to think the penny hasn't dropped yet, for many people, that the trade in new petrol and diesel cars is really ending in 6 years

[JadeClade]

I think the price of second hand cars will go through the roof, at first, when new cars are no longer available, and people buying new homes now really do need to be factoring in where they are going to charge an electric car, and all sorts of preparations and plans are simply not being made

YANBU - we need to be planning and preparing, as individuals and society.
YABU- we don't need to think about it.

Exactly.

However, "I can't ride a bike" usually means "I can't ride a standard two wheeler while dodging in and out of cars".

If we made the roads safe enough that people felt comfortable using trikes and recliners, anyone who could drive could ride a bike.

Actually, all the countries in the world are "on board", now that Trump is out.

But that's the point of EVs. You don't usually need to top up at peak times. People plug in while they are at home or at work or shopping.

Or the battery-swap thing that just started last year in Denmark. Not sure how it's going but the principle is sound.... stop into a 'petrol' station, switch your battery for a full one, pay your fee and get on the road.

Are you hard of thinking? No one has to buy a brand new electric car now or ever. Petrol cars aren't going to disappear overnight and will be available second hand in your price range for years to come. This is about society making a commitment to replace the manufacturing process for brand new cars and therefore bring about a gradual change in the way we use transport in this country. There will be plenty of time for the infrastructure to catch up. The fucking dinosaur attitudes towards change in this country are frankly shameful.

This month is on track to be the hottest month globally, ever. That's no joke. The WHO have said global warming is over and we are now entering "global boiling".

Add to that the deaths of children that are directly attributed to the pollution caused by petrol and diesel cars. I'm not sure their parents think it's as funny as you seem to.

Surely those would then become the peak times? add in a move to electric heating of homes too.

Look i'm not knocking EV's but i just don't see the move to build this infrastructure needed for charging or the building of generation capacity.

I do not know of a village nr me where there is a single public EV charger (most village houses don't have off road parking) there is no planning apps in to install any either... its just 7 years away.

Can someone on here tell me why they are so convinced that because the infrastructure isn’t in place now, and might not be by 2030, and that because EVs are expensive and that will be hard for poor people who need cars- that the government will scrap their plans?

what bit of the last 13 years has made any of you think that if it becomes clear their policy will have negative consequences on the poorer members of society or a sizeable minority, that they will therefore not do it?!

so the OP is right - this is likely to happen. It is likely to have negative consequences for many people. If you are one of those people, it’s worth factoring this in now if you make any big life choices in the next few years.

if you are already in an isolated property so need cars to cope with your life, then you will have to plan to replace your car in 2029 rather than keeping it going to 2035 and having to get EV. If you are going to move in the next year, think if you can afford EV cars and charging etc before buying a house in an isolated location that will require 2 cars being driven several times a day to function.

if you and your family live in town A and get offered a job in town B with no option like a train link between them, factor in the end of cheap petrol cars to your decision to take the job.

No one has to buy a brand new electric car now or ever. Petrol cars aren't going to disappear overnight and will be available second hand in your price range for years to come. This is about society making a commitment to replace the manufacturing process for brand new cars and therefore bring about a gradual change in the way we use transport in this country. There will be plenty of time for the infrastructure to catch up. The fucking dinosaur attitudes towards change in this country are frankly shameful

That depends on the availability of fuel and its cost, if fuel is plentiful, then petrol cars will become very expensive, if not, they'll be worthless and useless.

EV's will not change how we use transport in this country, we'll just replace one form of large environmentally damaging transport with another.

There is not "plenty of time for infrastructure to catch up" let alone generation capacity, 33m cars in the UK....

It politicians that set the tone, they could make cycling far safer by changing the law, sentencing guidelines & make the test more relevant together with 5 or 10 year re tests (would cost little to do any of this) but they wont... its all about the car... whoever is in power...

i m fucking glad my DD never rode a bike when she worked in a hospital 3 miles away, its too dangerous and drivers who kill and/or drive dangerously around cyclists are given a slap on the wrist (so took her car)

As I said earlier, they won't scrap it because poor people will suffer. They'll scrap it because the government's funders and rich mates need those poor people to be mobile to get to work in their companies and to spend money in their businesses.
All parties have shown how much they despise the 'little people' aka the electorate. But their position and their funders' wealth still relies upon them.

I guess mine is pretty low, will have to calculate it
I don't fly or have children and drive probably 2000 miles a year

I don't think this can happen without suitable alternative being in place. So
A) Making electric cars cheaper. Not everyone can shell out 30k or even 10k for a second hand electric vehicle.
B) Better public transport. I've tried to get the train three times in the past few months to a destination rather than driving and all three times it turns out the train isn't running on that day due to some reason or another other.

Just stopping the sale of petrol cars and forcing everyone into electric is all well and good but it's not really feasible for those on lower incomes or not living in the centre of a big city

I have no idea whether the necessary infrastructure will be in place in 7 years (given that there will still be plenty of ICE cars on the road at that point I suspect yes) but the government are absolutely investing a lot in this, now. I was chatting with my DH about this thread as he works in an adjacent industry and he met someone recently from a company that installs in pavement chargers - they are getting council funding to install in various places, guess which borough is their biggest customer to date? Kensington & Chelsea 🙄

Also, look at the speed with which the covid hospitals got thrown up. If there’s political will to do things then things will get done quickly.

