Electric Cars - Am I The Only One Having Reservations?

[MysticMeghan]

The news is full of stories about electric cars, how marvellous they are for the environment and how wonderful it's going to be when we all have them. But as someone of modest means, I can't help wondering if this is going to be something that is embraced by the wealthy and those of us who can't afford to shell out £30,000 for a new car are going to be left behind.

I know there is car leasing, but you have to be able to be loan worthy to qualify for that. If you are on UC or working a part time minimum wage and you NEED a car to get to work because you live in a rural area or work unsocial hours, what are you going to do? There's not going to be much of a market in 2nd hand electric vehicles, so buying an old banger for £500 (or cheaper) to get around isn't going to be an option anymore.

The other thing that occurred to me was charging. I live in a street of terraced houses where we fight to park outside our own house because there are no driveways. We all park on the same side of the street to let fire engines and buses get by. Even with occasional charging, there are still going to be electric cables trailing across pavements. What about people across the road? How do they charge from home? Trail their cable across the road? What about blind people or wheelchair users trying to get along pavements? The estate is just streets and streets of tightly packed houses built in the 1950s. There is simply nowhere to install public charging points even if we wanted to.

At my work, we have 250 spaces for about 500 staff. People who arrive late have to park on the street. We currently have about 8 electric charging points for which there is fierce competition and already loads of problems getting people to move mid morning so that others can get in and charge because there is simply nowhere for people who move their vehicles to actually go. I have no doubt our employer would pay to convert the entire car park, but it needs to be at least double to size to allow everyone to charge. We are on an industrial estate with lots of parking restrictions. I realise that the simple answer to this is public transport, but for me to get to work by public transport in time for a 6am start simply isn't going to happen because the buses and trains for those distances don't exist at that hour of the morning. I work in Edinburgh but live in a different region (county) because I just can't afford Edinburgh house prices.

DH works in a rural area where there is ONE public charging point shared between about 17 villages. He has to commute further than the the range of a current electric vehicle and he uses tools and is an only able to work during daylight hours, so parking miles away and walking a cement mixer up the street just isn't practical. Assuming technology could improve to the extent that the range of vehicles could be increased and he could find on street charging near to where he is working, there's still going to be large sections of the day when he is likely to be hanging around waiting to charge a vehicle where he isn't actually earning.

The government are actually REMOVING the subsidy for purchasing electric vehicles in March so there doesn't seem to be much joined up thinking going on. And whilst I'm sure that electric vehicles are going to be a real boon in cities, I can't help thinking that in rural areas, where people NEED cars and there isn't even a proper mobile phone network or even mains gas in some places, people are really going to struggle. Where DH works the area earns most of its revenue from tourism, with people driving considerable distances but then just mainly staying for the day. Are they REALLY going to put in 40/50 charging points in a remote fishing village? Or will people have to beg the use of someone's private supply so they can drive home?

I recently read an article where an electric car user admitted that driving to visit his in-laws in Norfolk was quite inconvenient because he had to stop and charge about 5 times (and no doubt stay overnight somewhere as well). But he said as he only does that once a year he can live with it. What if you have to drive considerable distances every day or every week to look after sick relatives? There is this assumption that everyone lives identical lives with at most a 15 mile commute. That nobody really drives long distances very often. That's not my reality at all.

I know by the time all this happens, cars will have a better range and need less charging, but whereas you can easily integrate electric cars into a fairly modern country like Norway, this is Britain with our creaking Victorian and post war infrastructure and short of turning the country into one huge car park how is this going to work? Even in Norway they had problems. Affluent city dwellers with great public transport links embraced the changes. The rural poor have had to radically re-think their lifestyles, with less opportunity to travel, work and socialise they are more or less stuck in areas with very few facilities.

Please tell me there is someone else out there who thinks this 2035 ban is just a load of swank and the government are going to have to massively back track as the deadline gets closer?

PS If you are a Hybrid user I bet you are mad already!

I don’t see how it is going to work. I live in a terraced house and often cannot park outside my house.Also I simply cannot afford to buy an electric car.My worry is that motoring will become something that only the rich can afford.I live quite rurally and without my car my life would become very limited.I don’t have the funds to move into a city!
Part of me feels we should just live for today ( within limits ie not harming animals etc)and not worry about what may happen to the planet in a hundred years time as China and America don’t seem to care.
I don’t eat meat,recycle as much as possible and never fly so I am trying to be green.
I am also worried about losing my gas central heating as I will not be able to afford to heat my home using electric, I and I suspect many others will just have to freeze all winter!

