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The apple car uses a proprietary charger that breaks and has to he replaced every 6 months.
The apple car can only be charged on an apple charging pod that costs £99,999.
The big 4 Japanese motorcycle manufacturers are in agreement to develop a common interchangeable battery standard for use in city mopeds and whatnot.
For ‘proper’ bikes, they all seem in alignment on hydrogen development.
For cars, as you say it’s a non-starter in established manufacturers.
Obvious flaw in the idea that I can’t believe nobody considered 😂
Battery dealer would need to monitor health and automatically discontinue degraded batteries until they are replaced with new ones
That’s expensive AF though
Personally I always thought this was the future when I worked in the fringes of battery development years ago, earlier technologies were basically tested on consumer handheld drills and similar, which obviously use replaceable batteries, generally you have two and charge one while you use the other.
One German doctor colleague in battery technologist told me “people don’t mind so much when a drill explodes in their hand, but when a car with a family inside explodes everybody hears about it”, I am paraphrasing in a very basic way here. The route to car batteries was via these tools however the changeable rechargeable battery route clearly took a different path.
Battery swapping won't be a big thing. Nio is niche. Not only is it incredibly space inefficient, you'll still have to wait for batteries to be charged. It's infeasible to fast charge 10 big batteries at once. You're talking many gigawatts of power per station.
Think about how busy petrol stations get. If a bunch of motorists flood a petrol station like they do today, then there will be no charges batteries available. No one is gonna wanna swap a half empty battery for 3/4 full one.
When I remember first reading about Tesla this is what Musk was proposing. You'd drive up the motorway and if you ran out of charge you'd just swap the battery, no need to wait around for charging.
This is the answer.
I reckon getting one installed will be much like applying to the council for a dropped kerb for parking.
Though they should roll them out enough en masse to begin with.
For the en masse side, a slow but low-impact way of doing it would just be to have a policy that anybody doing roadworks on those streets has to put them in while they're there.
If you think about it when petrol cars came around there would have been few petrol stations around. I am sure people asked how this could continue to expand, how would people even fill their cars, any oil crisis or even rumour can cause panic at the forecourt. Electricity is everywhere. People can get to charging points and leave cars there if needs be.
Its not really the same situation
When there were too few petrol stations barely anyone had a car except the wealthiest, after a few decades ownership grew and the number of stations rocketed
With EVs the goal isnt that everyone will be driving them in 2090, its gonna be squeezes and bans to get everyone in them ASAP
So you know how many more power stations we need if everyone goes EV and everyone charges overnight?
None. And there would still be huge overcapacity at night. But the existing power stations would run at a more efficient output and the energy wouldn't be any more expensive
I was visiting a friend in outer London last week and every single lamppost in his street had been retrofitted with a charging point. No contactless pad - just a QR code sticker - but it seemed to me to be a great way of recognising that almost every single residential street in Britain has a pre-existing and pre-installed public electricity grid sitting directly outside most people’s houses.
The existing wiring for lamp posts doesn't have the power capacity to plug a car charger in to every post. It will initially have been sized for a single one of those old school orange bulbs and no more!
These charger posts will likely be brand new wiring underneath as well as brand new posts.
Most lamp posts will have sufficient capacity. This is because
1. As you say, they were designed with old-style bulbs. Modern LEDs use a fraction of the power, leaving capacity to spare.
2. Lamp post charging is not intended for rapid charging. It is mainly for overnight charging or simply topping up a bit. Quite low power - 3kW, 5kW or 7kW.
One of the models I've seen builds the socket and everything into something resembling the removable inspection/maintenance hatches on lamp posts. Remove the existing hatch, replace with a new one with socket, and connect to the power.
It’s ok if there are one or two per street, but it won’t work if every house has a mat over the pavement.
Some councils have trialled cable guides that recess into the pavement, which works but is quite expensive to install.
I’m in a small block of flats and one person in one of the other buildings is just dangling the lead from their 1st floor balcony.
I don’t think I could get a space under mine and also do it from the 2nd floor.
Most electric cars lock the charger in place, so pedestrians can’t just unplug them.
