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)

We just need to get there with charging speeds and infrastructure. It'll happen.

Being able to charge your car at home is already way more convienient than filling up with petrol.

For those who can't charge at home or are away from home, a 400kwh charger can charge a standard size EV battery from 10 to 80% in around 10 minutes.

Initially, it will mainly be people with access to charging who will do it- i.e. people with driveways and people with easy access to third party charging (eg in their work carpark or they don't drive much and just charge at Tesco once a week while they shop or while they're at the gym). Then charging will get faster and petrol stations will become fewer so the "inconvenience" factor of charging offsite will reduce relative to ICE. In any change cycle you always have front runners who are just massively into the tech or the "rationale", then you have "normal people" and then you get the hold outs/ laggards.

How will it work when lots of us can't charge at home? Genuine question. It will be too expensive to do every charge when out and about.

Thanks. Will mumsnet in 30 years time be all 'ffs the neighbour is hogging the charging point even though their car must have finished charging hours ago' 😂

Bought my first ever new car a couple years ago and toyed with electric, for a moment. In a terraced house with no parking so nowhere to charge it. I cannot be bothered to have to go driving around looking for a public charger that's not broken, or indeed not being used.
I think far too many people like like my house or in flats for electric cars to be for everyone. They need to be made a hell of a lot cheaper too.

Why assume that the way it is now is the way it will always be? When ICE cars were in their infancy, people used to have to buy jerry cans of petrol in general stores. It's early days, solutions will come. It's not even as big a challenge as getting petrol to everyone - we all have electricity in our houses already.

So you don't actually have a suggestion...

Oh FFS. Get a grip.

In some parts of London there's some new charging units, just on the side of the roads in residential areas. Easier sure but I hate to think how much more people are paying using them.

The other thing, do they charge faster now? Or do more miles per charge? I used to drive 350 miles to see my parents often, I don't suppose that is going to happen on one charge, adding to an even longer journey.

Lithium is used once in a battery compared with the chemicals used in every tank of fuel.

cars aren’t scrapped when the battery fails. When the battery becomes less viable for a car it can be swapped out. That battery isn’t scrapped, it can continue to serve a long life (decades) in lower intensity situations like house battery grid backup, solar support, supporting areas that aren’t on grid electricity.

car battery usage doesn’t even drop off that fast. Maybe 1% a year. How’s your petrol fuel economy compared with what the manufacturer said when it was new (especially looking at VW group vehicles!)

there are many days of the year when UK electricity generation is at least half sustainable, with wind, wave and solar. This will increase as more sustainable generation is built.

this would be even better if every new build (house and public building) had to have solar, as well as grey water management.

The info about the UK grid is brilliant, and it is great to see how much the proportion of renewables has grown over the years.

But even in 2026... For every extra EV that is charged, the extra power required will mostly come from burning more gas. The marginal generation, the extra power we need to generate for each extra bit of demand, is almost always gas. When we increase demand, the sun doesn't shine brighter or wind blow harder. So we have to turn up the knob on the gas fired power stations.

EVs are the future but we have a lot of work do to infrastructure, to increase renewable supply and to smooth and shape demand (for example via vehicle to grid discharging which is woefully slow to progress) before EVs are as clean as some people would have you think.

Also, anyone smugly saying they charge from their own solar, each KW into your vehicle is 1kw less to the grid, and so 1kw more needing to be generated by gas (yes, ok, give or take some conversion and transmission losses).

I don’t buy new, but I also don’t buy older than 3 years second hand - so it’s 2033 for me. I have a self charging hybrid now, I’m not resistant to EVs, but there is no way I can see that charging infrastructure for where I live could be provided. I’m in a narrow street with terraced houses. I rarely park outside my own house, so personal charging is a non-starter, and often not even on my street. The practicalities don't add up. Lots of the U.K. housing stock is like this. I can’t see how it can be done.

We have an electric car as our family car. Just been on a European road trip to Holland and it’s confirmed to me that I’m not swapping my diesel for electric! Electric is fine for pootling about locally but a bloody nightmare on a long trip. Those saying that 400kw chargers are quick clearly haven’t used one with our car - it was 30-40 mins to charge the car fully which adds considerably to a journey if you need to charge 2 or 3 times compared to popping into a petrol station to fill the tank

Not true that electricity comes mainly from fossil fuels in UK

grid.iamkate.com/

We live in a city in a dip and the pollution hanging over it on a clear day viewed from
the hills was awful. Whatever the other pros and cons we couldn’t go on all pumping out those fumes in cities it’s just not right.

Ours charges up 260 miles in the time it takes me to have a wee and get a coffee - each of which I need a lot sooner than 260 miles anyway, so a non-issue for me.

I do 250 miles to my friend, stop once for half an hour's lunch break and charge, and get there with plenty of charge to spare. Driving on my own I'd want a decent stop anyway so it's not an issue. And even driving with two of us taking turns, I think it's better for the body to get up, move around and sit in a different position anyway, so we don't mind a charging stop.

But we are a family who try to minimise impact generally so are used to slower travel. We do a lot of bike/train travel which is often slower than driving, and have used sleepers and overnight buses to Europe rather than fly, which is also slower. I understand for some people this isn't a workable option.

Yes, apart from any other consideration, air quality in cities is a huge problem, it causes so much illness. In a few decades, people will look back in horror at what we put up with.

Yep, this will lead to a huge amount more people believing and insisting that the space on the public road outside their house is exclusively theirs.

It doesn't help that, as well as charging a car, you obviously still need to park it somewhere.

There will probably be a lot of regular fights and communication breakdowns if there are more cars than spaces.

Also, anyone smugly saying they charge from their own solar, each KW into your vehicle is 1kw less to the grid, and so 1kw more needing to be generated by gas (yes, ok, give or take some conversion and transmission losses)
@Telemicus that doesn't make any sense at all. We had solar panels installed and bought an electric car at the same time. We didn't use to put any energy into the grid at all. Now we put some energy into the grid and some into our car.

The people who hate electric cars probably aren't the ones putting solar panels on their roof.

I'm hoping the technology for hydrogen fuel cells is going to hurry up so the petrol based infrastructure can be converted to run on hydrogen or even better, water

There about 10 n the UK at the moment

https://www.ukh2mobility.co.uk/stations/

I never get the argument about you needing to stop for a wee and a meal/drink/leg stretch on a long journey anyway.

Yes, this is true; but I'd much rather choose when and where to stop based on what suits the occupants, rather than what the car demands.

I also don't get why you're expected to charge the car when there's 20% of the battery left and not charge above 80%. Yes, it might be better for the battery, but what a waste of capacity and range.

My diesel car can get around 550 miles to the tank on long motorway journeys - I'd rather not just ignore the first 110 miles and the last 110 miles as if they aren't available - even though the remaining 330 miles woukd still be a lot more than many EVs seem to offer.

Electric cars have like 1/10 of the moving parts of a combustion engine. They have very few parts to go wrong. Friend has had his for 10 years and no significant repairs. Still on same brake pads due to regenerative braking. I have an ev too but I don’t drive more than a few times a week. Have a subscription with IONITY and charge there at a slightly cheaper rate. It’s all renewables. Would love to have off street parking though

I wouldn't bother with electric

The simplest possibility is that charging out and about could become less expensive as time goes on.