I don't know why you think there won't be much of a market in second hand electric cars. There are already plenty of second hand cars available with prices starting at around £5,000. As they become more common I would expect prices to drop.

New electric cars start at around £20,000. Yes, the government grant is due to be withdrawn, although it has been extended several times and it is still possible it will be extended again. However, it will have to go at some point. When electric cars are common and prices have dropped to a similar level as other cars there will be no point using taxpayer's money to help people buy new cars.

The range of electric cars is going up all the time. New cars go well over 100 miles between charges with many of the latest models managing 250 miles. The range has roughly trebled in the last 10 years and the rate of growth in range is increasing rather than levelling off, so it is likely we will see cars with a range of 400-800 miles in the next 10 years.

As the range increases the need to recharge them as often as many drivers do at the moment will go away. At the same time, charging technology is improving. Some chargers are available that can charge a car in under 15 minutes. So it is possible that we will simply drive to a filling station and plug in.

The other thing to note is that petrol and diesel cars aren't going to suddenly disappear. It may not be possible to buy any new ones after 2035 but there will still be millions on the roads which can run legally.

There are certainly challenges if the government's target is to be met. But I would be very surprised if motoring became something only the rich can afford.

The price of batteries is going down all the time as they get more power dense so you need fewer for the same range, and fewer is lighter so take fewer materials to make.

The motors and drivetrain of electrics is waaaaaay cheaper than internal combustion, much simpler mechanically and lower tolerances needed except for a couple of bearings.

As PP, you can get a little 2nd hand electric for £5k or a pretty fancy one for £15k right now. That'll only go down every year.

The charging thing is very much a practical concern though.

I share a lot of your concerns. That said I think there are solutions. It's a question of what the political will is.

There's not going to be much of a market in 2nd hand electric vehicles, so buying an old banger for £500 (or cheaper) to get around isn't going to be an option anymore.

This largely depends on whether batteries remain expensive limited-life items. The cynic in me thinks this will be the case, because what incentive will the car manufacturers have to use a battery that'll keep its capacity for 20 years when they can just use one that'll get knackered after 5?

Also - and this applies to most of your points - "we should drive less" is government policy and will probably remain so. All too often schemes and policies don't seek to make public transport better but rather to make driving worse. On that basis, the haves won't see any problem in pricing the have-nots off the road. I mean we already see that with our high fuel taxes and other motoring costs.

I think we could have a future where electric motoring works for everyone, but I think we could also have a future where car travel becomes a luxury most cannot afford, and I'm not confident public policy will create the former.

There is simply nowhere to install public charging points even if we wanted to.

Kerbside chargers. Charging sockets as common and in the same sort of position as streetlights are today. If rolled out everywhere on-street parking is allowed things become manageable.

I finally came across an article today which addresses some of the REAL issues for the poorer sections of society. It's mainly aimed at Europe and the USA (where thanks to Trump, there isn't much of an appetite for electric vehicles ATM) but it acknowledges that poorer people will probably never get to own an electric vehicle because even being able to acquire a second hand vehicle for £5,000 or £6,000 is out of reach if you only pull in a couple of hundred pounds a week.

www.dw.com/en/electric-cars-low-earners-may-never-get-to-drive-one/a-50517095

Kerbside chargers. Charging sockets as common and in the same sort of position as streetlights are today. If rolled out everywhere on-street parking is allowed things become manageable.

I went and counted the number of street lights in our street. There are seven down each side. But there are 35 cars parked. This is because the street lights are quite widely spaced with the ones on the opposite side of the street being alternately placed if you get me. So using lamposts would allow approximately 7 cars out of 35 to charge every night because we all have to park on one side of the road only to allow access up and down the road. The other thing is that lamp posts would all have to be moved because they aren't at the kerbside they are at the hedge side of the kerb which means if we used them in their current position there would be cables trailing across the pavement.

