EVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.
The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.
This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.
> With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers
And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
> And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
Or just have sane laws requiring management to provide it at-cost?
In my country the default is that the board of tenants is responsible for the management by themselves. Delegating all the boring stuff to a management company for a fee is definitely possible, but I don't think them charging a per-kWh premium is even allowed.
I’d like to think governments would serve the interests of the people but in my experience it’s just been they serve the interests of the corporations.
FYI I’ve only lived in the UK and the USA, both of which are living far below their potential
> This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
/Exactly/ this! The UK is all about maximising rent extraction, enshittification of everything and profiteering.
Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
So just a ~£400/yr saving at 10,000 miles, excluding capital investment (assuming 40mpg, £1.45/L). Though if you just do stop-start in London 30 mpg would be more accurate, so ~£1,000/yr in savings.
How much was your car (or, more usefully, how much is the depreciation per year)?
Honestly the car is a luxury for us and a minor tax dodge. I was a consultant with some retained profits in a ltd co so we decided to take advantage of the lease deductions. Got a great deal on a top end VW - £206pm ex VAT.
What are you talking about? £206pm is the low range of the car leasing market, and the price per km is under petrol. Millions of people lease cars in the uk and can get favourable tax deals through their employers. So yes, still bollocks.
Can you explain this more? I have an EV scheme through work where you can get EVs for £200/month on lease including insurance, maintenance and tyres.
Outside of these schemes you can buy a Dacia spring brand new for £10k, or a whole host of decent options second hand. £20k will get you a second hand Tesla with decent range and fast charging.
This doesn’t scream “wealthy” when an ICE Ford Focus is £30k new.
Estimations vary but it seems like at least 50% -70% of homes could support at-home charging.
There's different levels of 'wealthy'. £200/month over 10 years is still £24,000
You can buy an old-but-roadworthy Ford Focus for a tenth of that. And a whole lot of people rely on used cars in the sub-£10k range.
If you've got a £20k+ budget, then yes, the EV options are pretty good. Did browse used Teslas myself recently, but as I can't charge at home I'm pretty much stuck with ICE.
TBF these schemes tend to only be available from the better employers. If you're working a minimum wage job for anything but a ftse100 customer facing company you probably don't get the option of a 'cheap' lease.
Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
There might not be much of a market for true EV supercars, but that market is so small as to be inconsequential anyway, with many models selling 10s of units and many of these cars never actually being driven significantly.
In the 'high performance but actually driveable' toy zone, there are plenty of Porsche Taycan 'company cars' around London. But sports cars are niche. Lots of rich people drive SUVs, and there are plenty of Porsche / Audi / BMW, etc, SUV EVs around outer London.
EVs will keep getting cheaper as China puts pressure on the market and as the number of EVs on the roads increases. In the UK, you can already get a second-hand VW ID.3, a great EV, for well under £15. And new cars from BYD and MG are available at ever more reasonable prices.
I don’t get why someone would want to own an electric supercar. A Ferarri engine is beautiful even if it’s impractical. Electric motors aren’t special even if they are tremendously powerful and efficient.
I could see a market for hybrid supercars if cities go further on being clean air zones, enough of a battery to let the owner drive slowly around Knightsbridge.
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
The used car market should solve that eventually - so long as battery longevity is there. A reasonably maintained ICE car can last 20+ years of low mileage use. We need battery packs that last that long, or that are modular and replaceable for a reasonable price.
Didn't work so well in my experience: it's about as expensive as petrol (on top of the car being more expensive) and it takes longer than a grocery shop for a charge. You really don't get much benefit unless you can charge at home.
Works just fine for me in Prague, Czechia. The running costs of my EV are exactly the same as those of my previous car (a 1-liter econobox). And it’s a 200hp RWD.
I live in a city which is far better navigated by foot or by bicycle than by car - it was, after all, designed for the horses ass.
So I converted to electric - at first, electric moped, but now I ride a more powerful electric motorbike. It is simply a pleasure to get on and ride every day, smooth, quiet, efficient - and because I’m not car-sized, extremely fun to get around.
I encourage everyone to not just get off the petroleum treadmill, but to also try to live closer to the things that are important. I know a vast swath of humanity has to navigate the plains every day just for survival - but getting a closer, more local outlook on life can be rewarding too, and converting to electric has certainly provided that for me personally.
The "or with the potential to have" is hiding away a lot, to the point of being misleading. Most homes, especially in flats and terraced housing, which are the majority, won't have the infrastructure support for charging point conversion.
My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.
Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.
Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.
Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.
In my (generally affluent) zone 4 neighborhood in London, the number of green plate EVs had multiplied like rabbits over the past few years, but few houses have off-street parking. A huge percentage of the cars parked on street are EVs.
But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.
