Is the UK Ready for Switching from Petrol/diesel to Electric Vehicles.
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Watching Dispatches tonight and they are talking to drivers about how the find the experience of driving with an electric vehicle when needing to charge the vehicle up and coming up against out of order charging points . 1 driver said that about 30% of there time they go to out of order chargers . In my local town I can only think of 1 supermarket who has any charging points and there is just 2 chargers in a 400 parking spaces for the supermarket . The government also need to replace the tax they are going to lose when you go to electric and not filling up with petrol and diesel .
Do you think we are ready or is it a disaster waiting to happen ?
It's a great aspiration . 2030 is a bit too soon ! The charging infrastructure is clearly not there even to service the 5% -10% ish (of total vehicles ) of EVs we currently have !
Looking at the cars I might buy the price is 20 % -30% more than an equivalent petrol model (even with the government grant ) .
OK in the next 8 years efficiencies of scale might kick in to bring EVs down to a comparable price and batteries will improve ? but I doubt it .
Read a piece today that the manufacture of a single new car (of any propulsion ) costs more in emissions than an EV can save in 20 years of motoring !
It will come and will be a good thing over time but 2030 is too soon .
I don't understand the current policies to be honest. We need to get people into lighter smaller cars not just change the fuel type and some EV's are SUV's and very heavy so require more energy to move and do more wear and tear to road surfaces. This is especially true of commercial vehicles. We need a class of car like the Japanese KEI cars but electric this would help create a home grown car industry again by creating a UK car type different to other countries. We need more single person and dual person cars.
Ultimately we need to be making more journeys with ebikes and normal bikes and making journeys with larger vehicles much more expensive. We need to reduce the distance and frequency of commutes if possible which use full size cars.
You can make a strong environmental case for keeping your existing petrol or diesel car and just making many more journeys with bicycles.
This is the type of vehicle most people should be using because most journeys in cars only have a single occupant. That is what we should be aiming for. This really should be the main type of vehicle in use in urban environments. I just don't see the point of pushing EV's that weigh a couple of tons as environmentally friendly at all.
BonzoBanana think I would be bit nervous driving that but most journey I take are with at least one other person
Imnotcheap I think if the vast majority of vehicles were single or dual person then you wouldn't be as worried but obviously there are many very fast large cars driving about at the moment that can easily kill other road users. I think if there was road tax that had a large preportion of its cost related to the weight of the vehicle and the resources that go into making it so a 7 person vehicle was hugely expensive to buy and run then it would motivate people to downscale their vehicles. If you only allowed smaller vehicles into inner cities and larger vehicles were forced to use park and rides and then use public transport like buses to get into the city centre then people would start getting annoyed about owning their larger vehicles when they see the greater convenience of having a smaller vehicle.
Very interesting , sounds good for the future but these two posters sound very sensible...I was also shocked to see on Twitter a dog charity being threatened with closure because of their van!
No way is electric vehicles practical entirely. In South Wales where I live there are many old terraced streets , no parking and no front gardens,so no opportunity for chargers , if you could park near the house, you would have to have charger wires running across the public pavements. Not just in South Wales but many other areas of the country also and also problems in major cities where parking is not directly outside your house .
Absolutely no where near! The infrastructure is a non existent, where I live we have about 15 public charging points for about 30k population.
The cost of the vehicles are still too high even for second hand ones and not enough of them.
I can see it a disaster waiting to happen unless we have some dramatic changes
Where I live there are 5 chargers at 3 locations. As far as I'm aware. It definitely won't be worth me getting an electric car for a while if I could afford it
There’s three public charging points we’re I live and as for my household there’s three cars so I would need three charging points and I would not get the cars close enough to the house to charge them so we’re definitely not ready
I definitely don’t think we are ready yet but going in the right direction. I had to use an Uber a few weeks ago and the guy had a hyundai ioniq, it was around the same time as the ‘petrol shortage’ he said having an electric car during that time was a life safer for him. I’m sure all the electric car drivers were laughing at everyone queuing as the drive past. Lol
I thought you might be interested in this article about electric cars which confirms what the dealer said to us when we recently bought a car recently. The chap seemed to think that electric vehicles were just a stop gap until hydrogen gets going! https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1526465/green-energy-switch-net-zero-plan-electricity-hydrogen-power-boris-johnson-poll
I would love to try an electric car but not a todays prices. I guess the greenest thing is not to have a car and to work from home or live walking distance from work. I think the dates they are wanting it to happen by are optimistic as with all government planning. I would start with logistics and move away from the idea that everyone needs a car, or three as is the case where I live.
I would love an electric car but put off by the cost and if something goes wrong or you been in a slightest crash then it becomes a write off according to the RAC.
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