Quentin Willson is one of the UK’s best-known motoring faces. He was a Top Gear presenter for over a decade, wrote and presented BBC2’s The Car’s The Star and started Channel 5’s Fifth Gear. He is an enthusiastic EV campaigner, having co-founded FairCharge which works to ensure the UK has the right EV-related policies for the environment, economy and drivers. Interview by Paul Day

You’ve spent your adult life working with cars, were you obsessed with them as a boy?

It occurred to me at an early age, maybe 10 or 12, that cars were fabulous symbols that could change your importance in life. They could make you look younger, or more mature than you are. More prosperous, more successful. And I just gravitated towards them.

When I was 11 my dad bought me a Ford Anglia engine for my birthday, he got it from a scrapyard. I dismantled it and then got it working, much to the annoyance of the neighbour because it had no exhaust, so when you fired it up there was this huge noise. And then somebody gave me the AA Book of the Car for a birthday, so by about 15 I was pretty good on cars. The teachers at school would come and court my advice.

Then I realised I could buy cars and then sell them for a profit. So even before I got my license I was buying little Frogeyed Sprites for 200 quid and sell them for 350. My mum would drive them round for me.

So by the time I got to university, I’ve got this little kind of stash of money and cars were so cheap then. So while everyone on campus was driving around in minis and escorts, there am I in a wildly unsuitable, mauve Jensen Interceptor and a sheepskin coat.

When I got my grant for buying books at university I bought a Granada GXL with it instead and pretended I was Jack Regan in The Sweeney, smoking Piccadilly cigarettes. But it was just part of this illusion that makes you a new and better person if you’ve got a posh car.

How did you get involved in the industry?

This lovely man, Steve Cropley, identified me as somebody who knew about cars but could also write – particularly about second-hand cars. He started a magazine called ‘Buying Cars’ and it got noticed. I got a call from a man at the BBC who sounded like a vicar. He said, would you come and do a screen test? And the rest, as they say is history.

When did EVs first come in to your life?

I’ve come from the dark side haven’t I? I’ve spent a large part of my broadcasting career telling people to buy these large, multi-cylindered cars but while I was going Top Gear I was also driving electric cars, much to Clarkson’s mirth. I was one of the first journalists in the UK to drive a thing called the GMEV1, which was wonderful – the first production EV in the world. I drove it on Sunset Boulevard and I was thinking, blimey, this is good. It was out-accelerating everything in sight, and looked cool. I said ‘this is the future and one day we might all be driving these’. GM then crushed them all because, you know, they didn’t want the EV1 to interfere with their global combustion car business. And then we didn’t get proper production electrics cars till probably 2009.

What was the first EV you owned?

The first one I bought was a ferociously expensive, miserable, hateful little car, which would only do about 50 miles on one charge. The children had to go to school in their hats and coats, freezing, ‘daddy why can’t we have the heater on?’ And the low battery warning light would come on: ‘are we going to get home? What’s going to happen to us?’

As a family, we did all our motoring in these electric cars for years and years. I bought a Leaf, then a Zoe and now I’ve got a Tesla and it does 300 miles to one charge. The only combustion car I have now is a 60 year old Ford Mustang, which paid off its embedded carbon debt long, long ago.

So I decided: this technology works. We need to do something about it. And also, living in London, you just have to run your finger along the window ledge and it’s black with diesel particulate. I’d walk along Marylebone Road in the traffic and you got that metallic taste in the back of your throat.

That’s when I decided to start this campaign called Fair Charge. And we’ve been campaigning for electric cars ever since.

A lot of people driving EVs they say they miss the throb and the rattle of an ice engine. You never found that? You were quite happy to drive along in silence?

Yes, because if you understand about cars you realise that you’re got all that friction – all that flailing around of cogs and wheels and chains and pistons and camshafts – and you understand that 70% of that power is lost by the time it gets to the rear wheels. And they breakdown so much and they cost so much to service. I had a Bentley once and I took it in for service and that’s £5,000 please. And so for me, it’s a kind of liberation. My current car will do 0 to 60 in 3.1 seconds, which is faster than most Ferraris. And it’s quiet, it’s refined, it’s smooth and for me, the arch petrolhead, I don’t feel that I’ve made any sacrifices.

