Peter McDonald
No technology succeeds on product alone. Drawing parallels between the early days of oil and the modern EV transition, Ohme’s Peter McDonald argues that seamless ecosystem partnerships – not just better batteries – are the key to unlocking mass adoption.
The last time we changed fuel for our everyday transport, nobody did it alone.
Today, global car manufacturers are investing billions in electrifying their fleets. The engineering challenge is largely solved. Battery costs have fallen dramatically, vehicle ranges are increasingly competitive and yet despite the advances, adoption remains below the trajectories that once seemed inevitable.
The reasons are well-documented: range anxiety, charging availability, installation complexity and the simple friction of a consumer journey that has not been made easy enough. All of those things are improving, of course.
The parallels to the early days of the combustion era are uncanny. The product exists. The demand is latent. What is missing is the infrastructure confidence and the ecosystem alignment that turns latent demand into habitual behaviour. Just as the early car driver needed to know there was fuel available at the end of the road, today’s EV driver needs to know there is a charger – reliable, accessible, affordable – at home, at work or en route.
Car manufacturers did not solve this alone in the 1890s. They could not have. The oil companies, the road builders, the financial backers and the governments all had to move in conjunction with one another. The consumer only commits when the system around them is credible – one lesson that hasn’t changed.
The story of oil’s early decades, told by Daniel Yergin in The Prize, is one of a resource in search of a purpose – and the extraordinary confluence of forces that eventually found it one.
What this means in practice today is that the car makers leading the EV transition cannot treat charging, energy tariffs, installation infrastructure and the wider ownership experience as someone else’s problem. The partnerships that made the discovery of the first commercial oil well back and the car inseparable, have a modern equivalent between vehicle manufacturers, charge point manufacturers and operators, energy suppliers, fleet managers and the financial institutions that fund the whole chain.
The companies that will win the next decade in mobility are not simply those that build the best electric vehicle. They are those that invest in the partnerships that make the consumer transition feel seamless, inevitable and affordable.
No technology transition happens on the strength of the product alone, it needs the entire ecosystem to succeed. We are living through a remarkably similar inflection point and making some of the same structural errors.
No technology transition happens on the strength of the product alone – it needs the entire ecosystem to succeed
The internal combustion engine arrived at precisely the right moment – not only for the pioneers of personal transport, but for the oil industry itself. Crucially, petrol had previously been considered a dangerous waste product of refining, flared off as largely worthless. The internal combustion engine transformed that liability into the world’s most valuable commodity. Oil and the car didn’t just co-exist, they co-created each other’s futures.
What is less remembered is how deliberate and collaborative this process was. The major oil companies of the late 19th and early 20th century understood that selling fuel was only possible if people had vehicles to put it in and that vehicle adoption required making the consumer experience easy.
The oil companies and the early automakers were not simply competitors for the consumer’s wallet, they were ecosystem architects, each one’s growth contingent on the other. The interdependence was structural, not incidental.
The same is true today in the EV sector. Public charging infrastructure is improving all the time; there are more – and better – EVs on the market with range anxiety largely now a thing of the past; home charging is becoming more affordable and more dynamic with technology such as Ohme’s and the fleet sector itself has been responsible for much of the EV sales boost in recent years.
EV sales rose by 23.9% in 2025, accounting for more than one in five of all new cars leaving showrooms. Their volumes have already grown again so far in 2026; this new registration is likely to be the strongest March for EVs that we’ve ever seen. EV van sales could be better, but they are still growing and that remains a great step in the right direction.
Movement and change is happening, but it needs to happen in conjunction with each other. As the Japanese poet Ryunosuke Saturo said: “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
Peter McDonald is mobility director at Ohme. Prior to his current role, he spent two decades working for automotive manufacturers including Nissan, SEAT and the wider Volkswagen Group.
