I have perhaps become well known on this forum for my views in opposition of electric vehicles. However, I don't think I have ever said I don't think electric vehicles are good - just that its not a viable mainstream option for the majority of the population. I do not oppose electric vehicles as an option for some people, I oppose the government suggesting they will ban production of combustion engines for the purposes of political point scoring and without any suggestion of a viable alternative.
Does this make me a 'luddite'? Or perhaps I'm 'myopic'? Interesting that those who have descended to namecalling do not provide any context or considered analysis with their assertions.
I recently bought an electric car. It is a Kia. The build quality is excellent. It has a range of 280 miles. I charge it when it drops below 50% and only up to 80% to keep the batteries in great condition. So I charge it about twice a week. I use an ordinary 13 amp plug. It charges at 10amps which is little more than an electric heater.
So for me I never have to find a public charging point. I just plug it in when get home and leave it overnight. No need to queue for a garage or spend 5 or 10 minutes filling up .
You have succinctly demonstrated here why electric works for you, and that's great! Sounds like you are one of many who are able to embrace this new technology and it suits your current lifestyle and situation.
However, there are millions and millions of people for whom the situation does not allow adoption, and no amount of investment in infrastructure will really change that.
You can charge at home. Many can't.
I'm guessing you don't regularly drive more than 200-250 miles in one go. Many do.
If we move aside the wildly innacurate estimates about the carbon footprint of electric vehicle production and electricity generation for a minute....and if we ignore the fact that not enough cobalt exists in the world to keep producing batteries.....the fact remains that electric vehicles do not suit the needs or the lifestyles of a huge portion of the population, and never will most likely.
There's the people who live in flats, or houses without driveways who often have to park their car well away from the front of their house. I live in a terraced house which has a car park at the end of the block of 4. I have a space but its too far from my house to reasonably charge a vehicle there. That would leave me to use the charging point in the town which isn't too far away, but there's 6 charging points which are often not working, occupied or otherwise. My town has a population of about 6,000. Maybe as many as 1,000 couldn't charge at their house. Even if every space in the public car park had a charger at it, it still couldn't serve everyone. Also the public car park is walking distance to my house. Its not walking distance to many.
There's people who regularly have to drive reasonable distances, and on a time limit. On wednesday I drove from Birmingham to my house in Perthshire (350 miles), which is a drive I do a lot. I stopped for lunch in Penrith for a total of 10 minutes, and I had to get back at a certain time which wouldn't have allowed for a 30 minute stop for a charge. Half a tank of diesel and I wasn't worried at all about running out of dino juice.
Then we have commercial users. Think about a guy who runs a joinery company - his business has 6 vans which some of the youngsters who work for him take home at the end of the night and drive direct to the job in the morning. He gets 2 phone calls first thing in the morning with "boss I forgot to charge the van last night so I can't get to the job. I will be an hour late".
The other 4 vans have been taken home by lads who can't charge at their homes, so its pot luck if the rest of those have been charged.
Commercial users who tow regularly. Enough said.
There's people who will never put their children in an electric vehicle because of the extreme risk of thermal runaway in the event of a crash.
Finally, electric vehicles will never suit the needs of the police or many of the emergency services. What are they supposed to buy when internal combustion engines have been banned?
I live next to Gleneagles hotel, who currently have a fleet of electric Jaguars for ferrying delegates down to Glasgow for COP26. They have a gigantic bank of diesel generators currently installed for charging them....
So I'm not saying electric vehicles aren't good. I'm also not suggesting the world doesn't need to make a change of some kind, but banning something without a viable alternative being available is what is myopic. Fortunately its one of these "promises" made by politicians which will never be realised as by the time it has come around we'll be in someone else's term, and those in power can blame the short-sightedness of the previous encumbent - they obviously didn't think it through when they made that promise!
Instead, we need to come up with genuinely good options, and people will naturally chose the option that works for them! Toyota (who were on of the earliest to get into EV, and have matured their tech nicely) are doing a lot of work on hydrogen propulsion. JCB are also producting hydrogen powered commercial machinery. Porsche (I think?) have been putting a lot of money into producing synthetic fuel.
We need to explore multiple options to produce viable alternatives, rather than a blinkered vision of an electric future which ignores all the facts just because loads of people have invested loads of money in it and are now "pot committed". Any time I tell someone I don't like Teslas (there are many reasons for this), they always lament about how fast they accelerate, thinking that will convince me (a motorbike guy) that they're great. What I've come to realise is that everyone mentions this because its literally the only good thing about them. They accelerate fast, so we can ignore all the other features and pretend that people buy cars based on how fast they accelerate....
