We charge our phones in the car and don’t even think about it. But charging the car itself? That instantly feels like an annoying chore. Strange, isn’t it?

📱 You’re on the motorway with your favourite podcast playing and the phone sits on the wireless charging pad enjoying its charge up. The only worry you have is that you might forget it when you get out. You come home in the evening, shoes in the closet and the phone straight to the USB-C cable so it’s ready again in the morning. You charge it whenever it’s convenient because it’s just so easy.

🚗 With the car though, we plan, search for the right charging points, calculate range, filter providers and many only charge when the battery is nearly empty. Same action and yet we operate in completely different mental models.
I am aware of the lack of price transparency, the patchwork of providers, the missing right to charge at home, those are problems of an immature market. But those are obstacles to overcome, not limits to cope with. Because at its core, an EV is just a battery on wheels.

⛽ We blame technology but what we really mean is good old conditioning. For decades we learned: vehicles need fuel, and fuel only exists at petrol stations. So we drive there and naturally fill up the tank. Because you don’t want to keep driving to the petrol station, that’s no fun at all, it’s a tedious chore. I call this petrol thinking.

🔋 And we unconsciously transfer this model onto the batteries in our cars, even though batteries work completely differently. You charge when it suits you, not when the battery is empty. And you do it wherever you happen to be, because there’s electricity almost everywhere. You don’t optimise for filling the tank as fast as possible, but for not having to think about it at all. That’s true battery thinking.

But with EVs we fall back into petrol thinking yet ironically telling everyone that we evolved to something much better. We want the ‚tank‘ to be charged quickly instead of letting charging disappear. The mental model runs deep, thanks to perfect conditioning.
And you can’t charge your brain with a new conditioning overnight, unlike your phone does. The update takes longer, but you can trigger it manually to speed things up. But only if we stop copying the petrol station model and start treating batteries like batteries.