Demand for Electric Cars has Dried Up

Demand for electric cars has dried up and it’s time for a rethink, says billionaire founder and Chairman of chemicals giant INEOS, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Writing in the Telegraph, he says the “notion of a quick transition away from petrol was always barmy”. Here’s an excerpt.

The electric car is not popular today. The early adopters have all bought theirs so now the car giants are having to persuade ‘normal punters’ of the merits of going electric. And they are having none of it.

There is a rather fundamental drawback with the electric car. It simply doesn’t do what you want a car to do. It doesn’t get you from A to B reliably if you are on a long journey. And you have no idea whether you will be able to fill it up. Put it together and it’s referred to as ‘range anxiety’. And it’s very real.

Electric is fine and dandy for the short local journey, but should you decide to head off for the hills, forget it. And hence demand has dried up. Tesla is making 14,000 workers redundant. In March, German sales of electric cars collapsed by 30%. You can’t give a second-hand electric car away in the U.K.

Politicians have been dreaming of vote-winning green agendas and utopian engineering and energy switches. Dreams of course, don’t need to be real. They don’t need to accommodate the needs of the consumer, the practicalities of installing colossal new infrastructure and the small matter of where all this electricity is coming from. Coal?

Flipping transportation from fossil fuels directly to electric is not like flipping a light switch. The very notion is barmy, which is why the USA predicts electric car take up by 2050 in the USA will only be 20%. In Europe, our idealists are heading towards 100%.

Ratcliffe outlines his preferred transitional design of an electric vehicle with range extender (REX): “You can charge it in the normal manner. However, tucked away under the bonnet is a small engine and a generator. The engine powers the generator, when requested, which in turn charges the battery. The engine is not connected to the pedal, so is simple, efficient and reliable.”

“Why would you ever buy a fully electric car when you have this option of an electric vehicle with a range extender and complete absence of range anxiety?” he asks.

Worth reading in full.

In the same newspaper, Matthew Lynn says “the electric car carnage has only just begun”: “Ford has just confirmed what has long been feared: that the latest quotas are punitive for U.K. consumers and a gift to China.”