Also, look at the speed with which the covid hospitals got thrown up. If there’s political will to do things then things will get done quickly.
The COVID hospitals never used and an abandoned waste of money?!
That's your example?!

Comprehension? I didn’t say they were a good use of money. Most of what the UK govt did during the pandemic seemed to be a bad use of money. I gave them as an example of a major government funded project getting completed quickly.

..Nightingales were a very simple thing to do, services already in an existing building, all they needed to do was equip a few dozen beds for the cameras and bingo! job done!
I believe the first one was a 500 bed "hospital" when "completed" they had just 50 beds up and running... little modern medical equipment (needed in existing hospitals) & few staff.

A fairer comparison would be the roll out of fibre broad band and look how long that has taken.. c/w with political will and 100s of billions spent on it, just 45% of homes have access to it & tbh that is perhaps easier as it doesn't require huge and very costly generation capacity that takes many years to build.

That’s a fair point 🙂 Though I have to admit that having had both fibre and a charge point installed at our home I can promise that the latter was about a hundred times easier (one contractor involved rather than the internet company, the first engineer, the second engineer, the third engineer… all of whom found different incorrect reasons fibre wouldn’t work for our house 😂)

I know that’s a complete anecdote and not talking about large scale infrastructure, but I guess my point previously was that the infrastructure is further along than most people seem to think, at least in some areas of the UK (which can legitimately act as beachheads).

You know switching from petrol to electric cars 8n the U.K. would make very little difference, right?
Yes, we should do whatever we can, but this particular switch isn’t something we can do.

It certainly seems to be the most intractable problem. What’s your answer?

Covid hospitals!!!

That is properly funny, well done!

I live in a medium sized village where there is a farm shop with 6 electric vehicle charging points. I am sure there are lots of benefits to supermarkets, local businesses and workplaces of providing charging stations. I appreciate it takes longer than filling up with petrol but it can be integrated into daily life. We don't always need to charge at home.

@SlippySarah the cheap way to do it is at home though. I am a supply teacher so don’t have a regular place of work, I live in a terrace, I live alone so shopping taxes me about 20 mins… it’s impossible to make charging at home work and for me (and many others) charging away from home is too inconvenient and expensive. You haven’t come close to a solution there.

@cardibach - there’s no single answer, it will be a combination of several different things:

• chargers in car parks - workplace, shopping/leisure facilities, general public car parks
• Roadside chargers
• ’electric forecourts’ - either standalone facilities, or at petrol stations (MFG, for example, have banks of 6-8 rapid chargers at an increasing number of petrol stations
• Charger sharing schemes, e.g. there are several platforms on which I could advertise my home charger for use by others (presumably people who live or work nearby), with the app handling payment.

I’m not saying there is sufficient of these in place right now, I’m saying these are the kind of solutions which will make it workable for people who can’t have home chargers.

When I first got my car, I couldn’t charge at home for the first 8 months. I managed with a combination of rapid chargers a short distance from home and 7kW chargers in a council car park 3 miles away. It got much easier when the council installed a load more 7kW chargers in a car park 1/4 mile from my house and also provided a free parking permit for EV’s.

I’ve since moved house, and now have a home charger. But it would be perfectly possible to cope without - in my town with its less than 10,000 population, there are two sets of two rapid chargers, 4x7kW in Tescos car park and 2 x 7kW in the car park of a country store. Most of these are within 300 yards of my house.

Obviously there need to be enough chargers, of the right speed for the setting (7kW in places where cars will naturally spend several hours, rapid in places which ideally have cafe and toilet facilities if you need to spend 20-30 minutes). And the prices need to be affordable.

I also think that people who arts talking about how hard installing charging points are aren't thinking about how complex petrol production, refinery and dispersal is. It's not a static thing, it's changing all the time. Companies come and go, technologies change, oil prices fluctuate. Installing charging points and infrastructure upgrade looks simple by comparison

I think interchangable battery packs are the long-term answer. Instead of having the battery come with the car you treat the battery as a container for fuel a bit like a fuel tank.

Design the cars so the batteries can be removed from the bottom of the car, design a battery station that you drive to (like a petrol station), park in the designated spot, a robot removes your current battery and replaces it with the fully charged one in around 2 mins and you drive away.

The dropped off battery gets recharged and then used by another person in 30 mins time.

Make the batteries a standard size, shape and larger sized cars can have more of them and smaller cars have less.

Where I live electric motorbikes are really a thing now. They now account for around 20% of all motorbikes and they use this principle. Battery stations are all over the place, you ride up to a station and manually swap your 1 or 2 batteries and then ride off. Its done on a contract so you don't need to use cash/credit card you just get a bill each month in the post. Far far far more covinenent than going to a petrol station as there are around 10x more battery stations than petrol stations.