So why do so many gas cars still fill the streets of Victoria, Saanich, and Sidney — even as electric vehicles become more affordable, more capable, and more available than ever before?
That’s exactly the question Yuko, a researcher and volunteer with the Victoria chapter of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (BCSEA), brought to Julian, founder of Motorize Electric Vehicles in Sidney, BC. The BCSEA is focused on helping BC transition toward more sustainable energy use — and electric vehicles are central to that mission. Yuko wanted to understand the real barriers people face, the misconceptions holding them back, and which policies or education efforts might actually move the needle.
What followed was a wide-ranging, candid conversation between two people who genuinely want to see more EVs on the road. Here’s what came out of it.
It Starts With How People Actually Shop for Cars
One of the first things Julian pointed out is something that often gets overlooked in the EV conversation: a car buyer is not a professional car buyer.
They’re a parent, a retiree, a young couple who just bought their first home. They haven’t spent months researching. They wake up one Sunday morning, decide to look at a few lots, and whatever experience they have that day shapes their entire perception of what’s available.
If they visit a dealership that only carries one EV model — and that model doesn’t happen to suit their lifestyle — they leave thinking EVs aren’t for them. Not because EVs aren’t great. But because they never found the right one.
Julian’s approach at Motorize always starts with the use case, not the car.
- How far do you drive every day?
- Where are you going to charge?
- Do you have kids in three different activities pulling you in different directions?
- Do you actually drive to Calgary every year — or has it been four years since the last trip, and last time you flew because the fuel cost was too high?
When you start with those questions, the right car becomes obvious quickly. And the savings become very real, very fast. Julian described a customer paying $1,800 a month in fuel driving a Jeep for food delivery. Motorize set him up with a Tesla Model 3 Long Range with Full Self-Drive. His total monthly vehicle costs dropped to around $650. He was significantly ahead every single month — not by a little. By a lot.
That kind of conversation changes everything. But it only happens if someone sits down and has it.
FUD: The Invisible Barrier Nobody Talks About Enough
Yuko raised something important early in the conversation — the role of misinformation in slowing EV adoption. Julian had a name for it: FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Here’s how it works. Rather than telling people outright not to buy an EV, certain industries with a financial interest in keeping gas cars on the road fund the creation of content that plants seeds of doubt. A story about an EV fire. A report questioning battery disposal. A headline about an autopilot incident. None of it says “EVs are bad.” But together, it builds a fog of hesitation.
Julian shared a perfect real-world example. He was at the Coast Capital office in Sidney picking up vehicle registrations when a friendly young woman at the counter asked him: “But don’t you feel bad about the water consumption?”
He asked her to explain. She said she’d read that hydroelectric power uses water that’s “gone forever.”
Now — this isn’t her fault. She read something, it sounded plausible, and it shaped how she thought about EVs. But the reality is that water in a hydroelectric system passes through a dam, runs downhill to the ocean, evaporates, forms clouds, and rains back down. It’s a closed loop. The water doesn’t disappear.
But if someone believes it does? The next time they’re at a car dealership, that little doubt is there. And they choose the familiar, comfortable option.
This is why Yuko’s work with BCSEA — community education, public outreach, honest information — matters so much. You can’t out-advertise FUD. But you can replace it, one conversation at a time.
The PHEV Confusion: “I Thought I Bought an Electric Car”
Here’s another barrier Julian sees constantly, and it’s one that actively hurts EV adoption: the plug-in hybrid misunderstanding.
A plug-in hybrid — or PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) — is a car that has both an electric motor and a gas engine, along with a battery that can be charged from an outlet. Sounds great. But here’s the catch: most PHEVs offer about 20 kilometres of electric range. After that, the gas engine takes over. And any time the car needs heat — the engine fires up automatically.
Julian described customers who bought vehicles like the Mitsubishi PHV or the Jeep 4xe because a salesperson mentioned they had a plug. They went home thinking they were driving electric. Then they realized they were still stopping at gas stations regularly.
These are sometimes called compliance cars — vehicles that manufacturers produce primarily to meet government fleet fuel economy regulations, not because they’re genuinely designed to deliver an EV experience. And when customers feel misled, it doesn’t just frustrate them with that specific car. It makes them skeptical of EVs in general.
A true battery electric vehicle — a Tesla Model 3, a Nissan Leaf Plus, a Hyundai IONIQ 5, a Kia EV6 — runs entirely on electricity. No gas engine. No surprises. You plug in at home, wake up with a full charge every morning, and only think about charging on longer road trips.
By the time people arrive at Motorize having already owned a PHEV, Julian says, they’ve usually figured this out the hard way. They trade it in and say: just give me what I actually wanted in the first place.
Buyer Psychology: The Spreadsheet vs. the Gut
Here’s something Yuko and Julian spent real time on — why people don’t always make the financially obvious choice.
It’s easy to sit down with a spreadsheet and show that an EV will save a family $30,000 to $40,000 over 10 years. The math is genuinely hard to argue with. But that’s not how most people make big purchases. They shop with their gut. They fall in love with how something looks. They get excited about a feature. They go with what feels familiar.
Julian used the example of the Ford Bronco — a stylish, popular vehicle that’s not particularly efficient and wouldn’t be the smartest financial decision for most families. But people love how it looks, and that matters.
The key, Julian said, is grounding the math in the customer’s actual life. Not abstract savings over a decade — but a concrete picture of what next month looks like, and the month after that. Once people see their real numbers, the decision often becomes easy. But they have to be walked through it by someone who’s genuinely interested in getting them the right car, not just closing a sale.
This is where dealership experience matters enormously. And it’s also where community education — the kind BCSEA does — can fill a gap that car dealers alone can’t.
Who’s Actually Buying EVs Today? The Answer Might Surprise You
When Yuko asked Julian who his customers are, the answer was pretty clear: everybody.
