I recently interviewed an electric car owner Muhammad Mushab Zakaria who made the transition in March when he convinced his wife to trade in her Kia Picanto for a BYD Dolphin standard range and he shared a point of view that I had not seen.
We met about a month ago when Fast TV organised a session with viewers who wanted to experience electric cars up close.
He had made the journey specifically to join us all the way from Malacca and he had an interesting story to tell.
After owning an electric car for three months, he noted that his electricity bill had doubled from roughly RM150 per month to about RM300 per month and he was delighted with the change.
The Kia Picanto was burning through RM100 worth of petrol a week which meant that the transition to electric meant he was saving RM250 every month but then he thought he could do even better if he got himself an electric motorcycle and so he did.
The savings from the motorcycle is not huge probably less than RM100 per month but he was happy not to have to visit the petrol station a few times a week.
In July, he decided to make another change, this time he wanted to install solar panels on the roof of his house and further reduce his electricity bill.
That seemed like a reasonable move given that more than half of his road transport energy needs is now being met by Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB).
When I asked him if he had always planned the move, he said that solar did not make sense for him before they bought an electric car.
This is true for most people whose electricity bill is less than RM250 per month because the way that we install solar in Malaysia is that we have to get an allocation under the Net Energy Metering programme and what happens is that at the end of the month, TNB would tally up all the sun juice you send them and deduct all the electrons you take from the grid and you end up with your monthly bill.
A solar roof of 7.5kW capacity would set you back around RM25,000 and the system can generate about 30kWh every day, which is way more than what is used by the average house and as a result your bill is zero but you have produced so much extra electricity that you can only carry forward till the end of the year.
Which means that if your bill is RM250 or less, the maximum savings is around RM3,000 per year and it would take eight or nine years to recover the investment. That doesn't make sense.
Now imagine having an electric car and motorcycle that boosts you bill to RM300 to RM350 per month and on top of that there is the petrol savings of RM300 you are enjoying as a result of the transition.
If your monthly savings now approach RM550, then you can recover the solar panel investment in less than four years.
And from the first month you put on solar panels, you no longer have any electricity or petrol expenditure and at the same time you still have excess energy every month.
Mushab said since installing the panels in July, he has over 200kWh of excess energy aleady and he expects it to increase to nearly 400kWh by the end of the year.
Since the NEM system does not allow him to carry it forward to the next year, he plans to invite friends with EV to come and take some of the juice that he has at a discount, after all it would just be written off anyways.
It just never really occurred to me that purchasing an electric car would be the catalyst for making solar roof such a good financial move especially as the government is mulling the possibility of modifying the current petrol subsidy system to exclude a large portion of the population.
After all most people don't really take the environment into account when they buy a car but they do take into account running cost, maintenance, insurance and monthly payments.
By looking at car and solar as a package, buyers would see a much larger financial benefit of making the move to electric vehicles.
In any case, the move to electric vehicles cannot rely on government incentives beyond the first few years where it is necessary to attract early buyers to the technology but beyond that they have to stand on their own merit.
Stories like that of Mushab and his young family who represents the average Malaysian family is the sort that will make people think that they too should make the transition.
Once there is no financial penalty in the purchase price of an electric vehicle, people will need to overcome their concerns with the cost of battery replacement and the longevity of the batteries but it seems that worry is fast evaporating.
The proof of this renewed confidence in batteries can be seen in the resurgence of hybrid sales in Malaysia and around the world.
Just a few years ago any suggestion of hybrid would be met with a frown and a question about the cost of battery replacement because many of us have heard about the jaw dropping prices of post-warranty battery replacement for hybrids.
The prospect of never having to pay for neither electricity nor petrol can be one of the most compelling reason to make the EV transition. I'm sorry of you live in a highrise.