COP26: How easy is it to drive from London to Glasgow using an electric car?
Cars are one of the four areas Boris Johnson has promised action on at COP26 but with more and more people making the switch to electric, how good is the current infrastructure?
I've been attracted to the idea of an electric car for decades - well before Clive Sinclair's disappointing C5. Yet in spite of the hype, old problems still seem to be waiting for major technical advances.
I was driving a Kia e-Niro, a family SUV with a range of about 275 miles. With the map telling me it was 400 miles to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow city centre, I reckoned two charges should see me through.
As the article makes clear, those two charges were more problematic than expected. Our 4x4 would take us there and halfway back on a single tank of diesel.
Most of the time an electric car would work for us because most of our journeys are short, but electric cars are expensive and don't do everything our diesel does. I'm not convinced they ever will and I'm pretty sure nobody else really expects them to. In the longer term it's public transport for the likes of us.
A pessimistic conclusion perhaps, but to my mind the political games being played are a key factor of our supposed electrically mobile future. Particularly totalitarian games such as COP26 - they certainly do not inspire confidence in a mobile electric future comparable to the mobility and freedom we have now. Or maybe that should be the mobility and freedom we had a few decades ago.
11 comments:
"With the map telling me it was 400 miles to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow ..." I saw an official-looking COP26 map yesterday that reckoned the drive from Edinburgh to Glasgow as 92 miles. Wrong by a factor of two.
Our much-loved diesel gave up this summer, so we went for a new VW petrol car. No chance of electric for us, as we live in what is in effect a tied cottage and the owners would not countenance spending on a charging point.
In terms of the bigger picture, do we have enough copper to provide sufficient charging points? Can we get the stuff needed for millions of batteries? Are we set up to deal with the old knackered batteries?
My guess is no, and I also guess that we will never hear these and other questions put to Boris. Expect the virtues of cleaner, greener, public transport to be extolled after this COP nonsense.
It depends on cases I think. A relative has bought an electric car for his wife to use on a 45 mile commute (plus return). To fuel the car he has installed solar panels and a wall battery with a faster charger, plus (when the admin is sorted) off peak electricity to charge the car if there is insufficient sun. It makes sense for them. I do expect the charging infrastructure to improve to cover the longer journeys.
I have a diesel. Normally I do around 4 journeys a week totalling less than 50 miles (about a gallon of so of fuel). My 'pollution' is low - but to go electric I would have to sell my diesel and buy and electric car and I would almost certainly never recover the environmental cost of manufacturing the electric car. So I'll soldier on.
Might be best to stick to a proper car for now.
dearieme - it's probably a habit. Pick a number and double it.
Sam - my guess is also no. Nationally we don't even have the electrical capacity although I don't think they care about that, or anything else but grand gestures.
DJ - the charging infrastructure is bound to improve. We visit a shopping centre near the M1 and they already have quite a few charging stations set up in the car park. I imagine drivers call in from the M1 to charge up and have a coffee while waiting. Charging at home is an attraction but many can't do that.
James - I think so. Wait and see.
Someone did a calculation recently that to convert the UK alone to electric cars would require the entire worlds supply of lithium & other rare metals.
Worstall or Not a lot of people possibly?
I only recently worked out that our VW petrol Golf costs 16.5p per mile, on petrol alone!
So if I do the shopping on my electric bike, I get an immediate diescount of 33p per viisit!
But then I'm a spreadsheet nerd...
Nessimmersion - I remember that calculation. As I recall there were other metals too, such as cobalt and neodymium. The whole idea was shown to be impossible for those reasons alone.
Scrobs - don't tell Boris though.
"In the longer term it's public transport for the likes of us"
You nailed it. There's no plan to have the same number of vehicles on the roads after electrification. Clearly and obviously we can't generate enough electricity to do it.
But that's OK, because private transport will be only for those and such as those - you know who they are. The rest of us can wait for the bus, or just stay put.
It's a feature, not a bug.
And having worked for a space battery manufacturer using lithium ion cells for the last 8 1/2 years of my working life, I can tell you that there are no new battery technologies on the horizon.
Anon - that's my impression. Private transport is to be greatly curtailed or phased out.
Tammly - that's the impression I have from reading around the subject. Lots of hype and some incremental improvements, but incremental is the best we are likely to see.
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