Now people are creatures of habit and like to park outside their own homes. So assuming that technology improved and we only needed to charge a couple of times a week we'd all have to rely on our neighbours being really nice and moving their cars further down the road and parking somewhere else so that someone else could get a shot at the charging point. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. People are just not that reasonable. I get home late every night and have to park wherever there is a space. If there are no spaces next to a charging point I am going to have to walk up and down the street knocking on doors trying to find someone to move their car so I can charge. And what if they refuse? People do.

I looked at non lamp post kerbside chargers and they stick up quite a bit and have to be set back from the kerb. If you don't do this then people can't get their car doors open. On our street that is going to put them in the middle of the pavement. What about wheelchair users and buggies getting by?

I had a chat with someone involved in the car industry, and there is some thinking that the solution will be to have battery exchange stations in the same way as we currently have fuel stations - you'd drive in, log in to the system/pay and swap your battery for a fully charged one. Needs the industry to set that up though, but as the demand increases, the means of servicing that demand will improve. Bit chicken and egg at the moment though, we're not at the tipping point where it's commercially viable/demand is there yet.

I was watching a programme the other day about parking (yes, really!) and it had a feature about this new parking payment app system they have in Harrogate. Basically there are lots of round things set into the road at kerbside, and you can look on an app and see where they are free, and when you park over one it starts racking up payment for parking, and when you drive off it stops.
I reckon there will be something like that for charging - possibly wireless charging will be efficient enough, possibly there will be something on the car to make contact.
I also think in cities and towns there will be more short-term rentable electric cars, sort of like Boris bikes, and perhaps a reduction in actual car ownership. But I agree that rural areas are very much a different kettle of fish.

The important sentence in the article to which you link is "A lack of enough cheap second-hand electric vehicles is likely to remain an issue for at least a decade". Petrol and diesel vehicles will still be around for at least another 20-30 years. By then I would expect cheap second-hand electric vehicles to be available.

The cynic in me thinks that the push towards electric vehicles is an attempt by Western Governments to quash the power of the Middle East, whose fortunes are built on oil.

This is why Trump's refusal to get on board with climate busting initiatives doesn't make sense. He's not quite the buffoon we think he is. But the US is lagging way behind. I know they have an abundance of cheap shale oil, but they can't frack forever.

It would be so much easier if we could remove the batteries to charge up at home/office/coffee shops etc.

Electric cars would work better if there was a standard battery for all makes, and you stopped at service stations and swapped batteries, rather than faffing around waiting for your battery to charge. Old batteries are also dfficult to recycle, so not quite as green as the companies make out.

We currently have a diesel as we do long drives so having to stop every couple of hours to charge a car would be a pain in the arse. We park on the street, so couldn't charge at home, and my employer has already said they won't install charging points at work. I'm hopeful hydrogen technology will have come in by then, negating the need for these cars.

It's not just about the electric cars though is it? It's extracting the stuff needed to make the batteries, and disposing of it later. It's also, and this is where it gets difficult, about having to upgrade the system to cope with the increased demand for charging electric cars, from investing in nuclear to guarantee supply, to rewiring housing stock to cope with the increased base load. The engineers I know have said this is pie in the sky until the major infrastructure work is done to ensure supply. It will cost a shed load.

Although electric cars might be cheaper than petrol and diesel at present, it is helped by the fact that domestic electricity is only subject to 5% VAT and the fact that people don't take electric cars on long journeys and really have to THINK about how and where they are driving. As the range of cars increases, people will use them more and so the running cost will begin to increase.

With the government set to lose MILLIONS and possibly billions in fuel duty VAT, they may seek to impose the full rate of VAT on domestic electricity, so we'll just be exchanging high gasoline bills for higher home fuel bills instead. As there are also plans to ban gas boilers, this will push more into electrical generated forms of heating. As someone who has lived in a house with no access to mains gas, I KNOW how much more expensive it can be to heat a house using electricity as opposed to gas.

I don't think anyone is going to save vast amounts of money here. The capital outlay on electric vehicles is huge. And the cost of putting in home charging points will have to be met by the consumer. Moving house is set to become a whole lot more interesting!

Personally, I don't think electric cars are going to happen in isolation.

Here's the other shoe:

news.sky.com/story/uks-first-autonomous-road-trip-nissan-leaf-drives-itself-from-bedfordshire-to-sunderland-11926935

put the two together, and you're looking at a future where private car ownership is rare, and most people just call a journey within 30 seconds or so and leave parking and charging the cars for someone else to worry about.

