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Why Do People Resist New Technology Like Electric Vehicles?
David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Last week California air regulators voted to ban all new internal combustion car sales starting in 2035. The news was met with a predictable mix of responses: Some lauded the decision as forward-thinking and environmentally responsible; others saw it as government overreach–an attack on consumer freedom and the free market.
Whether the arguments against EVs are in good faith or not (they’re often not), the fact remains that this burgeoning technology has been met with fierce resistance since Teslas started hitting the road back in 2008. It’s easy to find examples of people keying EVs, rolling coal to spite them or blocking chargers with gas-powered cars.
A part of human nature is naturally resistant to change and to the unknown. It has served us well evolutionarily over the past 200,000 years. Tradition keeps us safe when it comes to eating the right wild berries or choosing a route to the next town. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there were people in the Roman Empire spreading myths about how using indoor plumbing makes your sword hand weak, or that riding in a chariot would make your uterus fall out. Even without political tribalism and pressure from the fossil fuel industry, new tech can be divisive.
Rosabeth M. Kanter, a professor of business at Harvard Business School, who studies these ideas, says the number one reason people resist change is that they fear a loss of control over their lives. This may explain why the ban on new gas cars in California has faced some backlash.
“For people who are feeling like life is slipping out of their control–that sinister forces are pushing them around–they're likely to not want to be forced into making a change,” says Kanter. Whether or not the state could have accomplished the same goal without a mandate is debatable, but due to the California Air Resources Board’s successful history of driving national policy with ambitious state-level laws, it’s not surprising they chose to take that risk.
However, Kanter also notes that plenty of new tech innovations have been welcomed with open arms. Take the smartphone, for instance. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007. By 2017, 77% of Americans owned a smartphone. Cars, of course, were always going to be slower transition—after all, the lifecycle of a car is at least three or four times as long as that of a smartphone. But why has there been so much cultural resistance to the growing EV market share?
The biggest and most obvious answer is cost. Smartphones aren’t cheap, but there’s a big difference between $700 and $70,000. The current batch of EVs on the road are simply too expensive for the average person to afford. Knowing that demand would outstrip initial manufacturing capacity, EV makers have chosen to offer luxury models first in order to make as much money as possible while ramping up production. And while legacy OEMs are beginning to enter the scene and change this dynamic, we’re still early in this story and costs are still extremely high.
Kanter says that to get consumers to adopt new tech, the transition has to be smooth. It has to be easy. Remember taking your flip phone to a Verizon or AT&T and trading it in for a smartphone? These companies made it simple and offered excellent financing plans–just a few extra dollars added to your bill every month. And while there are about a thousand different EV rebates and incentives on offer (see Wednesday’s newsletter) finding and understanding how to apply these deals is a whole lot harder than trading in a Motorola Razr for an iPhone.
Regarding smooth transitions: Charging infrastructure remains another huge impediment. While EV range anxiety is perceived to be much more of an issue than it actually is, the fact remains that America’s charging infrastructure is inadequate–especially rural areas in the middle of the country. If California wants to get everyone in an EV as quickly as possible, the state will need to make EV charging as seamless as gassing up.
Another thing Kanter says made the transition to smartphones different from EVs and other technology. New phones offered immediate and obvious benefits. Maps and internet access alone would’ve sold the devices. They also connected customers to networks that were pretty much inaccessible without the device. Nobody wants to miss out on the group chat drama. “The minute they see things that are benefits for themselves, you don't have to argue with them anymore,” says Kanter. “The benefits are right there in front of them.”
The benefits of electric vehicles, on the other hand, are more subtle or even existential. Calculating the cost of recharging the vehicle or the cost per mile of driving almost requires some familiarity with high-school physics. While the math isn’t necessarily complex or difficult, it’s new and foreign enough to present a barrier. Yes, it’s usually cheaper per mile to drive an EV than to fill up with gas, but to figure that out you have to know what a kilowatt hour is and how many your car consumes per mile of travel and how much electricity costs per kilowatt hour. Climate benefits only really apply at a society- and perhaps planetary level.
Of course you have this entire debate playing out against a climate in which batteries and gasoline have somehow become political footballs. If “opposing any policy from the other side” remains de rigueur in Washington, EV adoption will be slowed by politics…until the transition is truly seamless and the benefits are impossible to ignore.
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David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Behind Her Empire Podcast: Coolhaus Ice Cream, Once Sold From a Broken Truck, Is Now a Multimillion Dollar Business
12:29 PM | September 15, 2020
Natasha Case is the co-founder and CEO of Coolhaus, a women-founded and led ice cream brand serving premium cookie sandwiches, pints and bars.
