Stuff Meets… electric car and sustainable tech advocate Robert Llewellyn 

Not really a name that needs much introducing – Robert Llewellyn is perhaps the best-known electric car and sustainable tech advocate of our time. Here we caught up with him about everything from the UK’s clean tech revolution to the Ford F-150 Lightning. 

We’ve just done the second Everything Electric show in Australia and it was three times bigger than the first one – it was enormous and amazing. 

They’re on a different timeline to us but the speed of adoption of electric vehicles in Australia is dizzying, because there were none four years ago and now there’s a hell of a lot – it’s really taken off. A lot of the Chinese cars that are just starting to come into Europe have been in Australia for the last few years – they get them early on. Also, they have solar. If you’ve got solar panels on your roof in Australia you don’t pay electricity bills, and if you’ve got enough of them you can charge your car as well, so you don’t have a fuel bill. It’s not fair, basically – the Australians are too lucky in some ways. 

I haven’t used any electricity from the grid in the last three days. 

I have solar panels both on the roof and in the garden. As I’ve been at home and I’ve been managing it carefully, I haven’t used any electricity from the grid so my bill for the last three days will be zero. But I know I’ve got to charge a car overnight tonight, so I will use some grid electricity. In the summer we don’t have electricity bills from mid-May to the end of September, but we do in the winter. With the amount I drive, in summer I can run two electric cars plus the house, although if I drove a lot I probably couldn’t. Both my electric cars are leased: I have a company car that’s a Tesla Model 3 and my personal one is an MG4, which I really love. 

Most people don’t know that we’re on the edge of a clean tech revolution in the UK. 

Globally there is a clean tech revolution going on, there’s no doubt about it, but in the UK it’s mixed – I think most people in the country will have heard of offshore wind, but they don’t know quite the impact it’s had. Today, over 50% of all electricity used in the UK is from offshore wind, so it’s made a massive impact. Ten years ago it would have been less than 5%, so that’s been a big shift. 

It’s not because we want to be ethical and pure that we don’t burn coal any more.

We don’t burn coal because we don’t need to, it’s too expensive and it doesn’t make sense. We’ve got more electricity from wind than we know what to do with, so the transition is economic rather than moral or ethical: why would you burn coal when it’s expensive and dirty and there’s all this electricity that’s much, much cheaper? It’s the brutality of capitalist economics. 

You can’t ignore Tesla.

There are lots of reasons to be cynical and dismissive of Tesla, but we have to acknowledge the fact that this one company has shifted the dial globally and has pushed all of these old manufacturers that were determined never to make electric cars and were saying they don’t work and they’re rubbish – they’ve all had to change. What’s the bestselling car in the world now? The Tesla Model Y. So Toyota, who were pushing hydrogen and hybrids, have had to say: “Oh God, we might have called it wrong.” Every European maker you’ve ever heard of is now making electric cars. That’s not entirely down to Tesla and it’s certainly not entirely down to the CEO, but that level is enormous and you can’t ignore that or deny it. 

I drove the Ford F-150 Lightning in America and I was amazed.

In terms of other electric cars that I’ve driven – a very short distance – the Ford F-150 Lightning is just so bonkers and huge. It’s about the size of my house. One of the big selling points for that car, which got half the attention Tesla always gets even though they are selling hundreds of thousands of them, is that you can run your house off it for about four days. American houses use the most electricity of any country on earth, so that is very impressive – and people have actually done that. 

Find out more about the Fully Charged Show and the Everything Electric show.