I’ve Been Running An EV Publication For A Year. Here’s What I’ve Learned
Transforming a society centered around gas-powered cars is proving harder than expected. And it requires thinking differently.
The concept of entrenchment has been on my mind a lot lately.
I have covered the auto industry as a journalist for more than a dozen years and have been a car enthusiast my entire life. Even so, I can truly say it’s hard to understand how entrenched the car industry is in modern society until you pay close attention to what happens when things start to change.
After a year at the helm of InsideEVs, I can see those fault lines more clearly than ever.
I'm grateful to work alongside such a talented and dedicated team of reporters, editors, video creators and contributors. 2024 isn't even over yet and it's been the wildest and most uneven year yet for the electric vehicle revolution, which to us feels both inevitable and also millions of miles away. We get more news to cover in a day than many publications get in a week.
But covering the EV shift must be like covering the rise of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s; most people don't yet understand the magnitude of change we're all facing. What's going on right now isn't just "cars that you plug in." It's the rise of the battery economy and the war over who controls it. It's the transition from fossil fuels to a hopefully more sustainable future. It's automation, jobs and widespread economic upheaval. It's a software-driven transformation of how we'll get around someday, with all the good and terrifying things that entails.
I'm not even sure that the car companies can see all of that, either. That's because change is not a concept anyone is used to when it comes to cars.