Recent developments in Birmingham have done nothing to make me believe this isn't happening. Unless there's a sudden retro fashion for air pollution.

(It's also a reason why talking about a railway costing £100+ billion for 2035 or whenever is plain madness).

I have the same concerns, I live in flats in London the carpark spaces are spread out and limited. Now you can park down the road or around the corner but what happens when everyone is fighting over them.

I’m also a wheelchair user so realistically you are going only allow charging on one side of the street to allow people to pass? Have seen people on TV and they had a long lead they had to carry out as there was no drive and had to be places over the pavement. Making it impassable. Not everyone lives in nice house with a drive!

Have seen people on TV and they had a long lead they had to carry out as there was no drive and had to be places over the pavement.

I wonder what the theft attraction would be for a nice big run of copper wire capable of handling a few kilowatts might be ? A really organised outfit might be able to make a few grand for an hours work in some streets. (Yes insurers have already looked into this ...)

I don't think electric cars are the way forward. Hydrogen technology will overtake at some point.

I don't think electric cars are the way forward. Hydrogen technology will overtake at some point.

Where does the energy come from that charges up the cars?

Battery swap is a good idea but doesn't seem to be on the radar. The chief problems are batteries are currently expensive, big, and heavy. The value means you don't want to swap your battery for a 'random' one, while the bulk and weight means they tend to be built deep into electric cars where they can't practically be removed. For example the batteries in the Tesla Model 3 weigh half a ton and are under the whole of the passenger cabin floor.

But if batteries became lighter and cheaper, battery swap could become used.

I'm sceptical about the idea of driverless taxis taking over from private cars completely. Cutting out the need to pay a human driver could make the fares a lot cheaper, but I think most people with the money to buy their own car will want to. It's your own space, you can leave stuff in it, have your child's car seat always fixed in place, and it's there exactly when you want it not after a 2 minute wait that might be 10 minutes if it's rush hour and you're unlucky. Also, although a fleet of driverless taxis requires less parking space, for the same amount of people travel the taxis create more road traffic since they must drive between fares.

And from an economic perspective it's the same vehicle whether it's a private car or a taxi. Meaning that unless private car ownership is subject to punitive taxation, the cost of one will largely track the cost of the other.

I work in the real estate industry and we've discussed the infrastructure needed for electric vehicles. Current consensus is not to spend on EV infrastructure as hydrogen cars will make it all redundant.

To the OP - your thinking is the same as mine. But, I think 15 years is a long time. And it's only "new" cars that will have to be electric in 2035 - petrol and diesel cars have a life of 10-20 years, so there'll still be petrol/diesel cars on the road well past 2040 and probably won't be until 2050 that they become rare.

So, we've got 30 years before "everyone" will have electric cars. Over that time, technology will improve, so shorter charging times. Infrastructure will be put in place, bit by bit, i.e. re-designed car parks with charging points for every space, kerbside charging points on residential streets, etc.

If supermarkets get rid of their petrol stations, they'll have a lot more space for car parking, so will be able to spread out spaces to accommodate charging points.

If (and it's a bit IF as I don't believe it will happen), driver-less cars become a reality, then they'll be able to drive off and charge themselves at central out of town charging points, and come back fully charged to pick you up the next morning.

As for pricing, they'll have to become cheaper if people can't afford them - simple supply and demand. The car manufacturers will want to sell millions of them to recoup the huge costs of research & development, so there will be ways for lower income people to be able to buy/rent them.

My main objection is that hyrbids are also going to be banned from new sales by 2035 - that's a bit of a killer as hybrids are a brilliant "middle ground" approach that answers most of the issues of a wholly electric car, i.e. distance, charging etc. It wouldn't surprise me if Hybrids get a reprieve and are allowed to be sold new for a few more years after 2035 if the infrastructure/technology for 100% electric cars isn't quite ready by then.

After all, digital radio was supposed to have replaced analogue radio years ago, but we still have analogue because digital doesn't fully work and huge numbers of people still use analogue. The same could easily happen with cars.

Pretty sure there’ll be a huge role for hybrids in rural areas and for longer journeys.
The future phasing out of diesel and petrol cars doesn’t include hybrids.

Be a laugh in a power cut!!!