Are we swapping

I’m writing this from a crowded corner of the Beijing Auto Show, fighting over the last available power socket to charge my dying phone. Which, given what I’ve spent the last two days looking at, feels appropriate.

Walking this floor feels less like a motor show and more like an electronics expo. There are exceptions, of course. GWM, for instance, have the rugged trucks in their adventure zone, the Tank 700 hybrid on center stage, and the Haval PHEV SUVs; these still feel like proper machines built for work. But step outside and into the other halls, and most of what you see are smartphones on wheels.

The ICE cars are still here, sure. But they feel like the past attending their own funeral. China has truly gone electric, and it has gone hard. And my first instinct was: we need to catch up.

Then I remembered my Meralco bill. Because if there’s one thing Filipinos hate more than traffic, it’s that. And it got me thinking. Are we swapping one problem for a bigger one?

The latest CAMPI-TMA numbers tell you everything you need to know. Electrified vehicles up 36% in a single quarter. Pure electrics more than doubled. PHEVs up over 900%. In March alone, EVs were 17% of all cars sold. The momentum is real, and it’s accelerating fast.

Which brings me to your power bill.

Just look at it. The pass-through charges. The subsidies you fund but don’t receive. The way every upstream cost eventually finds its way to you. Especially that compounding 12% VAT. It’s starting to have more hidden layers than a government contract. It’s not just straight-up robbery. It’s like their very own Strait of Hormuz.

Because here’s what nobody is saying out loud when it comes to EVs: everyone is talking about charging infrastructure. More stations, faster chargers, plugs on every corner. Fine. But nobody is talking about the base load underneath all of that. You can put a faucet on every street corner, but if the well is dry, you’re all tapped out.

And the Philippine grid is already running on thin margins. Visayas goes on yellow alert routinely. The whole system is a full elevator that keeps getting more passengers. It’s still moving. But you feel it.

And yet everyone still talks about range anxiety as the biggest problem to solve. About whether you’ll make it to the next charging station. But here’s the anxiety nobody puts in the brochure: what happens to your EV during a brownout? Range anxiety assumes the grid is there when you need it. In the Philippines, that assumption has a complicated history.

And if adoption keeps accelerating at this pace, millions of vehicles plugging in every evening means everyone’s bill goes up. Even yours. Even if you never buy one.

Just look at oil. A lot of people panic-bought fuel, or made the impulsive switch to EVs, when prices spiked recently. The logic made sense in the moment. But oil has been doing this for fifty years. Every embargo, every standoff, every tanker incident. It spikes, the world panics, and then the market does what markets always do. It corrects.

Electricity on an overworked grid is a different story. Rate adjustments, once embedded, don’t come back down easily. Infrastructure delays are measured in years, sometimes decades. So the thing we’re panic-pivoting toward, in reaction to a price surge that will likely correct itself, may end up costing more, and more permanently, than the thing we’re running from. It’s like burning your house down to get rid of a termite problem. The solution is far more permanent than the nuisance.

That’s not an argument against EVs. That’s an argument against making permanent decisions based on temporary panic.

This is exactly why the PHEV surge in that Q1 data makes so much sense. A plug-in hybrid doesn’t ask you to trust the grid completely. It gives you the electric efficiency when the infrastructure is there, and the range and reliability of petrol when it isn’t. For a Filipino driver, a hybrid isn’t a transition car. It’s the mission-ready one.

Toyota has been saying this for years. GWM seems to agree. Refusing to bury the only thing that actually works right now while we wait for the infrastructure to catch up. That’s why they’ve spread their resources across a basket of solutions: hybrids, PHEVs, hydrogen, EVs, and cleaner ICE. I used to think that was indecision. Standing in Beijing, watching an entire industry lurch toward a single answer, I’m starting to see the wisdom in it.

The question is no longer to EV or not to EV. The question is whether we’re building the well before we install the faucets.

Because in this country, when we get the sequence wrong, everyone pays. Especially the ones who never wanted an EV to begin with.