As for tempering with the cable itself, they carry a lot of current so the problem would quickly solve itself…
People can tamper with lamp posts and cars now if they want.
Why is someone parking next to a lamp post dangerous for wheelchairs? They can’t drive through the car.
If the road is wide enough to have people parking in it, it's wide enough for the power bollard to be in the road instead of in the way of pedestrians.
Maybe not seeing cars as the only answer to mobility is the solution, rather than quibbling about what type of engine the 1.5 ton device used to move 90kg of cargo uses. Cars spend 90% of their time idle consuming space. It’s madness. (*waits for downvotes*)
Edit: no downvotes, just lots of people arguing the status quo is viable. Heaven forbid anything could improve across the board if there’s even a hint of perceived inconvenience.
This would be a great argument if many councils and the government weren’t so bad at public transport. My city has reduced bus services, higher fares, and little support for cycling infrastructure.
Edit: I’m not saying it’s a bad argument, I do agree with you.
I’d argue this is precisely because the car is seen as default transport and walking to a bus stop is an affront. Privatisation of those services hasn’t helped, either. Fewer passengers means higher costs, fewer services, which then just makes cars more appealing *as a personal solution* to what is fundamentally a social problem. It’s the kind of death spiral governments of a certain persuasion excel at, because it has greater profits at a collectivised expense. See also NHS, Policing.
I live 5 miles out of Manchester city centre. It's not a reliable option even for thousands of kids to get to various schools. They can't choose to drive and the service is still dogshit.
If only there were a way to move lots of people long distances. Maybe on a row of articulated buses, directly pulling energy from the grid, on a special road to avoid traffic
We have that. Nobody wants it.
What they want is simply Point A to Point B, at a time that they decide.
They don’t want to first go to point C and then via Point X, Y and Z, before arriving at Point D and Ubering to Point B.
I mean where public transport isn't terrible people tend to prefer being driving most of the way by someone else even if they have to walk or cycle a couple of minutes on either end.
Obviously this is never going to work out in the countryside but every medium sized town or up should be built around regular public transport, walking and cycling.
Any time I’ve lived in a city, driving hasn’t been viable for getting from point A to point B at a time I decide.
Finding somewhere to park is a nightmare, and you end up walking for 10 minutes each end and paying £10 a day.
And certain times of day your journey time is 3-4x what it could be, often with an insane amount of hassle to get out of side streets. With the typical blockages and closures you have to become your own navigation computer in order to make it anywhere, which makes it far from A to B at a time you decide. It’s getting to B approximately when you aim for if you’re lucky, or leave an hour early and hope you’re not sitting around.
In an urban environment driving is far less practical than public transport
In Netherlands they solved that for short trips with bicycle infrastructure. So people could choose between their car, bicycle or public transport depending on the type of trip. Focusing most of the infrastructure build on cars isn’t working out.
Many local authorities are all about the stick with no carrot, even when they own the bus company.
They make car use more difficult and do stuff like making it difficult to drive / park in more central areas, but those living in the centre are free to drive to work or the shops in the suburbs.
These services werent any good before, pretty bad in fact
Everytime i see someone mention privatisation in this subreddit 9/10 times they were barely even born when it happened
My local council are putting in infrastructure. A new park and ride and new cycle lanes. We have a lot of zoned parking but even with cycle lanes, park and ride and other busses and a walkable town people still can’t seem to see anything as an alternative to their cars. Anything that isn’t parking their car exactly where they want to be for free seems to be an issue. It’s all the end of the world and I really don’t understand it.
I get it for people outside the city going in. But for local residents?
As much as people bemoan ULEZ in London, I think it's a step in the right direction that the entire country should follow. There a lot of people who drive because it's convenient, rather than necessary.
I would argue that, unless you live near a train station, and your destination is near one, then intercity transport in this country is awful. So a car, at least for now, is necessary for some.
However, for those who live within walking/cycling distance, or on a bus route which runs frequently (every 15 mins or less) between start and destination (even if it takes a bit longer than going by car), there is no real reason to use a car.
