Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
Episode 16Octopus Electric Vehicles · 9 November 2026
From One Tesla Conversation to Octopus EV: Fiona Howarth on Going Electric
Fiona HowarthOctopus Electric Vehicles
Coming 9 November
“I had a petrol and a diesel car sitting on my driveway.”
Fiona Howarth, Octopus Electric Vehicles
Show notes
What is in this one.
- 00:00Who Fiona is
- 01:09A physics teacher, the 90s, and running out of fuel
- 03:25The Tesla conversation that started it
- 03:47The things you loved at seventeen keep nudging you
- 04:47What actually put people off electric cars
- 05:07A few hundred people on a green in Harpenden
- 08:33The scheme nine in ten employees don’t know exists
- 12:12Do people miss the feel of a petrol engine?
- 12:45Horses, acceleration, and the guilt of going back
- 14:45Isn’t the upfront cost still too high?
- 15:19Battery prices, $1,000 a kilowatt hour down to $100
- 17:19Why used electric cars are undervalued
- 18:37Nobody her age drives electric. Is that a market?
- 20:41Satellites, AI, and forecasting the sun
- 23:26Building an app in a weekend
- 24:24Where the price falls actually come from
- 26:59The 2035 ban and 6 billion pounds of private charging
- 29:57The only girl in the technology class
- 35:12Diversity as a performance argument, not a values one
- 38:18The real odds of starting a business
- 39:38Lockdown, two kids, and five hours a day
- 41:44None of us get to work for you if you leave
- 44:39What does success mean to you?
- 47:03My takeaways
What I took from it
Your original passions never really leave you.
- Being a good leader is mostly being adaptable, and saying so out loud.
- My generation is the next market for this and almost nobody’s talking to us.
- The tooling moved fast. What you build with it is still the hard part.
From this episode
The lines worth keeping.
About the guest
Fiona Howarth
Founder and Chair of Octopus Electric Vehicles, which connects transport, renewable energy and smart technology to make electric vehicles more affordable. Background in engineering and clean tech, and a leading voice on climate innovation and the future of transport.
