James Titcomb, writing in the Telegraph, has spotted a hugely regressive factor involving electric cars. And the faster the Government pushes us towards EVs, the more drastic the consequences. The problem is the driveway divide which he discovered after buying his own EV:
I have an advantage in the electric transition: the humble driveway. Unlike almost half of the country who live in terraced housing or flats, my dwelling has a dedicated parking spot where I have been able to install a wall-mounted charger.
In a petrol-powered world, the driveway divide did not matter. Whatever one’s domestic circumstances, we all had to queue up at the forecourt and pump fuel into our vehicle every few hundred miles. In the electric age, meanwhile, driveway ownership divides motorists into haves and have-nots.
There are obvious convenience benefits to being able to charge up domestically. Leaving the house with the equivalent of a full tank every day and never having to visit a petrol station easily outweighs the moderate inconvenience of charging on the occasional longer journeys.
But the main advantage of charging from one’s own house is financial. On today’s smart overnight tariff, charging a battery from empty to full costs less than a fiver. In comparison, filling up an average family petrol car costs £75, according to the RAC Foundation. A full tank will go further than a charged battery, but the difference is still huge on a per-mile basis: around £2 to drive 100 miles in the EV, compared to £14 for petrol.
This has always been the promise of electric cars, even for those unconvinced by the environmental factor: while the car’s sticker price may be higher, you will save on running costs in the long-run.
That calculation, however, has completely broken down for those who are unable to plug in at home. While the rise of smart meters and EV-only energy tariffs mean charging at home costs almost nothing, soaring electricity prices have led the price of public charging to hit an all-time high.
Powering up at an ultra-rapid station costs the equivalent of £28 for 100 miles – almost double that of a petrol car – and this has risen significantly in the last two years. Slower chargers, such as those placed in lampposts by councils, are slightly cheaper, but not by enough to make EVs financially viable. Supermarkets and other shops that once offered free charging as a way to get people in the door have stopped doing so.
When electric cars are both more expensive to buy and more expensive to run, owning them makes little sense. No wonder, then, that the EV-owning class is disproportionately those with dedicated parking – 93% of people who have given up their petrol-powered vehicle have a home charger.
When those without a driveway – estimated at up to 40% of the population – have no financial incentive to own an electric car, it should not be a surprise that ownership is so far behind official targets.
Something Titcomb doesn’t mention is the prospect of a whole new type of protocol also. EV owners who’ve driven a long way will turn at up relatives’ or friends’ houses expecting to plug in on arrival, rather than filling up at a local petrol station, won’t they? Adult children rolling up for the weekend will do the same. It’d be as if in the old days the host was expected to have half a dozen cans of petrol waiting in the porch.
This means well-heeled homeowners with offroad parking and plug-in facilities, despite being rinsed for free volts by their guests, can offer electrical hospitality. After all, you could hardly send your guests off to pay vastly more at a commercial charger, could you? Meanwhile, those without drives will have no choice but to send Uncle Jack and Auntie Nancy off to some rip-off plug-in facility at a nearby shopping centre. Unless of course they’ve had the good sense to hang on to their petrol car.
It’s another way EV cars and the mandates could divide Britain even more than it already is. And, big surprise, now it’s a Labour Government doing everything it can to accelerate the imbalance.
Titcomb concludes:
One way or another, the pavement tax will need addressing before the majority of the population is forced on to EVs. If not, electric car mandates will become even more unpopular than they are now.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Britain will become a “laughing stock” unless hybrid cars are banned from 2030, Net Zero lobbyists have said. According to Electric Vehicles U.K. (EVUK), allowing some hybrid cars to remain on sale after 2030 would be a “catastrophic misstep” and hold back the rise of EVs. It comes after the Government pledged to bring forward the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035 to 2030 but made an exception for certain hybrid vehicles to remain on sale.
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Aren’t “smart” overnight tariffs subsidised by taxpayers?
Yes, the naughty taxpayers who don’t want to Go Electric. Serves them right.
