Electric cars are NOT the future, are they?

[Isometimeswonder]

I am genuinely torn. I need want a new car but really don't want electric.
But so few smaller petrol cars are made now.
I haven't got a place to charge a car at home.
AIBU I should accept electric is the future.
AINBU I should get petrol. (Please recommend a small city car)

May I direct you to a post from @Ayebrowup thread on that subject? At the 00:20 mark.

Once you have one you realise how awful the ICE cars are. I’m not passionate about cars DH was the one that pushed for an EV. However I now find petrol stations and the smell of fuel there knowing what it does to health absolutely repellent now. I didn’t really think about it before as was “normal” but once you step outside that world you see it a new light. Well I did anyway.

I assume you mean this? Which means that one lamppost charger can service the needs of many EVs

Have not read the 100s of threads on here about on-street parking and how territorial (and selfish) many people are?

If someone with an EV is lucky enough to have a lamp-post charger outside their house, how many do you think will simply hog it and leave their motor connected to it when not in use?

Just get the traffic warden round. We have residents parking anyone parking in our road not logged in gets a ticket. It’s not hard! You get a ticket once you don’t do that again.

I agree, but private car ownership is decreasing in some large cities which is a step in the right direction

We don't have residents' parking on our street. Or traffic wardens. Or lamppost chargers.

The council has put in 19 lamppost chargers - for a city of 490,000 residents. There are theoretically about 250 outlets at about 170 stations, but many are on private sites, so only for employees and bona fide visitors, and many are below 43kW.

I just did a search for my borough and found this
they currently state they have no lamppost EV charging infrastructure plans or deployments at present.

There are about 127000 adults in the borough and 68% of households own a car

We sometimes find that some lamppost chargers are ICEd (meaning an ICE car is parked in that space so we can’t access the charger) but if this is something some EV drivers do, it has never caused us any problems in terms of finding another charger anyway. I’d wager it’s a very tiny minority behaving in this way. Plus you get overstay fees if your car has finished charging and you leave it too long in some places.

There are plenty of places where there aren’t enough lamppost chargers for sure. But that’s something that can be remedied. It’s not like there’s a finite number of charging posts that can ever exist.

What some of us are trying to say is that some of the concerns that people have come down to never having driven an EV and struggling to change the mindset from having an ICE car. Yes, it does require some thinking initially. I absolutely understand why many people are put off by that - I certainly was (using different suppliers and cables felt a bit stressful in comparison to sticking a nozzle in) - but it’s also easier than many people realise.

If someone with an EV is lucky enough to have a lamp-post charger outside their house, how many do you think will simply hog it and leave their motor connected to it when not in use?

In our experience, that doesn’t happen. Granted, where we live lots of people don’t have a car (we survived for a number of years when our old Volvo finally died), so there are a fair number of free spaces and there are plenty of lamppost chargers clear.

But one in particular is interesting - it sits outside a house which has a Renault Zoe, and that has never been parked blocking the charger.

And that would be because the owner is the same as us, and doesn’t need to charge it very often. It’s a Shell Ubitricity one too, so costs 52p/kWh, when you can get 39p/kWh on the Char.gy one around the corner, so maybe the Zoe owner just moves their car 20 metres to charge it and saves a few £.

It’s a sign, I believe, that EV drivers won’t necessarily be “dog in the manger” about it. If they don’t need the charger they leave it free.

Hulking big petrol SUVs icing chargers when there are plenty of free parking spaces (sometimes just ahead or in front) do raise an eyebrow - I like to think it’s because they’re just not seeing or thinking about them (they’re very cool and discrete), but the animus here about EVs sometimes makes me wonder…

It’s like doing your recycling. Lots of resistance and moaning when that was brought in as it’s far easier to just put everything in a black bin bag. But the majority see the need for it and adapt behaviour.

In some places those spots with a lamp post charger could be reserved for car share cars only - supporting the transition to reduced ownership which will eventually reduce the parking problems.

Just a warning for people who can’t afford to get the charging point fitted at home and who aren’t flush with money- the electricity bill is an awful shock when you get it- if you’re paying for petrol you’re paying weekly but your electricity bill comes in as a lump sum and it’s difficult! I also don’t like that they’re so much lighter than our old car- was driving in a storm recently that wasn’t by any means the worst I’ve been out in and got fairly tossed about!!

And the same will probably happen with hydrogen over the next decade or two.

@Ayebrow In our experience, that doesn’t happen. Granted, where we live lots of people don’t have a car (we survived for a number of years when our old Volvo finally died), so there are a fair number of free spaces and there are plenty of lamppost chargers clear.

I think this is key. Where I live, and numerous other parts of my city, if you come back at certain times of evening you might drive round a couple of times before deciding to give it a go squeezing your car into the one remaining rather small space.

