Range anxiety in electric cars is far more a factor of psychology than physics, so it is cheaper and more effective to reduce the anxiety than to endlessly increase battery range — since psychologists' laws are malleable, not immutable.
Sutherland uses his own cars (a Mini Cooper Electric at 56 miles, his 112 kWh Lotus at 16% showing ~58 miles remaining) to show he panics at 16% but not 56 miles — proving the anxiety tracks the framing, not the physics. He suggests reducing anxiety rather than adding thousands of dollars of battery weight. ✦ AI generated
Rory Sutherland · My First Million · 2026-07-27 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 7:23
my wife's car is a Mini Cooper Electric and it's got about a I guess it's about uh 28-30 kWh battery and a range of about 100 mi. And I've got the Lotus Eletre, which is a 112 kWh battery, range of about 300 mi... the car's down to 16%... Then I look at the actual range and it's about 58 mi. Now, my wife's car, that's 56%... And my wife's car, we drive around at 56%, i.e. with a range of 56 mi, all the time without the slightest mention of anxiety. But when that's expressed as 16%, not 56 mi, okay? I'm suddenly having conniptions... Now, what that suggests is that range anxiety is much more a factor of psychology than it is of physics... isn't it cheaper just to reduce anxiety rather than to increase range? Because if the way to reduce range anxiety is always to increase range, we'll end up with electric cars being heavier than they need to be, more expensive than they need to be and you know, with 50 kilowatt hours sitting outside your house 95% of the time effectively doing nothing.
verbatim transcript · starts at 7:23
7:18pushing it and just get audited once every, uh, 30 years. >> actually right. Yeah. I mean, having said that, an IRS audit, from what I've heard, is a living nightmare, isn't it? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not actually being serious. You know who needs the modern-day horsepower is all of the AI products. You know, if you if you if you have Claude and you have ChatGPT, essentially they're all making the
7:40same-looking product, right? It looks like a chat interface and then it you type something and then it gives you something back. And so they're not differentiated in the experience or the the look and feel of the product that much. And then they come out with these models and each one has a different, you know, Opus 3.0 light, heavy, expert, pro, plus and you're you you have no
8:01idea which to use and then they use benchmarks that are it's like on the crud lightweight benchmark of coding expertise we're at 3.779. Why don't they just have the equivalent of horsepower? Why don't they just write IQ? >> Yeah, or when like Apple was like the iPhone instead of saying like it's X amount of megabytes of gigs, they said a thousand songs in your pocket. >> A thousand songs in your pocket. Now,
8:25this is the classic thing which is that engineers, whether they know it or not, deep down just want to impress other engineers. Okay? And so a psychological solution in their engineering community would be seen as cheating. So, I'll make the same point about electric cars which is you have this thing called range anxiety and we're spending billions and billions of dollars a year trying to produce batteries with a higher energy density.
8:50It's a really good thing. I'm not I'm not saying, "Hey engineers, you're wasting your time." But isn't it cheaper just to reduce anxiety rather than to increase range? Because if the way to reduce range anxiety is always to increase range, we'll end up with electric cars being heavier than they need to be, more expensive than they need to be and you know, with 50 kilowatt hours sitting outside your
9:11house 95% of the time effectively doing nothing. So, reducing anxiety and I realized by the way how irrational this is. Well, I explained the story which is it it fascinates me because one of the things I think that helps, if you want to do this, is to have some degree of metacognition. Which is you don't just think, you think about your own thinking. It It's apparently true of fighter pilots. The
9:36really good fighter pilots have good cognitive skills, but they also have good metacognitive skills. They don't just go, "I'm going to do that instinctively." but they also ask, "Is there a reason why I shouldn't be doing that in this instance?" Okay? Or this time it's different, as it were. And so, my wife's car is a Mini Cooper Electric and it's got about a I guess it's about
9:58uh 28-30 kWh battery and a range of about 100 mi. And I've got the Lotus Eletre, which is a 112 kWh battery, range of about 300 mi. And I got back from quite a lot of driving. I'd been down to Wales and back. And the car's down to 16%, okay? And I'm getting And all the lights have gone amber cuz it's at 16%, so I'm get I'm