> But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts
Are these the standard UK 230V 13A fused single-phase receptacles? Those put out about twice as much power as a 120V 15A circuit protected by a breaker, 3kW vs 1.5kW
230 * 13 = 2990W
120 * 15 = 1800 * .8 = 1440W
Using those for L1 charging would be a lot better than US L1 charging.
No, they are 3.5kW - 5kW standard EV chargers. But it's probably easy to install them using the existing power run.
But you are right that standard wall charging is much more viable in a 230V system here than in the US. Some people just run a cable from inside to their car if they don't have a 'real' charger yet.
Considering the article is talking about the UK, which recently axed a significant portion of its new high-speed railway corridor: don't count on it.
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
91 comments
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.
The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.
[0]: https://gul-e.co.uk/, https://www.kerbocharge.com/
(Coarse location: outer SE London.)
> With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers
And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
> And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(
Or just have sane laws requiring management to provide it at-cost?
In my country the default is that the board of tenants is responsible for the management by themselves. Delegating all the boring stuff to a management company for a fee is definitely possible, but I don't think them charging a per-kWh premium is even allowed.
FYI I’ve only lived in the UK and the USA, both of which are living far below their potential
> This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.
/Exactly/ this! The UK is all about maximising rent extraction, enshittification of everything and profiteering.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
ChatGPT reckons this gives 7.6p/km when petrol would be 9-12.
Obviously it could be cheaper, but it’s still pretty good for us. We’re not using it for commuting or anything though.
How much was your car (or, more usefully, how much is the depreciation per year)?
> EVs are great if you're wealthy
Was in fact, not "bollocks" in your case.
I don’t see why it would be different in another city, and in a less dense one you can home charge which is dirt cheap.
> EVs are great if you're wealthy
Can you explain this more? I have an EV scheme through work where you can get EVs for £200/month on lease including insurance, maintenance and tyres.
Outside of these schemes you can buy a Dacia spring brand new for £10k, or a whole host of decent options second hand. £20k will get you a second hand Tesla with decent range and fast charging.
This doesn’t scream “wealthy” when an ICE Ford Focus is £30k new.
Estimations vary but it seems like at least 50% -70% of homes could support at-home charging.
You can buy an old-but-roadworthy Ford Focus for a tenth of that. And a whole lot of people rely on used cars in the sub-£10k range.
If you've got a £20k+ budget, then yes, the EV options are pretty good. Did browse used Teslas myself recently, but as I can't charge at home I'm pretty much stuck with ICE.
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
There might not be much of a market for true EV supercars, but that market is so small as to be inconsequential anyway, with many models selling 10s of units and many of these cars never actually being driven significantly.
In the 'high performance but actually driveable' toy zone, there are plenty of Porsche Taycan 'company cars' around London. But sports cars are niche. Lots of rich people drive SUVs, and there are plenty of Porsche / Audi / BMW, etc, SUV EVs around outer London.
EVs will keep getting cheaper as China puts pressure on the market and as the number of EVs on the roads increases. In the UK, you can already get a second-hand VW ID.3, a great EV, for well under £15. And new cars from BYD and MG are available at ever more reasonable prices.
And yeah sure, who travels right? lol
> Charging off grid power at 8-30c/kWh
Nice how do I get access to this 8c kWh electric for 0 EUR capital investment, today? Oh, it needs some capital investment? 5-20k EUR worth? No wayy
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
So I converted to electric - at first, electric moped, but now I ride a more powerful electric motorbike. It is simply a pleasure to get on and ride every day, smooth, quiet, efficient - and because I’m not car-sized, extremely fun to get around.
I encourage everyone to not just get off the petroleum treadmill, but to also try to live closer to the things that are important. I know a vast swath of humanity has to navigate the plains every day just for survival - but getting a closer, more local outlook on life can be rewarding too, and converting to electric has certainly provided that for me personally.
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spa...
Flats and terraced homes aren't the majority - about 55% of people live in detached or semi-detached houses. See the ONS Census data at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...
My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.
Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.
Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.
Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.
But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.
> But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts
Are these the standard UK 230V 13A fused single-phase receptacles? Those put out about twice as much power as a 120V 15A circuit protected by a breaker, 3kW vs 1.5kW
230 * 13 = 2990W
120 * 15 = 1800 * .8 = 1440W
Using those for L1 charging would be a lot better than US L1 charging.
But you are right that standard wall charging is much more viable in a 230V system here than in the US. Some people just run a cable from inside to their car if they don't have a 'real' charger yet.
SMMT publish monthly data too
And which ever way we look at it electric cars are becoming more popular
https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/
French TGV trains have been planed as turbotrain powered by gas turbines, but after 1973 oil crisis evolved into electric trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV
Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/our-work/looking-after-the-rai...
We can either make the shift now or we'll have to do it later. Much better to do change early and invest in it early.