After earning her masters in architecture from UCLA and landing her dream job at Walt Disney Imagineering, she left her corporate job and risked everything she had on an idea and an old postal van she purchased on Craigslist.
At the time, her partner and co-founder, Freya, decided to take the barely drivable van to Coachella to see if their passion for making the first architecturally-inspired ice cream sandwiches could be a viable business.
Coachella was a big hit, and since 2008, Coolhaus has become a multimillion dollar business growing 2-3x per year. Natasha has been named on both Forbes and Zagat's 30 under 30 list and has helped expand the business to over 7,500 grocery stores nationwide, from Safeway to Whole Foods.
Want more? Subscribe to Behind Her Empire on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Yasmin Nouri
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
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Office Hours: Virta Health’s Sami Inkinen on Changing How Type 2 Diabetes Is Perceived and Treated
03:05 PM | December 30, 2022
Image courtesy Virta Health
Sami Inkinen’s first taste of entrepreneurship was running an online bulletin board system from a farm in Finland.
On this episode of Office Hours, the Virta Health founder and CEO joins host Spencer Rascoff to discuss how to find a compatible co-founder and how his own health scare inspired his latest company.
Since his days in Finland, Inkinen co-founded the online real estate marketplace Trulia, where he served as COO, president and board member before selling the company to the Zillow Group. He founded Virta Health, a company dedicated to surgery-free Type 2 diabetes reversal, in 2014. Now, Virta Health has raised $360 million in equity capital, employs 500 people and boasts 300 enterprise clients.
But, before his entrepreneurial success, Inkinen had to get to America.
“I was entrepreneurially minded, and I was like ‘I just absolutely have to get to Silicon Valley’,” Inkinen said. “That is the NHL of entrepreneurs.”
He applied to Stanford University’s Master of Business Administration program and got in. While there, he met Pete Flint, and the two began to brainstorm what kind of business they wanted to create.
“We both became convinced—it wasn't really a leap of faith—that over the next decade, consumer internet will completely transform residential real estate,” he said.
The pair co-founded Trulia in 2004, and Inkinen said they were able to capitalize on the surging power of the internet at that specific moment. Figuring out SEO early on also helped Trulia reach potential users. But part of Trulia’s success is also due to Inkinen and Flint’s dedication to being good co-founders. Inkinen said their shared personal interests aided that dedication.
“I might compare it to literally finding a life partner,” Inkinen said.
These days, Inkinen has pivoted to health care. He was inspired to commit himself to another startup while rowing 2700 miles from Monterey, CA to Hawaii. But what spurred his interest in diabetes, specifically, was his own health. When he learned that he was pre-diabetic and on his way to Type 2 diabetes, he was shocked, as he considers himself an athlete.
“All my expectations about why people have Type 2 diabetes were completely wrong,” he said. And the more he learned about the issue, the more he realized there was an opportunity. “There is a key to unlock this whole thing, not just to myself, but potentially hundreds of millions of other people.”
After talking to several doctors to understand the space better, he founded Virta Health, which seeks to help patients "reverse" Type 2 diabetes.
“The keyword is the reverse,” he said, “because traditionally, it is treated with medications. You go on insulin, and you try to control your blood sugar. And so we nutritionally reverse Type 2 diabetes and provide the support by medical doctors — through the telemedicine platform — to get people off the medications and make sure it's safe.”
The process is a combination of AI software that measures users’ biometric data and intensive one-on-one support. Virta Health’s care team works with individuals three times a day to guide them through beneficial behavioral changes. Doctors supervise and determine how and when to pull people off of medications like insulin.
“So it's a combination of those two things: the tricks and protocols to behavior change. And [the] telemedicine approach, that very intensive support to enable [it],” he said.
Scaling a company like Virta Health can be challenging, as Inkinen said fear that reversing Type 2 diabetes won’t be successful. But for Inkinen, seeing how his company has helped others is gratifying.
“Now, seeing our patients literally taking this work of our company as a permanent tattoo on their bodies after reversing their Type 2 diabetes, it just gives me shivers,” Inkinen said.
Disclaimer: Spencer Rascoff is an investor in Virta Health.
dot.la reporter Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Want to hear more episodes? Subscribe to Office Hours on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Spencer Rascoff
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. During Spencer's time as CEO, Zillow won dozens of "best places to work" awards as it grew to over 4,500 employees, $3 billion in revenue, and $10 billion in market capitalization. Prior to Zillow, Spencer co-founded and was VP Corporate Development of Hotwire, which was sold to Expedia for $685 million in 2003. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 100 companies and is incubating several more.
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerrascoff/
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