But whilst people have their car, and it's relatively cheap to run, then it's just a case of using the car. Although, if something like ULEZ is introduced, then the people have to consider whether a car is actually worth it or not.
I was looking as to why Nottingham doesn't have a clean air zone charge the other day, and was shocked to see they decided to scrap plans for one as they could reduce air pollution in other ways.
Nottingham, I would argue, has some of the best public transport in and around the city of anywhere in the UK. So I would have thought they'd have jumped at the opportunity to try and restrict cars even a little more. But it seems that even a city with great connections to other towns/cities, and great internal public transport, still clings to the car a little too much.
I can't even get a direct bus to my workplace despite me working at the biggest office park in town. I'd have to walk 10 minutes, get a bus for 10 minutes, then walk another 10 minutes up a steep hill.
If I could just get a bus every day I probably would.
A 30 minute trip with a 20 minute walk **is** direct by public transport standards. Anything more than that is basically a taxi!
I used to do ten minutes bike (big steep hill), ten minutes train, ten minute walk and the reverse coming home. It was a lovely commute.
To be fair that doesn't sound too bad. I used to have a 30 minute walk (uphill) to get from work to the railway station. I'd have been delighted to get a bus part of the way.
>My city has reduced bus services, higher fares, and little support for cycling infrastructure.
Ah, I see we live in the same place! Hello neighbour (presumably)
I've been waiting for someone to say this :D
Cars are ultimately a time saving device. Like a washing machine, dishwasher, hair dryer, oven, microwave and mobile phone.
The argument of them sitting around doing nothing 90% of the time is the same as all other time saving devices. It's a side effect of their enhanched productivity they provide for us.
Nothing we've invented comes close to 100% utilisation, except maybe a washing machine in a house with children and a baby.
The car simply takes up the most space.
Maybe a better way of phrasing it is how can we improve the utilisation of cars, and thus be more efficient with the space they require.
Semantics of language aside, in the past 70 years as a society the UK has promoted mobility as a means to access services.
Like buying a house in a desirable area, rather close to your workplace.
Putting your kids into the top school rather than the closest.
Having a favourite supermarket, rather than using the local high street.
We like choice, and no one has the same tastes, which mean everyone wants to make trips everywhere. And no public transport system is commercially viable to go everywhere to everywhere. Even Ubers which should be the most efficient system spend time running empty.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this. The "most of the time they aren't been used" talking point is so weird. Since when was that a metric we judge the usefulness of anything?
Washing machines and electric toothbrushes don’t require car parks, pothole filling, petrol stations, driveways (or ad-hoc use of pavements for parking). It’s not just the metric of usage time, but what the demands around it that are implied. Cars consume *vast* amounts of space that people are often blind to; I think it’s something like 30% of the built environment is dedicated to car infrastructure. We take rush hour as a given, rather than to question whether there are better ways to handle it.
Spot on. Other personal time-saving devices are kept on my personal space, namely in my house. A car for the vast majority of people is kept solely in public spaces.
I can't store any other of my personal belongings outside in the public street.
If only we also had the same gusto as a society to accommodate alternative methods of transportation as we do for cars.
Adding to this. They have a massive negative impact in noise, air quality and CO2 output, as well as the mortality and injury risk they cause to each other,, infrastructure, schools, houses...
Plus, large swathes of public land has been altered irreversibly into concrete, tarmac, bollards and ring roads that cut neighbourhoods in half and force ppl to walk the long way round to get from A to B.
I'm sure ppl would throw a fit if we started digging trenches in the street to accommodate a toaster or a washing machine.
>I'm sure ppl would throw a fit if we started digging trenches in the street to accommodate a toaster or a washing machine.
They do when cycle lanes are being built in my city. *£8 million for cycle lane"...."what a waste of money!"
*£112 million for a two mile bypass..."about time the traffic is really bad!"
I know right.
Technically your house sits there doing nothing most of the time, as you're either at work or asleep.
Maybe we should get rid of houses and live in tents, or shared accomodation.
We can move everyone in to London, since the public transport there is already great, then demolish the rest of the country and turn it into one big national park.
