I had not appreciated the ban did not apply to hybrids and there area few out there that will tow caravans well enough so that should mean they are not dead yet. Diesel and petrol cars will not disappear even if the ban is implemented in 2030, which looks impossible unless the infrastructure to support it is developed far faster than most believe possible. Even the mains cables in the street may need to be upgraded and how you deal with areas where people do not have a private drive to keep the car on is still in the air. Possibly the diesels and petrol models will get a boost in value as people who prefer them will want the last ones. Certainly the demand for petrol and diesel will remain for some time but as yet we do not know the cost.
The battery range has increased rapidly and there is every possibility they will be up to towing by 2030 although charging will still have to take time and the room needed to charge with a caravan on the back could be a problem.
I know people doubt we will have the generation capacity, by my nephew who is CEO of one of the suppliers is happy that this will not be a problem. I just hope he is not over optomistic.
Hello Ray,
I think you underestimate the push that IS going into EV infrastructure, and that push will accelerate quite dramatically . There is a long way to go but it is eminently possible, as Norway has proven. There companies who are actively pushing to introduce charging points built into street furniture like street lamps, and bollards.
For those who may not have access to home or street side charging there will be the network of public fast charge points at supermarkets and other retailers, carparks and of course service stations. Zap Map has recorded 118 new public chargers added in the last 30 days . There are no almost 9000 public charging points available - and growing.
I shall repeat, The National grid has stated it can cope with the increase in EV's without needing to put in major upgrades to the supply cable capacities. The reason this is likely is becasue domestic charging units will be typically limited to about 7Kw (which is no greater than an electric shower) and the demand to recharge EV's is unlikely to coincide with daily peak demands for other reasons.
Most EV's manage to do between 3 to 5 miles per kWH, and as commutes on average are less than 30 mile round trips, that only needs between 6 to 10kWh of energy to be replenished. Even allowing for some of the losses in the charging systems, most cars will be topped up in 2 to 3 hours of charging!
I have done some rough calculations:-
We currently have about 38M cars and small vans on UK roads. there are typically 2.3M new cars added annually (and something in the region of 1.2M taken off the roads. This means we have an net increase of about 1.1M yearly that is roughly 3% turnover annually. Figures to the end of Sept 2020 indicate we have 370K EVe and hybrids on our roads that's roughly 1% of the car population. Even if all new cars sold from to-day were EV's at 2030 (10 years ) we are not likely to have more than 31% of the car population registered as EV's. Realistically it will still be less than that as not everyone will buy electric. It's more likely to be about 20%.
Based on a 3% turn over it will take something like 40 years to effectively remove all ICE cars from our roads. There may of course be other factors introduced that might accelerate the change.
There is ample time (provide people plan adequately) to manage this changeover with little pain or risk of the system collapsing. It needs most drivers to drop the conventional approach of running a vehicle till it's nearly empty of fuel and adopt the idea of topping up every day (or over night).
EV's combined with localised storage systems in homes is actually good for the power generators as it can be used to balance and even out distribution issues when faults occur or maintenance is required.
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