It wasn’t always that way. Early EV buyers were largely tech enthusiasts who loved the technology, and environmentalists motivated by reducing emissions. Both great groups — but a small slice of the population.
Now the profile is completely different.
Families are coming in to cut costs. Fuel, maintenance, and the unpredictability of gas prices add up. When you show a family with two working parents and three kids what their numbers look like over five years in an EV versus a gas car, it often becomes an obvious choice.
Retirees and seniors are coming in because they live in a zone. Their world is the doctor’s office, the pool, the grocery store, their family nearby. They don’t need 500 km of range. They need something reliable, comfortable, and genuinely cheap to run. An older Nissan Leaf — Julian has one on the lot right now for $10,000 with a newer 40 kilowatt-hour battery (that’s the energy storage capacity — think of it like a larger fuel tank) — goes 220 km on a charge. Running costs work out to roughly $1,000 a year versus around $5,000 a year for a comparable gas car like a Honda Accord. That’s $4,000 back in your pocket, every year.
Parents buying a first car for a teenager are coming in because safety matters. EVs are, by nearly every measure, the safest vehicles on the road. They’re approximately 400 times less likely to catch fire than a gas car, and they come equipped with safety and driver assistance technology that most gas cars simply don’t offer.
And then there are the unexpected customers. Julian mentioned retired sailors who buy older Leafs to harvest the powertrain for their boats — quieter and far cheaper than a diesel engine, chargeable off solar panels. And farmers who strip out the seats and use a $5,000 Leaf as a glorified electric workhorse around their property. These cars, Julian says, almost never truly die. They just find new owners with new purposes.
“My Only Regret Is That I Waited So Long”
Julian said he hears this so consistently, he could engrave it.
Almost every first-time EV buyer, without any prompting, says the same thing when they return after their first week with the car: I only wish I hadn’t waited so long.
Not a few people. Nearly everyone.
Whatever the hesitation was — range, charging, reliability, cost — the people who had those exact concerns and made the switch anyway are now the most enthusiastic EV supporters you’ll ever meet. That’s not marketing. That’s just what Julian sees, day after day.
The adjustment period is also much shorter than most people expect. Some customers call after their first night to say they “left the car on” — they got out and walked away because there’s no engine noise, and in the morning the car was all lit up. Julian laughs. Nothing bad happened. The car just runs silently. Within a day or two, it’s all completely natural.
What About Charging — Especially Without a Home Garage?
This came up in the conversation and it’s one of the most common concerns Yuko hears in her research. What if you’re renting? What if your building doesn’t have EV charging?
Julian’s answer: start with the use case.
Most Greater Victoria residents drive somewhere between 12 and 18 kilometres a day. Even at the higher end — say 50 to 60 km daily — a modern EV can handle a full week of driving and still have charge to spare. And at some point during that week, you’re going to a grocery store or a coffee shop. While you’re inside, you charge. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
The public charging network on Vancouver Island has also come a long way. BC Hydro has done genuinely excellent work installing fast chargers across the Island — Port Renfrew, Port Hardy, Tofino, Campbell River, Courtenay. If people are there, charging is available. Traveling around BC in an EV today, Julian said, is a non-issue for most realistic trip scenarios.
For workplace charging, Julian pointed out that it’s actually quite straightforward for businesses to install. A licensed electrician, a permit, and somewhere between two and four thousand dollars depending on the setup. Some businesses are even generating carbon credit revenue from the kilowatt hours they put into employees’ and customers’ vehicles — partially or fully offsetting the installation cost.
The Road Ahead: All Green Lights
Yuko asked Julian where he sees all of this going. His answer was genuinely optimistic — and grounded in real data.
The S-curve of EV adoption is real, and it’s about to get steep. Ask any kid today what the coolest car they’ve ever seen is. Nine out of ten will say a Tesla Cybertruck. These kids have grown up with the brand the way an earlier generation grew up with Apple — total trust, genuine excitement. In 10 years, they’re the ones buying cars. And they already know what they want.
Meanwhile, on every street in Greater Victoria, the shift is happening house by house. Julian said he was the only EV on his street in 2020. Today, every second house has one, and every fifth house has two. The visibility effect is real. When your neighbour plugs in, you notice. When three neighbours plug in, you start asking questions.
And the technology keeps evolving in ways that make EVs even more compelling. Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) — where your car can feed power back to your home or the electrical grid during peak hours — is coming to BC. Combined with solar panels and home battery storage, every household essentially becomes its own small power station. Charge cheaply overnight. Run on your own power during the day. Sell surplus back when demand is high.
Most new EVs with the latest charging port are already capable of this. The infrastructure and regulatory pieces are catching up quickly.
Julian put it simply: we don’t get to that future without EVs. A gas car can’t do any of that. But every EV on the road is one step closer.
The Bottom Line: It’s All About the Right Information
So what’s really holding Greater Victoria back from going electric?
Not the technology — that’s ready. Not the infrastructure — that’s well developed and growing. Not the economics — those are overwhelmingly in favour of EVs for most drivers.
The real barriers are misinformation, limited shopping experiences, and a lack of honest, accessible education. FUD plants doubt. PHEVs create confusion. One-model dealerships give buyers an incomplete picture. And nobody ever sat down with a lot of families and showed them what their actual numbers look like.
That’s exactly the gap that conversations like the one between Yuko and Julian — and the work of organizations like BCSEA — are trying to close.
If you’re curious about making the switch and want to see what’s actually out there, the team at Motorize is always happy to help. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about your life, your commute, and which car actually makes sense for you.
Come visit us in Sidney — we’d love to show you what’s possible.
📞 250-655-3534 | 📍 #203-2031 Malaview Ave, Sidney | Book a Test Drive