I love classic cars and I think we will carry on owning and driving them, and getting lots of enjoyment out of them. But the combustion engine, that’s been around for 120 years, it’s had its day.

Are you happy with where we are now in terms of transitioning the country to EVs?

I think that we’re in at very difficult stage where all the early adopters have bought electric cars and the fleets are running around in them quite happily – we have a million electric cars on the UK roads – but getting the private buyers to make that jump is really difficult.

If we’re not careful, we won’t have this transition and we’ll go back to fossil fuels. And that’s a real problem for me. So to answer your question, we need to pull our fingers out fast, otherwise, the Chinese will just sweep us away with their £15,000 EVs that can do 300 miles.

Hardly any car manufacturers over are making cheap EVs, they’re making big SUVs with electric engines and they are just too expensive.

Yes, this is what legacy auto does. They just carry on doing what they’ve always done and they took their big SUVs and then strapped a battery in the bottom and charged anything up to 100 grand, thinking, ‘well this is what the public wants.’ I guess they’re protecting their profit margins but it’s backfired on them spectacularly.

What we really need is the little £10,000, £15,000 no-frills electric car. The profits are difficult on electric cars, we know that, but the cost of batteries and raw materials are coming down significantly.

Would you rather the Chinese were able to supply us or do you think it’s more important to protect our motor industry?

It’s a really difficult question. We should protect our domestic motor industry in the UK. There are 800,000 jobs in the supply chain and billions and billions of pounds of economic activity, but legacy auto have shot themselves in the foot.

I want consumers to have cheap, affordable electric cars that are well made and go for long distances and you think, well, if they come from China, maybe we’ve got to have them. But we’re in such a parlous position that it’s very difficult. I remember talking to the CEO of a very, very well-known car company in the UK years ago who told me EVs were ‘just a passing fad’ and they continued down their road of diesels and confused model strategy. And now they’re blinking into the headlights of this tsunami of Chinese cars. They got it wrong.

On the Fair Charge website, you call for more measures to help lower income drivers to be able to access EVs. Is there anything that we can do apart from reducing the VAT on public?

There’s a whole raft of options you can do. We campaigned with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders to cut the VAT on brand new EVs and second-hand EVs. That would knock 20% off the price of a used EV in some cases. Government needs to pull more levers to make this work – put signs where the electric charges are, so people know that we’ve got an existing infrastructure. China’s got 2.7 million electric charging points and we’ve got 53,000. You put your head in your hands and say, Why are we so behind?

And there must be ways that we can help people without driveways, who can’t charge at home, who are on lower incomes, to have electric cars and to have zero tailpipe emission. There are salary sacrifice firms like Tusker who help many 20% taxpayers: nurses and factory workers and shop workers and that’s very successful. And we see when that happens that you get a 85% to 90% satisfaction rate in their electric car.

We could also redeploy a lot of the second-hand cars that come off leases and from companies who are essentially dumping into a second-hand market and letting dealers buy them. Can we not repurpose those, so we can create a funded model where people on lower incomes have access to an electric car and a charging point?

Do you think anti-EV sentiment is getting worse?

It’s a wedge issue and we’ve got this left versus right thing. The left likes electric cars, they think they’re smart, wearing polo-necks and driving Teslas. The right hates them because they want their diesel pickups and it’s been really badly messaged. So you’ve got people learning about electric cars on Facebook, and listening to that stuff, which is being amplified again and again and again. It’s nonsense.

There are people now saying that they’re EVs are more polluting than production cars because of the particulates from the tyres. I talked to Kwik Fit about this recently and I said ‘would you please tell us the party line on this? And he said the wear is slightly more because people tend to drive them faster but broadly, the wear patterns they see are similar to combustion cars. So, where does that come from?

There are newspapers who like to run these stories. The Mail did one which was pages and pages of things that are wrong with EVs, just because Aston Martin weren’t able to produce a battery they were happy with. It’s clickbait because the advertising revenue is down and they need clicks for their reach. So that’s part of the problem.

Because of all this, all I’d say to anybody who isn’t an EV convert, who’s thinking about buying one, talk to someone who owns one! There’s a million EVs driving around in the UK and we don’t hear the voices of those people, those are the voices that we’re not hearing and I think it would be good if we did it.

Maybe I should do something about that…