To think a 100 mile range is not a lot?

[jennymanara]

Where I live we are being encouraged to buy electric cars through billboard adverts. These say things like electric cars can travel 100 miles before needing to be charged and that the average charging time is half an hour.

That sounds fine if all you want is a run around for a city or town to go to the supermarket and work, but pretty impractical for a lot if people. Especially given how few charging places there are. It would in reality mean that I could never drive more than 100 miles before going nack home to charge up the car.

@backforgood By household the amount with drives are proportionally way less. You might see lots in some areas because houses with drives take up way more space than apartments or terraced houses.
I personally would not want to trail a cable outside my house over the pavement to a car parked on the street.
I am not saying that we can't have electric cars, I am saying that any model that relies on people charging while the car sits on a driveway or in a garage will only reach a smaller proportion of the population. That is why infrastructure matters.

Also the billboards I have seen are not advertising small city electric cars. They are asking people to consider electric cars as a concept. If most electric cars can do more than 100 miles before being charged, then they are very ill conceived.

We really must get the Nuclear act together, yep its going to cost

I don't think there's a public appetite for the scale of immigration needed to build the capacity we'd need even if there was the political will.

We could of course fix the education system to provide enough engineers and scientists. But then we could have done that at any time in the past 31 years and chose not to.

Theresnotimelikethepresent yes, unfortunately our company car scheme doesn't use obvious things like the cost of the car when working out the cost of the lease. On the company lease website the cheapest model 3 Tesla is over £500 pm whereas the e-Golf is under £300.

The other consideration for me is that if I can't use an electric car as our main car for trips and holidays then we'll be using DPs BMW 335 instead and that's not helping the climate at all!

I'm now looking at the Toyota Rav4 VVTI hybrid. It's big enough to use as the main car for family, dog and luggage.

For people saying that electric cars aren't be pushed to diesel owners, but aimed at local commuters, the government periodically (when it cralws out of the Brxit mire and realises it's supposed to do other things as well) threatens to ban diesel cars because of poor air quality. It's also suggesting we stop selling petrol / diesel cars by something like 2030. What cars do you think the diesel owners are going to buy? not electric ones

My car was 9 years old when I bought it, had 27,000 miles on the clock and cost £3k. We use it for local commuting and the longer family holidays. There is no way an electric car will become available to provide a similar replacement to this. They're just £££.

And to the people saying we'll be able to charge these cars at work - we already pay to park where I work and my employer has ruled out installing charging stations, presumably because we'd be charging at their expense. Until solar panels are better, employers aren't going to install them in work car parks. Our nearest charging point from work is a 30 minute walk through the city centre.

It's also suggesting we stop selling petrol / diesel cars by something like 2030.

I wonder if the collapse of the combined car and petroleum industries have been factored into that kite-flying piece of nonsense ?

We really must get the Nuclear act together, yep its going to cost

Well look at it this way. Wind energy is well, OK as long as the wind is blowing which is more often than not, at this time of year but there are times whre the wind don't blow and the windmills don't go.

So..

You have to replacew that shortge, for now Gas is normally the source that backs them up, yes we do have Nuclear and some Hydron some Biomass and solar, not a lot of use at night, and a few imports but Gas is a fossill fuel and so what is giong to replace this back up system and storage quite hack it and that storage has to be powered by something .

The windmill capacirty has a long way to ge as yet you'd have most of the UK cbvered and the coast lines but if the wind aint there?.

Nuclear could fill the gap its non Carbon apart from the concerte used in construction Nuke fuell when used can be glassifed and buried deep more or less where it came from.

Now with all the extra cars to be charged up the grid can hardely supply enough power on those winter evening peaks where 50 odd GW's of power are required so where is it all to come from??