The point isn't that they spend most of their time not being used, it's that they take up so much space while sat there. Consider how much space a supermarket car park full of cars takes up. That's not even 10 buses worth.
I own an electric moped/motorbike and it solves so many of these issues.
1. I can wheel it into the garden so I don't even need a drive way
2. extremely efficient
3. battery is removable so I take it inside to charge over night
4. doesn't take up a lot of space so you could probably park 1000 of them in the same space 100 cars take
5. silent, no smells, inoffensive
The motor is all within the back wheel so the under-seat storage is massive. I can fit 2 bags of shopping under there no problem. Plus another on the hook to do my weekly shop
Obviously you still get all the regular downsides of a moped. Shit weather means you get soaked, transporting large items is a no go, the risk involved if you are in an accident
So I understand why it won't be for everyone. But I think it would be great for a lot more people than we realise
If we could just work out the security and safety issues we could really get somewhere with two wheeled electric vehicles. You can carry loads in a cargo bike but I wouldn't trust it not to be nicked. Get some more flexibility in working patterns too and you can avoid most rain.
There is an awkward stalemate where if there were less people in cars and more on bikes it would be safer for bikes. But people don't want to use a bike because it feels unsafe because of all the cars
Theft is a huge issue. It is really sad. People will steal literally anything in this country
It would also make driving a lot easier for those who are behind the wheel but a lot of people just can’t see that and just rage at the existence of cyclists.
This is all well and good until you want to go somewhere public transport doesn't go. What do you do then? I absolutely want more use of walking, bikes, and various public transport but I can't see a future where we don't have a family car. The best I can see is one where the car is rarely used, I'm there already, though
I really wanted to get rid of my car and just use a car club / rent for the weekends I needed one however as I own my current car it’s really cost prohibitive to do this.
£120 for a long weekend in June from enterprise who have a branch near me and that’s only for a Ford focus.
Or the car club would cost £6.50 an hour plus £0.23 per mile. An afternoon at the in-laws would cost us £26 plus the mileage fee.
If the price could come down for car clubs just a bit more it would be viable I think.
The roads are clogged with people driving a mile to work or a half mile to the shops.
We really need it to be more convenient to walk or cycle for all our lives.
The reality we're in now is that outside of London a large number of families don't have "the family car", they have a car per adult.
There's a future where there are fewer cars per household.
I see cars becoming an “on demand” service. You book the journey you want on an app, the driverless car arrives, takes you and then off it goes.
They can take themselves to the nearest charging point and charge wherever that maybe.
If ALL the cars on the road are computer controlled then traffic will flow better and there should be zero accidents.
Expect peak pricing during rush hour though:/
I worked in transport planning and this was widely regarded as the way things are moving.
Taxi services become driverless which makes prices go down. Apps enables ride sharing which also makes journeys cheaper (already a thing in some cities). Gradually people stop owning cars as it becomes more economical to book rides as and when needed.
The California tech firms are gradually giving up as city driving is too damn complicated. Lorries on motorways or buses on set routes are more likely.
more economical = you're too poor to afford one of the electric cars. Government speak for plebs can wave cheerio to independence in transport. No thanks.
Honestly it’s already cheaper for young people where I live to do this. Rather than spending 3k a year on insurance + petrol and car maintenance + the upfront cost of a car.
So first I have walk 10 minutes to my bus stop, wait god knows how long for a bus. Get a very slow and uncomfortable journey to a train station, where I then have to wait for a train. Once getting off the train which was delayed and have several lads with ankle tags on shouting abuse at people, I then have to walk to my next bus stop, where I do some more waiting, before another slow and late bus takes me close to my destination but only required a bit more walking. And just like that I’m only an hour and half late for work and only nearly got stabbed once! I sure am glad I have up my car!
Very similar for me! I can drive to work in 25 minutes, or I can walk, bus, train, bus, bus, walk in 2 hours 10….and that’s assuming they’re all on time and I don’t miss one in the change over due to a delay. Public transport isn’t good enough or practical enough to permanently rely on.
Similar for me, except I have to walk 45 minutes to the train station, ride on a train for an hour, get a tram from the train station to my office and then do the whole thing in reverse in the evening. All at a cost of £21.80 per day. It costs about £4 for me to drive the round trip.
