Kirsten Corson

No, because those Chinese EVs are not pieces of crap.

that you're going to throw away in five years' time.

And, you know, I'd say go for a drive in a BYD and see what it's like.

I mean, I'm not sure if you've got Kate across the line, but I'm happy to send a couple of EVs round for you to try, but it is astounding.

The majority of

of EVs and cars now are manufactured in China and they're most certainly not pieces of crap.

Because it's that high capital cost and if you want to make EVs affordable for everyone and accessible for everyone, we have to get

EVs coming into that second, third, fourth hand market and particularly in New Zealand when the average cost of a car is $14,000.

So making that initial investment, if you think an EV costs you $900 including rucks a year to fuel it up and a petrol car is going to cost you $2,200 a year.

So

You know, the total cost of ownership, it is far more cost effective for Kiwis to be driving EVs, and we're not importing $7 to $9 billion of fossil fuels.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the report shows that over 80% of people are charging at home or at work, and we're moving to smart charging, which is exciting because remember we've got vehicle-to-grid coming as well, which is going to add a lot of value into the economy.

So we still do need...

public charging infrastructure.

We're sitting around 1,800 at the moment, the report shows, but we still need more to give people the confidence that they can travel all around this country and are able to charge.

Well, you look at Ethiopia, they're doing better than us.

They've got 95% renewable energy.

We're sitting on 88%.

So for us, you know, and the likes of Ethiopia, when you've got that amount of renewable energy, this absolutely makes sense.