Electric vehicles are everywhere, including in the writer's garage.
Greg Bruce buys a car and gets more than he bargained for.
I bought it without driving it, without seeing it, without even seeing a picture of it. I didn't know what colour it was and didn't know the location of the dealership from which I was buying it. I bought it over the phone, from someone with whom I'd exchanged only a few words, most of which were her trying to describe the colour.
This is not to say I didn't know what I was getting. I've been through enough pandemics to understand the importance of doing my own research. I'd looked at both Google and Trade Me and I'd read various threads on EV-nerd Facebook groups and other forums. I'd even been to a dealership, where I'd arrived braced to protect my wife and children from the oncoming rush of high-pressure sales tactics but was instead confronted by a salesperson who appeared so unimpressed by our presence he didn't even stand up to greet us.
"Can we drive a Nissan Leaf?" I asked.
"No," he said. "All the ones we have here are already sold."
"When might we be able to drive one?"
He shrugged. "Never?"
I gave a confused laugh.
"They're all sold before they get here," he said.
I had seen the pictures of hundreds of EVs arriving here on ships and I'd read the stories about the explosive growth in registrations, and I'd noticed a sharp increase in the number of Teslas on the roads in the city's eastern suburbs, but none of that spoke so clearly to me of the enormous speed of the shift to EVs as did my standing in front of a car salesperson who appeared to see no need to sell me a car.
We hadn't been planning to buy an EV. Initially I looked at some small petrol cars, then Zanna suggested a hybrid so we looked at a few Priuses and even drove a couple, but they already seemed like relics.
The more I thought about buying a car driven by stinky, dangerous, ludicrously expensive pollutants, the more ridiculous it seemed. After a while, the only rational argument I could see against EVs was purchase price, which is slightly higher than that of equivalent petrol cars, but if you can afford the extra outlay it won't take long for your gas savings to pay that back, with enough left over for a nice tropical holiday or two.
It struck me that the brashly confident, laid-back salesperson seated before us not only knew all this, but knew that we knew, and was therefore happy to watch us try to convince him to sell us a car he didn't yet have.
I felt myself returning to the consumer persona I had been forced to adopt, wildly against type, when we bought our first house in the crazed Auckland property market of the mid-2010s, when our chances of success were directly correlated with our ability to convince our rational brains to go on holiday. If Zanna hadn't dragged me out of that car dealership, I could easily have gone all the way back there and bought one of the sub-par cars the salesperson eventually grudgingly showed us on his company's website, and I would probably also have convinced myself I loved it.
Luckily, a day later, on another EV dealer website, I found the perfect car. It had only just been listed. I called immediately and was devastated when the salesperson told me it had already sold.
"What exactly are you looking for?" she asked, consolingly.
I told her I'd been on her website and seen every available Nissan Leaf and that she had no others that suited us.
"What about this one?" she said and described a car that was even more ideally suited than the previous one, at the same price.
"I didn't see that on your website," I said.
That's because it wasn't, she said. Their EVs were selling so quickly, she didn't have time to get them all listed on the website.
"I'll take it," I said.
She told me it would be two weeks before the car would arrive. I found it so hard to wait. I wanted it in my garage so bad. A few days before it was due to arrive, I called her and asked for an update. I could tell from her voice that she was frazzled, that I was far from the only new EV buyer calling, desperate to commence my new petrol-free lifestyle, with all its savings and environmental benefits and potentially boring dinner party/water cooler conversation.
She told me the car had arrived the previous day, along with 15 other EVs. They hadn't yet been groomed though. The groomer had been away sick, probably overwhelmed by the gushing torrent of EVs.
"Sounds like we're in the middle of an electric vehicle boom," I said.
"Yes," she said. "My phone's been ringing literally every five minutes."
I apologised for my neediness and asked when she thought I might be able to pick it up. She said if I really needed it the next day, a Saturday, she could make that happen. Because I didn't really need it and because I felt sorry for her, and because I didn't want her to know how needy I am, I told her the following week would be fine.
So, when she called the next morning to say it was ready to be picked up, I was surprised and delighted. I felt a surge of excitement run through me. I couldn't get there fast enough. When I walked in and saw it sitting there, plugged into a charger, like something from a utopian novel, I felt the same rush of joy I had felt a couple of weeks earlier, when picking up our kitten from the SPCA.
I drove away, thrilled by the silence of the lack of engine beneath me, self-satisfied by my use - but not understanding - of regenerative braking. I was infatuated. When I got home, Zanna said we should come up with a name for it. It was so obvious I didn't even need to think about it: Cutie Pie.
We kept our old seven-seater, with its petrol engine, because we need a second car to get the kids to various commitments, but it was a week or two before I drove it again. As I turned the key, felt the unhappy rumble of the engine and smelled the stink of gas, it felt so idiotic, so retrograde, such an unfathomably harmful thing for humanity to have done to itself for so long, I wanted to get out and walk.
When the kids suggested later that it too should have a name, I didn't hesitate: Stupid.
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