15 Years

The Fully Charged Show is now an annoying teenager

I’m allowing myself a brief period of nostalgia. I know such self indulgent nonsense is not helpful or creative and I generally try not to wallow in the past, but every now and then I think it’s acceptable and possibly enlightening.

On June 11th 2010, 15 years and one day ago, I released an episode, shot and edited very much in the old presenter lead factual entertainment style. But on YouTube.

I mention that style because that is what I’d learned in the preceding 30 years working in what is now often called ‘broadcast TV.’

This short video tried to explain about a very nascent but emerging technology, the use of many computer batteries joined together in one big box, shoved into a car, which then supplied enough electricity to run an electric motor which in turn, made a motor vehicle move along.

The whole thing was a bit shonky, a bit bodged together, a bit cludged to use an Americanism. It really wasn’t very convincing. Add to that the rather major drawback that even if you could plug this vehicle into an outlet at your home, once you were away from home there was, and I mean this literally, nowhere to charge it.

So today I have to admit it is very hard to put myself back to that day 15 years ago and understand what the hell I thought I was doing. There were billions of perfectly serviceable motor vehicles all over the planet, they had come to dominate the world we lived in, roads had become the most commonplace shared infrastructure we use. Roads are everywhere, cars are everywhere, the support services they needed to keep running was everywhere.

Yes, okay, they burned a fuel and the toxins and gasses that just happily poured out of the exhaust slash tailpipe were a tiny bit of a drawback, but everyone was used to that, it was normal.

It really wasn’t until the summer of 2012 when I drove my Nissan Leaf, 100% charged from the solar panels on my roof, (it took 2 days) a journey of 68 miles to an ancient watermill in Dorset that had been converted to generate electricity.

Once there I charged the car from water turbine power only, (it took 5 hours) and then drove home again. It was on that return journey that something which I still think is fairly profound struck me.

It was an incredible privilege to be able to drive a machine, made from materials that had been dug up and refined, transported around the world, constructed into a vehicle in Japan, shipped to the UK and sold to me. A machine just like any combustion car but with one, massive, game changing, oil industry threatening difference.

I could charge or ‘fuel’ if you like, from the sun and the rain. This was the first journey I had managed to complete in such a way, it was revelatory. It was also incredibly niche and impractical, what normal person was going to spend 2 days charging a car from solar panels, then wait 5 hours while it charged from a turbine in an old watermill, and only complete a journey of 136 miles. Yes, you may call me a dreamer and at the time, I wasn’t the only one but it was close.

But I still can’t understand quite what drove me on. I know that in the previous 10 years, from around 2001 to 2007, I was making a show in the UK called Scrapheap Challenge, and in the USA called JunkYard Wars and during that time I did hear and speak with a lot of engineers who were developing battery management software and electric motor control systems, they talked about different battery packaging approaches and the imminent arrival of electric vehicles which would ‘save the planet.’

Even in 2005 when I heard this, it annoyed me. I knew whatever we humans did, the planet wouldn’t give a toss. If we wipe ourselves out tomorrow, in a million years time the planet will still be here. How about we try and save ourselves would be my mantra.

Anyway, somehow I managed to keep putting out episodes, not every week by any means but whenever something was offered. The launch of the Nissan Leaf in 2011. The Renault Zoe around the same time, the launch of the Tesla Model S in 2012, the Model X in 2015, and the Model 3 in 2017.

Those were the big, early milestones, and of course I’m missing out dozens of other electric cars launched in those years. However most of them were either plug in hybrids or an electric conversion done by the big manufacturer that was producing an existing petrol combustion car.

They simply took out the engine, gearbox and petrol/gas tank and fitted a limited amount of batteries and a small electric motor. I mean it was an electric car, but just not a very good one, and it cost hugely more than any equivalent combustion car at the time.

Basically, between 2010 and 2015, other than Tesla and toward the end of that period, VW, there was very, very little progress. There was a lot of activity though. A huge, determined push back by the fossil fuel lobbyists and their army of willing fellow travellers, stooges, patsies and loudmouth bullies.

It was as if the very notion of the electric car was a direct challenge to white male superiority, the patriarchy, call it what you like. Just the thought of a car without a combustion element which resulted in noise and of course, clouds of toxic, carcinogenic gas, was a direct threat to a man’s image of himself.

For some reason, I didn’t seem to be affected by this threat, in fact I thought it was quite funny. But during those early years I found myself in quite a privileged position. The general attitude from the wider motoring press, men who wrote or talkerd about cars, was either hostile rejection or snide cynicism. If you worked in PR for a big car company that had gone to the effort of making a genuine, functional electric car, say the Hyundai Kona, it wasn’t that easy to find a sympathetic ear.

Big Mr Clarkson dominated that field with such and enormous audience and influence, and electric cars seemed to threaten his very existence poor sausage.

So step forward an ex-comic actor slash TV presenter slash author who thought electric cars might, one day, eventually, be a viable alternative.

I was in contact with a lot of the big automotive companies in the UK, the USA, Korea and Japan, and I knew they were busy developing some very interesting technology. And sure enough, over the following ten years we witnessed the shift, from hyper niche, only bought by rich virtue signalling boomers, to a wider and wider demographic.

The people who made the terrifying leap to electric cars very rapidly learned they were just cars, only better than the old fashioned ones. Of course there was still enormous resistance and push back, as there should be with any new technology, but the resistance was waning.

In 2018 we ran our first live event at Silverstone motor racing circuit. Looking back it was only just one up from a village fete but a lot of people came along, we had some electric cars on display, lots of information and displays of home renewables, chargers, batteries etc. Quite understandably, no big car company wanted anything to do with us, for all they knew ‘Fully Charged Live’ as it was then could have been a total disaster.

Thankfully it was a total success and the following year, we had a respectable showing of the big car companies who had electric models they wanted to sell. After visiting the show during the first year, they were very willing to have a stand at the second.

The figures all doubled, I suppose word got around, we moved to a much bigger venue, and of course I am skipping past the pandemic as that nearly finished the whole thing, but since then, the shows have gone from strength to strength.

Not only in the UK, but the Netherlands, the USA, Canada and Australia.

The company grew from me and the occasional camera operator I could afford to hire to a full time team of about 30 people, most in the UK, but a lot of freelancers around the world.

Some of the team who ran this years event in Sydney, Australia.

It’s mind bogglingly complex to run and maintain with constant challenges, if there is one skill I have it’s knowing what skills I sadly lack. One of them is running and managing a business. I leave that to an incredible team of genuinely lovely people led by Dan Caesar, the CEO of Fully Charged Show Ltd.

In a couple of weeks we are making some changes, not so much to the shows or the live events, but to the name. From July onwards, The Fully Charged Show will be known as Everything Electric cars.

Our other channel, currently Everything Electric will become Everything Electric tech. It will all make sense. I promise.

I feel incredibly lucky to have stumbled into this world, to have found an amazing team that share my passion, indeed, a team who have made what we have achived so far possible.

I may not be around to see it, but I fervently hope there can be a 30th anniversary in 2040 because whatever happens in the world, it’s going to be a very different placed by then. I wish I could confidently predict that it will be better, and doubtless something will be, but there are some pretty enormous challenges for the next generation.

But as always, if you have been, thank you for reading.