he threw that Toyota owner joke in the, at the end there, I left it in cause it was a number one. It was a great callback and number two, I think it, I don't know. It just tickled me. It was so funny. So Max, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show and, uh, you know, hanging out with me. And then I also wanted to thank Gene cause you know, Gene's always been super supportive of me and the show.

[00:37:21] And, you know, I know, like I said, uh, I think as an interview, he does, he does a lot of stuff around EVs and, uh, climate in California. And, you know, I've had an opportunity several times to chat with Gene and he's somebody that cares and you can tell. So again, a huge thank you to Gene for doing that. All right, everybody, that is it for our episode today. If you want to email me, it's Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com.

[00:37:49] You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Bodie Grimm over on LinkedIn, B-O-D-I-E G-R-I-M-M. Oh man, what else? Uh, things, I'm finally catching up on things. I'm finally getting things organized. It feels like it's been, you know, the last six weeks have been like a whirlwind, but things are slowing down. I actually woke up yesterday and felt really good and energized and got a lot done.

[00:38:16] And I got a lot done already this morning and it's only 830 and I've already done just a ton of stuff that needed to get accomplished. So I'm feeling, feeling very on top of things right now. That's not a normal feeling for me. So our next episode will be Jill Simonello, who is an auto journalist and a delight. We had, I had a lot of fun talking to Jill. It's just, just a super easy person to talk to.

[00:38:45] And we talked about different EVs and racing and I don't know. It was, it was a fun conversation and I think you're going to enjoy it. All right, everybody. Thanks so much. I will talk to you soon. Bye.