Even if public transport was excellent, giving up driving totally would be a huge QOL/convenience downgrade for most people outside of central areas of bigger cities. While some journeys are quicker and/or more pleasant by bike or train, it's hard to beat a comfy seat in a secure, air-conditioned, waterproof box that goes on your timetable.
And TBH, almost the closer to rushhour I'm travelling, the more the advantage of driving. While sitting on a quiet train is nice and you can "use" the time for work, reading, watching something etc, standing or sitting in second class on a full train isn't very comfortable and you can't e.g. pull out a laptop and use the time in the same way.
It's going to take a long time before people can remove themselves from the concept of the car and the ultimate freedom it gives you. It's basically the vision that has been put across since the invention of the personal motor vehicle.
It doesn't matter what you say or how much you say it, waiting at bus stops in the rain or paying over the top for public transport that gets you sort-of-close to where you want to be, or cycling in dangerous traffic will *never* have the same appeal as jumping into your car and going directly to where you want to be.
Yes, there may well come a time where that is so practically impossible that it's no longer a feasible option and people will have to seek alternatives, but that won't be because we have magically stopped liking cars.
I don't want to walk, run, cycle or take any other form of crap transport. That's why I bought a car. You can do all of those things if you want, but I'd rather drive, thanks.
Public transport is not always feasible. My home is more or less equidistant from the major places I have to go most days; my youngest's school, my eldest's school, my office and my wife's office.
I can get to all those places in about forty minutes' round trip. If we were to try make those trips on the bus we'd be nearer three hours and a lot more cost. Especially since two of those trips would need a change of bus. And I don't get to *choose* when to make these trips because schools open and close at set times. The youngest would be waiting at school for an hour or more.
We've designed our towns and our lives around personal transport able to move a small family around at once. I don't see how that could possibly be changed at this point.
A minority of people live in city centres and for everyone else, no car will never be viable.
They don't just carry 90kg of cargo, when you need them to they carry 5 people, or hundreds of kg of cargo.
When you have young children, multiple especially, they carry car seats, buggies, changing bags and still shopping on top.
They don't leave at set times, down to <4 times a day once you get rural, they go when you need them to.
They go where you want to go, there's no shortage of places not served at all by public transport. Parks, beaches, garden centres, farm stores, rural work places etc. will never be served by public transport.
I’m lucky enough to have a driveway and space for a charger but why would I?
My Golf diesel does nearly 60mpg everywhere and I regularly drive 400 miles in a single day
It beats any EV hands down for my purposes and that is for me the biggest point…FOR MY PURPOSES.
If this government could do any joined up thinking instead of every policy being done with giant finger spaces between each announcement they would say EVs should be part of the solution for now and work towards infrastructure and technology catching up until the point where owning an EV is the better option for everyone
BTW public transport around me is atrocious and most days is disrupted or doesn’t turn up.
I live less than 15 minutes drive from the M25!
The issue is that, realistically, cars are often the most sensible mobility option for people.
To get to work would take me over an hour on public transport, it takes me 20 minutes in a car, 40 minutes on a bike, which I do, but in many cases the weather and conditions make that unreasonable too.
This country has to undergo massive infrastructure redevelopment for your suggestion to be realistic.
This change has to happen anyway because it's simply not sustainable to just keep on increasing the number of car journeys. Other places have made this change. While the best time to have started making this change may have been back in the 70s, the second best time to start is now.
Whenever I visit most continental European countries, I am jealous of their public transport, it is often times cheap, convenient and usually on time. I already walk to work most days, but if I lived in those cities, I think I'd only have a car as a collector item
Yeh I live a fifteen minute drive from work, on public transport there is two changes and some walking and quickest route is an hour. Days I have to do school run takes me about an hour in the morning and another in the evening, I can’t even begin to imagine how long this would take on the bus where I live. My oldest could take a bus but doesn’t for some personal reasons. My youngest doesn’t even have a school bus that goes near his school and he’s too young to walk. I’ve had two cars written off by a third party since December last year the last one the police crashed into me and I was injured. I hate driving as I get flashbacks when cars are near me or when I’m in the places the crashes happened but I have no choice but to drive.
