When Q8 Belgium reassures electric car drivers that it is normal to miss the reliability of a combustion-engine car, something has clearly shifted. In a recent Instagram reel, the fuel retailer opens with the line “Missing your petrol car?” before offering practical advice on how to improve real-world EV range and charge more efficiently.
At first glance, this seems like an unlikely role for a company historically associated with oil. This inversion inevitably invites caution. There is an old Dutch saying — als de vos de passie preekt, boer hoed uw ganzen — often rendered in English as “when the fox preaches, the farmer should look after his geese”.
The campaign offers a revealing lens on a broader question: does Big Oil genuinely want to convince us that electric vehicles are the future, or is it simply repositioning itself to survive the transition?
Everyday frustrations
What makes Q8’s approach stand out is not that it invests in EV charging — most major fuel companies do — but the way it communicates. Rather than showcasing infrastructure or sustainability pledges, the reel addresses everyday frustrations: winter range loss, the gap between WLTP figures and reality, and the lingering doubt many new EV drivers feel.
By openly acknowledging these pain points, Q8 ‘normalises’ the imperfections of electric driving while subtly arguing that they are manageable. That combination lowers psychological barriers without sounding ideological or evangelising.
Aligning with investments
This messaging aligns with Q8’s concrete investments. In Belgium, and increasingly across the wider Benelux, the company is rolling out a dense network of fast-charging locations.
Together with partners such as Storm, Q8 plans up to 200 fast-charging sites in Belgium alone, many designed as full-service hubs with shops and food outlets, while targeting around 500 fast-charging locations across the Benelux by the end of the decade.
As refuelling becomes charging, dwell times increase, and the economic logic shifts from fuel margins to convenience retail. Longer stops translate directly into higher spending on food and convenience products, which is why helping drivers feel confident about EVs is not neutral education.
It directly supports charger utilisation and footfall at Q8 sites. In this framing, electrification is not a threat to the forecourt but a way to extend its relevance.
Traditional roadside stop to stay
In that sense, the campaign is less about persuading people that EVs are better than combustion cars and more about ensuring that the transition does not bypass the traditional roadside stop.
Q8’s narrative is not “oil versus electricity” but “mobility, whatever the energy source.” The company does not argue for the end of fossil fuels; it argues for its continued role in a changing system.
Other oil majors are pursuing similar goals, though with different tones. Shell regularly uses social media to promote the scale and reliability of its Shell Recharge network, presenting itself as a global infrastructure builder for electric mobility.
TotalEnergies likewise highlights new charging points and city partnerships, embedding EV charging in a broader narrative about the energy transition and long-term strategy. A narrative explicitly prepared by its 2021 rebranding from Total to TotalEnergies, meant to frame electricity and renewables as core businesses rather than extensions of oil.
BP, through its BP Pulse brand, combines charging announcements with growth targets and network expansion plans. All three visibly associate their brands with electrification, but their messaging remains largely corporate and infrastructure-focused.
The deeper paradox
Q8’s consumer-level ‘education’ therefore occupies a distinct niche. Instead of talking about megawatts, targets, or system change, it speaks directly to driver psychology.
It does not promise that EVs are perfect; it promises that they are workable. In doing so, it claims a role traditionally occupied by automakers, consumer organisations, or public agencies. And that is where the deeper paradox emerges.
What makes Q8’s position particularly striking is the contrast with the automotive industry itself. While an oil-linked retailer is openly addressing EV prejudices and everyday frustrations, many traditional car manufacturers continue to lobby aggressively to slow the phase-out of combustion engines.
Or they use all their marketing resources to extend the life of hybrids under the banner of ‘technology neutrality.’ For automakers, electrification is not a marginal adjustment but an existential disruption, threatening engine plants, supplier ecosystems, and established profit models.
Hybrids offer a politically convenient buffer: they preserve ICE assets while buying time in a market and regulatory landscape that is shifting faster than many legacy manufacturers anticipated.
Not selling engines
From this perspective, Q8’s behaviour becomes less paradoxical. Unlike carmakers, Q8 does not depend on engines; it depends on stops, energy sales, and footfall.
An electric vehicle still needs to charge, still stops longer, and still consumes retail services. Educating EV drivers is therefore not ideological advocacy but demand management, reducing anxiety, increasing confidence, and ensuring that electrification flows through Q8’s locations rather than around them.
The result is a curious role reversal: parts of ‘Big Oil’ have become pragmatic enablers of EV adoption, while sections of ‘Big Auto’ have acted as cautious brakes on it.
That scrutiny becomes sharper when lobbying enters the picture. While EVs are celebrated in advertising and product launches, the systemic consequences of electrification are frequently negotiated away behind closed doors.
In several cases, including Toyota’s much-discussed stance, automakers have been criticised for actively lobbying against stricter climate and EV regulations while promoting hybrids and alternative narratives as supposedly more ‘realistic’ solutions. The gap between public messaging and political behavior has rarely been wider.
Brutally pragmatic
Against that backdrop, Q8’s position appears almost brutally pragmatic. The company does not lobby to keep engines alive because it has no engine plants to protect.
It does not sell hybrids as a moral compromise, because compromise does not serve its business model. Instead, it accepts electrification as a given and focuses on controlling where and how it happens.
This is not climate leadership in the traditional sense, nor does it mean that Big Oil has suddenly become altruistic. It is strategic clarity. In the current phase of the transition, denial is no longer profitable; only adaptation is.
In the end, the biggest obstacle to faster EV adoption may not be technology, infrastructure, or consumer doubt, but the quiet effectiveness of industrial lobbying that profits more from delaying change than from explaining how to live with it.
