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Originally Posted by Halcyon
There is nowhere near enough infrastructure in place to support everyone moving to electric cars.
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There certainly isn’t enough infrastructure right now. But not everyone has an electric car right now. We will need to see what government plans there are to ensure everyone who needs access to charging facilities can get it when they need it. Remember, in 8 years sales of new petrol/diesel cars will end. Cars already sold will remain on the road for years to come, so there will not need to be charging sufficient for 30 million cars on 1 January 2030.
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Most electric cars are too expensive for the average driver.
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As I said earlier, new technology costs more. The manufacturer is recouping relatively more of the research and development cost in early sales. Plus, they are not producing at a scale where the process is as efficient as it eventually will be.
By the time we all have no choice but to own an electric car they are unlikely to be significantly different in price to what you would pay for a new petrol model today.
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Even if we could all afford them, how is someone in a terraced house or flat who parks his car on the street going to charge it? Run a cable accross the pavement to his bedroom window?!
Plus, If I'm doing a long journey and I run low on fuel, I pull into a petrol station and 5 minutes later drive off. Even the fastsest of chargers won't let me get away with a full charge in 5 minutes.
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There are answers to both of these, although admittedly they are a bit chicken-or-egg, so to try to take them together …
When thinking in terms of refuelling time, you’re thinking like a petrol car owner, which is fair enough as that’s all you’ve ever been. But think of it this way: why would you choose to refill your ‘tank’ (battery) from empty, mid-journey, when you could leave home with it full every morning?
We refuel our cars the way we do because that’s what their design demands of us. Electric cars have a different design and therefore demand a different approach to refuelling. In many cases this will mean overnight charging at home. For those who can’t get their car on a driveway, in some cases I suspect councils may introduce on-street charging, however it is more likely that the places people park their cars when they go out during the day will become the filling stations of the future.
The killer statistic is this: in the UK, the average car is used just 1 hour in every 24. If even one of those idle hours is spent at a destination other than home then there’s no reason why that car can’t be fully charged there.
And for the minority who do a lot of high mileage motorway driving, then the distance covered on a single charge is such that quite frankly, an enforced half-hour rest to recharge the battery is only going to make UK roads safer.
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So..... I will be holding on to my Fiesta for as long as I can. We've also had S-Max and C-Max Ford's and they've been spot on, never had any big issues.
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Enjoy it while you can.