Forget that.
People don’t understand that transporting electricity is expensive. They think it’s free because it’s invisible. But actually huge amounts of power and therefore energy are required to send electricity from power stations to the consumption points.
Hydrocarbons are by far the most efficient form of energy to move around.
The whole electrification of transport males sense only to idiots and grifters.
True. I think there’s a particular blindspot when it comes to the internet and mobile networks – because the people that use them can’t see exhaust pipes they think that shopping and working from home and getting their entertainment online doesn’t have any impact, whereas in fact the whole thing consumes enormous amounts of power and rare resources, not just to power the servers but to build them and keep them cool. “AI” of course will make this much more true. I’ve been looking into “AI” a bit for work and the amount of computing power required to even have it run for a single user, slowly, is tremendous. We sell a complex back office financial services application – it runs respectably for multiple parallel user threads on my 5+ year old desktop PC. Even a cutdown LLM (Large language model) won’t even load on my PC, let alone do anything useful.
Ai data centres here in ireland accounted for 21% of all electricity use up to the end of 2023 that’s a 400% increase since 2015.
Rural and urban domestic use combined was 28%!
So yes, feeding an Internet connection uses almost as much electricity as powering your house does!
Bloody hell! Thanks for that stat – I didn’t realise it was so high. I’ve not seen a breakdown like that for the UK.
If Mad Ed has anything to do with it we won’t get to see one. Unless it’s just lies and more lies.
It’s not as simple as a class matter. Even houses with driveways may not be able to install a charge unit for an EV, depending on their power supply service cable. E.g. if it is on a loop service cable that feeds their house and another one next door, they would have to arrange for the DNO (not the utility firm) to split it and install a separate cable for both houses, as long as they can do that. It might depend on the capacity of the local transformer, or that of the distribution cable as well.
Pah, you’re such a party pooper, John
As this is from the Telegraph, it’s probably written by a Londoner for Londoners. Outside the Great Wen, I have a drive, which means I might be able to afford to run an electric car. However, I couldn’t afford to buy one (even if I wanted one), making the suggestion that I am part of some special ‘class’ a little silly.
More drivel about hybrid vehicles from the usual idiot suspects I see, we really do need to put them in the stocks and throw rotting vegetables at them.
Shame we don’t have horses on the streets anymore to provide extra material to augment the rotting veg. Dogs I suppose…
Divide? Yes. The people with driveways will be those without electricity.
Local low voltage supply is designed to supply an average 1kW to 2kW load to each property it serves. At times some properties will exceed this if, for example, they have an electric cookers on but overall the load spread will be within the average, so the accumulative load will be within the capability of the equipment and safety margin.
A car battery charger draws 7kW continuously when charging. If sufficient BEV owners served by a particular local supply are charging during the night or day, this will cause an overload and power failure.
Even better if they have heat pumps which draw continuously 3kW to 7kW they will overload local supply.
Net Zero won’t work because it cannot work – the grid infrastructure, high tension and low voltage, cannot carry and distribute the load required to replace the 87% of energy provided by fossil fuels with electricity. The resources to rebuild the grid to cope do not exist, and certainly not by 2050.
Milibrain has a plan, JXB.
And his plan is utterly useless and won’t survive first contact with reality.
There has long been a policy of taking account of “load diversity” in determining the maximum capability of any local distribution system. Quite recently, the IET has tweaked the BS7671 standard to the effect that remote control might be requited to manage the peak load. “722.311.201 Load Curtailment, including load reduction or disconnection, either automatically or manually, may be taken into account when determining maximum demand of the installation or part thereof”. In principle this could be done via “smart” meters, but it’s not clear how that could be done with multiple utility firms operating on the same distribution cable downstream of the local transformer.
