On a recent trip to the cinema I was presented with two new car adverts, both glossy. My cynical joke about the Range Rover that the owner was driving into the dealer for warranty work was soon overshadowed by the normalisation of a homogenised MG ‘SUV’ being £35000 as the basic price. But of course nobody pays the cash price nowadays, they mentally justify the purchase as multiples of their iPhone monthly payment. Cars as iPhones is a masterclass in behavioural psychology.
Sometime in the last decade I described modern car buying as the iPhonication of the forecourt and if anything the idea has aged better than most of the vehicles now sold under it.
There was a time when the first question was the price. The full price. A number large enough to demand a pause and some moral arithmetic. Today nobody asks that. They ask how much a month, and the rest is treated as background noise, like terms and conditions or the weather.
The trick is simple. We no longer evaluate cars as capital purchases but as subscriptions. The monthly payment is quietly reconciled against the iPhone in your pocket. Fifty quid a month for a phone feels normal. Three hundred quid a month for a car becomes six phones. You already live with one. Why not six sitting outside?
This is not financial logic so much as consumer conditioning.
PCP and PCH did not just change how cars are paid for, they changed how they are justified. Ownership became vague, temporary, almost impolite to mention. What mattered was whether the number could slip into the standing orders without causing an argument. Once it could, permission was granted.
Electric cars pushed this model to its logical conclusion. On paper many are startlingly expensive. In practice they arrive softened by language about efficiency, tax, sustainability and the future. The monthly figure does the heavy lifting. Nobody emotionally processes fifty or sixty thousand pounds. They process four hundred a month by comparing it to phones, streaming services and a gym membership they forgot to cancel.
The iPhone model also smuggles in another assumption, that upgrading is natural and permanence is old fashioned. You do not keep a phone for a decade. You refresh it, guilt free, because you were never meant to own it outright. PCP borrows that psychology wholesale. Three years, hand it back, move on, feel modern.
Electric cars lean into this harder than most. Big screens, software updates, range improvements promised just around the corner. They are sold less as machines and more as devices, which makes their disposability feel progressive rather than wasteful.
The danger is that when everything is framed as affordable monthly, nothing feels expensive anymore. Stretch the term, adjust the mileage, tweak the deposit and almost anything can be made to behave. The decision shifts from judgement to tolerance. Not can I afford this, but can I live with it?
That is a profound change. It moves cost out of focus and replaces it with habit. Comparison does the rest.
‘The electric transition is often presented as a clean break from the past, but it has been powered by the most contemporary consumer mechanism of all. Permanent payment and planned obsolescence, wrapped in virtue and delivered by direct debit.’
The propulsion may be changing, but the mindset is familiar. We have not made cars cheaper. We have just learned how to stop looking at the whole number, and how to measure our lives in iPhones instead.