Why I started thinking seriously about buying an EV
I didn’t start thinking about buying an electric vehicle because I suddenly became interested in technology, or my mate Bruce said my Hilux was anachronistic, or because I wanted to make a political statement. I’ve been sceptical as ever but increasingly I’ve been thinking about it as a form of insurance.
Fuel prices are volatile. Supply chains feel thinner than they used to. New Zealand is distant, import-dependent, and increasingly exposed to events well beyond its control. An EV began to look less like a lifestyle choice and more like a hedge — a way of reducing exposure to a system I don’t control.
While the ability to contemplate buying an EV at all reflects a degree of economic security that many people don’t have, it doesn’t invalidate the question — if anything, it sharpens it. When people with options begin quietly insuring themselves against system risk, it often signals that the system itself is transferring uncertainty downward. Not everyone can buy insurance. That makes the quality of collective risk management more, not less, important.
Following that line of thinking led me well beyond transport choices and into the structure of the economy itself.
Energy continuity and the governance gap in New Zealand’s economy
Energy continuity is rarely discussed explicitly. That is not because it is unimportant, but because it is usually assumed: energy, fuel, transport, and connectivity will be available when needed, at tolerable cost, and with limited disruption. These assumptions sit beneath almost every business plan, risk register, and household budget. Precisely because they sit so deep, they are rarely examined directly.
The practical buffer behind these assumptions is measured in days or weeks, not months.
In recent years there has been much more discussion of cyber risk, climate impacts, supply-chain fragility, and geopolitical uncertainty. But the physical systems that underpin all of these — liquid fuels, electricity, freight, aviation — are still commonly treated as background conditions rather than dependencies that might need to be tested.
This is understandable. For decades, energy systems have been reliable, globalised, and largely invisible when they work. Optimisation for efficiency has delivered lower costs and higher productivity. But systems optimised for normal conditions do not always degrade gracefully under stress – rather like my tolerance for deflection after a while.
Status anxiety and an EV as reassurance
The cultural symbolism around EVs doesn’t help much. Electric cars have acquired a curious emotional charge.
An EV is not a climate saviour, a moral credential, or a substitute for energy policy. It is, at best, a piece of private risk-management hardware with a large battery attached.
Why EVs make sense here — and often don’t elsewhere
One reason an EV makes practical sense in New Zealand is often overlooked: the electricity system it plugs into.
New Zealand’s grid is already dominated by renewable generation. It isn’t perfect and still faces dry-year and regional constraints, but it is fundamentally different from grids that remain heavily reliant on coal or gas. Charging an EV here largely shifts energy demand within a domestic, mostly renewable system.
That is not true everywhere. In countries where electricity is still predominantly fossil-fuelled, EVs can simply relocate emissions and energy risk rather than reduce them.
This distinction matters. It highlights that the value of technologies like EVs is not intrinsic; it depends on the systems they connect to.
Keeping the old Hilux going
There is also a practical point that often gets lost in debates about electrification. From an embodied carbon perspective, keeping an existing vehicle on the road for longer can make more sense than replacing it prematurely.
A large share of a vehicle’s environmental impact is incurred at the point of manufacture. Scrapping a functioning car early and replacing it with a new one — electric or otherwise — writes off that embodied cost and pulls future impacts forward.
This complicates simple narratives about transition. It suggests that the most resilient path is not universal replacement, but thoughtful sequencing.
Horses, electrification, and the flies
Taken to its logical extreme, the most sustainable transport option would be a horse.
Cities didn’t abandon horses because they were inefficient, but because their waste overwhelmed urban life. Manure piled up, disease followed — and so did the flies.
The response was not better horses, but underground rail and electrification — a coordinated, infrastructure-led technological system shift enabled through a mix of private enterprise and public coordination. Auckland’s transport system reflects a different sequence of historical decisions. The removal of the tram network in favour of arterials and highways shaped the context we now work within, and reintroducing light rail has proved difficult, in part because future travel behaviour and the housing density required to support it are extremely hard to forecast reliably in the absence of clear precedent or suitable analogues.
The lesson is not about nostalgia or technology. It is about scale and limits.
Risks that sit above individual and enterprise decisions
Boards are responsible for the continuity and long-term viability of the organisations they govern. Individuals are responsible for managing risk in their own lives. But some risks sit above the level of any single enterprise or household.
Fuel supply, shipping access, aviation connectivity, and energy availability operate across sectors and across the whole economy. No individual board can ensure national fuel resilience. No household decision can preserve aviation connectivity or coordinate an energy transition.
This creates a structural problem: risks that are widely understood in technical and professional communities, yet insufficiently owned at a national level because they do not sit neatly within market mechanisms or political cycles.
New Zealand has strong institutions for managing markets, money, and individual assets. What it lacks is any standing governance function explicitly responsible for the continuity of the economic system itself.
Instead, we rely on a web of assumptions — about energy availability, logistics, and connectivity — that sit between enterprises and beyond the mandate of any single agency. When these assumptions hold, they are invisible. When they fail, the consequences are systemic. This is a governance gap.
Resilience as infrastructure, not ideology
Energy resilience is often discussed in moral, political, or technological terms. But at heart it is an infrastructure question.
In engineering and construction, it is normal to pay a small premium for insurance — often around one percent — for resilience, redundancy, and safety margin. That premium is not justified by everyday efficiency, but by unacceptable downside.
At a national level, New Zealand applies no such explicit premium to the systems it depends on most. The result is a balance-sheet illusion. The economy appears efficient and robust, but only because it implicitly assumes continuity of energy, shipping, and connectivity. These assumptions are unpriced assets. If they were marked realistically, national exposure would look very different.
China has invested heavily in ultra-high-voltage transmission to move electricity across vast distances, smoothing regional variability and reducing single points of failure. Whatever one thinks of its political system, this reflects a clear assumption: energy continuity is a national function to be planned and built. The same assumption underlies the deliberate creation of a large EV market, driven less by consumer preference than by exposure to imported oil, supply-chain risk, and urban air quality. In this context, resilience was not left for markets to discover, but engineered directly.
When exposure is recognised as systemic, relying solely on markets to resolve it is itself a policy choice — one that quietly assumes continuity until it is tested.
But this is not a moral argument. It is an accounting one.
Choosing how we learn
Buying an EV will not solve New Zealand’s energy fragility. But the fact that it increasingly feels like a sensible insurance decision is itself a signal.
When individuals and organisations quietly hedge against system risk, it is often because that risk is real but under-governed.
History suggests that governance gaps are closed in one of two ways: deliberately, or by default.
We can examine the assumptions that underpin our economy while they still hold, or we can discover which ones mattered most after they fail.
The difference is not foresight. It is whether meaningful choice remains available when assumptions fail.