Where do you live? I’m curious to check. Some areas of the country have issues with the supply to the lampposts, so it’s not a universal solution by any means.

London lampposts can deliver 5kW. Which isn’t as much as a 30A household one can supply (7kW), but twice as much as the 2.5kW a granny charger can.

In the south, they’ve had to do some detailed analysis, and have concluded that lampposts there can typically support 5kW chargers too, and Char.gy is rolling them out in Liverpool as well as London and other places.

The main point is that there is electricity in many 1,000s more places than fossil fuels, and in time we will follow the Dutch and install chargers in many more of those places. London is just representative of the future, and we can guarantee to people that the future works - you may just have to wait a little longer for it to arrive*

and vote out local politicians that have slow-walked charging provision, since that is definitely happened in some cough* Tory run places. I suspect Reform councils will backtrack too, since it’s no secret that Farage is a friend of Trump and Putin.

But the majority of the population don't live in the handful of large cities, so we need massive changes to public transport and other transport infrastructure everywhere else to make more of an impact. The big cities are "easy wins" - but what about all the other smaller cities, towns, villages and rural areas - they're going to be a lot harder to either put EV chargers in place or improve public transport.

If you live in an area of terraced housing with cars parked bumper to bumper, EVs are actually anti-social. The owners no noubt feel pleased with themselves (an opportunity to virtue signal AND show off your wealth and privilege, how great is that?)

But the end result when govt forces the move to EVs will be cables snaking all over the pavements. Trip hazard central, making inner city living even more of a challenge.

I'm in the north West

My council has been Labour or Labour + Lib Dem controlled since it came into being in 1996, so for 30 years. That's the council that has installed 19 lamppost chargers in a city of 490,000 residents.

Of the neighbouring Labour controlled councils, I can't find any that have installed or intend to instal lamppost chargers.

It’s always going to be difficult to advance an agenda which makes people’s lives more complicated. Not going to happen.

Yes, they are the future. But it's going to be a future with more inequality and more social exclusion.

EVs are great for people who live in low density housing. If you live in a terraced neighbourhood with cars parked bumper to bumper, EVs are no good.

What’s your weekly mileage? Do you live somewhere with excellent public transport so you don’t often need the car? I do 3 separate hobbies that I would not be able to do via public transport.

@SwirlyGates

if you come back at certain times of evening you might drive round a couple of times before deciding to give it a go squeezing your car into the one remaining rather small space.

I hear you. It was exactly the same as in central Edinburgh when I was first driving, and it’s only got worse as people have paved over tiny gardens to park in front of their house, leaving fewer public spaces.

Mind you, in those days I used to drive 15 minutes to get to the petrol station, so filling the car wasn’t totally easy either. I used to do it when shopping, so I sense that Sainsbury’s model of rolling out rapid charging hubs on their sites will be as successful as supermarket petrol stations was back in the day.

We do have a small number of dedicated chargers with EV-only parking as well, and the first EV that appeared in our area was charged with one of those (I spoke to the owner one day, out of curiosity). They are usually free because they’re faster than the lampposts, there are idle fees after 4 hours and they’re a bit more expensive.

Funnily enough they, like the Shell lampposts, are run by an oil company, and raised their prices a lot when that takeover happened. It’s almost as if the oil companies want to delay EV adoption somehow.

So if anyone reading this is EV-curious and wants to see action to support them locally you need to engage with local politicians.

Total was letting their chargers fall into disrepair, and 3/5 were Out of Order at one point, 2 of them had been so for weeks. I spoke to a local councillor, and said it wasn’t a good look for anyone thinking of switching, since it played into the fossil fuel “EV chargers are unreliable” lie. He told me there were contractual service agreements with Total, and within two days all five were up and running again.

@Ayebrow
I am assuming that as more people drive an EV locally, they will avoid blocking a lamppost charger out of courtesy, but we will see
You think someone is going to park miles from their house in a difficult parking situation if one is available near where they live? When I get in after evening activities I’m lucky if there is one space in my street - or the neighbouring ones. I assure you I’d park in it whether or not I was going to use a mythical EV lamppost charger. Mind you, there aren’t many lamp posts either.

@Ayebrow (again)
It’s actually almost as if at least some of the posters are either paid shills for the fossil fuel industry, or have simply soaked up and are repeating the lies told by said shills in other sources
To me it seems more likely that it’s representatives of the EV industry, because nobody is listening. I’ve been told by several people that I’m wrong about Ev chargers in the place where I live and they don’t. It’s not practical for most of the country. It never will be as far as I can see. There is no way for my street to accommodate an EV charging facility for everyone if everyone has an EV car. No way at all. And don’t tell me I’m wrong, I live here, you don’t. Plus most of the country isn’t London and doesn’t have the public transport infrastructure which means there no need to drive for most journeys, reducing the requirement for frequent et charging. And it never will have.