I know what the maximum capacity of the cable that serves my place is, as it was only installed a couple of years ago, and I’ve had a look at it all. Some images here: https://youtu.be/LS8VFhRMsYY The distribution cable for about 30 addresses is limited to 355A @ 400V 3-phase, so you can do the sums if you want to. It would not cope with every house having EV chargers operating simultaneously. And they don’t want to invest in more heavy aluminium cable to cope with that, which is why they want to manage it remotely in due course. Note that at this place, the local transformer was replaced at the same time, so it really is a 230V single phase supply (not the old 240V). Made in Turkey in this case.
Thanks for such a useful and succinct explanation
I got the perfect driveway for one with an outside charging point.
This is a bit rich coming from him:Neil Young turns down Glastonbury Festival due to BBC’s ‘corporate control’
Let more and more people perform their mind-numbingly boring stop-start short distance commutes in their glorified electric milk floats. Fully charged every morning, whoopee woo.
People clearly don’t want the freedom of the open road.
“Always take the high road, it’s far less crowded.” Munger
Can’t imagine The Professionals in EVs.
In the years since this Scamdemic started in 2020 no real improvements have been made to the EV charging structure which shows exactly how honest the governments have been about the whole business. That is all we need to know. It is a joke and those who fell for it have been made to look like the idiots they are.
Full of new year cheer I see Hux. Good oh!
That’s me…always looking on the bright side. It’s what keeps me motivated.
Stlii, Oldham making international news is worth smiling about even if the reasons are not particularly salubrious.
I agree that hybrid cars are fairly hilarious, but by what logic would hanging on to the only sort of EV not dependent on the National Grid make GB a “laughing stock”?
Indeed – and more to the point, why would we give a FF what others think when it’s nowt to do with them? (Although we know the whole setup is crazy anyway)
I suppose we fund EVUK?
In Epping the local council’s wholly owned subsidiary is building hundreds of flats with almost no parking. Nearby streets have resident parking schemes but they are not limited to those living there.
When the flats are occupied it can confidently be predicted that flat owners will have cars and they will be parked in front of someone else’s house. The idea I have often heard suggested if cables across the pavement clearly won’t work in that scenario.
These electric cars are dead in the water. You can see that already major disinvestment is a huge trend and all of the major manufacturers have cut back. You are living in a cloud cuckoo land several removes from reality if you believe that electric cars have a future. They are unsustainable on every level. And there is growing evidence that sitting on top of a giant lithium battery isn’t always a good idea.
I’m sure the taxman will soon put a stop to that
“Britain will become a laughing stock” ? Spoiler alert, Britain is already a laughing stock.
I would ignore the Government. Labour will NEVER see power again after the 2029 electoral rout
And if there is sufficient take up of these infernal machines do owners really believe they will continue to enjoy cheap overnight electricity? Fuel duty raises billions for the treasury, as that declines EV drivers will see the cost of changing increase to cover the difference.
Also for two car families having to charge two overnight presents other challenges.
My neighbour is a ‘renewables’ freak and has an EV, their second car is a diesel as they can only charge one at a time and the diesel is used more frequently than the EV. The deciding factor in buying the EV was the EV was a subsidised company car scheme and the charger was installed under a grant. This is a well off family hoovering up taxpayer subsidies at the cost of the less well off.
This country is so screwed up, it is difficult to see it ever recovering. Economically, socially, just about every which way.
the only way out is to leave little Britain. It is no longer sustainable and the current administration is the biggest driver of this hopelessness.
Done just that, marebobowl. France is not without problems, of course, but so far we’re finding it better in every respect which has an impact on our lives. In some respects, it’s a lot better.
For example, and on point, France is the only Western country which has committed practically to the wonder of atomic power. And yet, you barely see any BEVs. And where we are, there is no lack of driveways, nor lack of private budgets to support the purchase of BEVs.
The problem with BEVs is the green government mandates forcing the transition before the battery technology and infrastructure is in place. It is extreme just like the extreme and radicalized people pushing it. There is no climate crisis and there is no need for the radicalized time frame. This is good technology but is not fully developed enough for what is being asked. Time will be needed for this development not government mandates.