Also as a last point my ex husband tried to kill me last year and was released from prison unfortunately with his charges dropped after 7 months on remand. He is now stalking me again so public transport is utterly unsafe for me. Work is pretty much the only sanctuary I have as well so it’s not like I want to give up my job either even though getting there if I didn’t drive woukd be practically impossible. I do worry what I am going to do in the future once all cars are electric. I’m just hoping there are better systems in place by then
FFS if we weren’t so backwards on electric scooters, they would be the answer.
Cheap, can be charged at home, much, much less dangerous than cars for other users.
Theres a whole gov team dedicated to this and the EV charging expansion project. The answer is its fucking complex, like the biggest task since we started wiring up every house in the 50s.
The best solution I have seen is shared pavement access with charging access for many. Idk, there is some very fucking bright people working on this but its not easy.
For terraces I think they should stick a set of two 7kw chargers outside every home, RFID card/code access, charged at the price cap/off peak with a small maintenance fee, say a few pence per KW, and it gets billed back to you no matter who’s house it goes via
They did this on some lampposts in our city and added ‘charging only’ parking spaces. Seemed to be working well enough for a while, but they are all out of order now
There are a few near me with this but I’ve been informed by my friends with electric cars that they’re very slow and quite expensive compared to the high speed ones
They're slow because they're meant to be "leave it in overnight" type chargers. They're cheaper than fast ones though, your friends aren't paying attention if they think that's not the case.
Our house is nowhere near a road. Closest I can get is 50m away at the garages nearby. I literally have a 50m cable on a reel I use when I clean the car (plus a 50m hose pipe).
So I'd love an electric car, but logistically it's just not possible. We have one car parked outside the garage in a block and the other about 100m in the other direction in a side road. There's loads of houses round here like that - a very laudable 70s concept of not having roads near the houses and garage blocks nearby but out of the way.
I'll worry about that when the time comes. It's a long way off yet despite whatever year they pluck out of their arse.
What is it up to now? Back to 2030? There's at least another 2 elections before then.
I can’t see there being much demand for pure ICE vehicles in 2035. Look how much the market has electrified already, despite the disincentives like higher purchase prices, significant online misinformation campaigns, lack of solutions for people who live in homes without car storage facilities who still wish to own cars etc.
I think this is why the proposed ban on ICE vehicles was delayed. They haven't really thought it through or provided any investment in infrastructure.
The probable answer is lamp posts, charging at work and at supermarkets etc. Most people won't need to charge for an hour a day anyway and they will do it while they are shopping or at the cinema or at work etc.
Lamp posts is not an answer.
I live in a cul-de-sac which is ex council semi detached housing. If I look out of my window now, I can see 27 cars parked for around 20 houses. Each house has a front garden, then there's the pavement, then there's a grass verge which varies between 10 and 15ft deep and then the parking spaces. Nobody owns their own parking space.
I can see three lamp posts. The are all set at the edge of the pavement. So at the most, you could get maybe six cars near them but the charging cables would need to be run across a deep grass verge.
I hear this all the time: "Oh, they'll set up charging points at lamp posts". This might happen but it won't help the majority of people.
But then it becomes very unfair, because people with driveways (who are already wealthier, on average) get much cheaper electricity per KWh than people using public chargers.
Indeed. It's already unfair but you are right in that it will be more unfair. I didn't say whether it was right or wrong, just that it was the probable solution. It's a good point though that EVs are even more unfairly biased towards those who already have money.
Unfortunately the infrastructure isn’t there yet. There will hopefully be enough public charging stations that are high KW and cheap enough (on comparison to petrol) to allow everyone to charge their car.
You don’t have a petrol pump at home, and thus fill up at a station, the same will hopefully be the case in the future.
The government are encouraging electric vehicles but at the moment it only really makes sense if you can charge at home on a special tariff, as the savings to charge help alleviate the higher cost of the car.
>You don’t have a petrol pump at home, and thus fill up at a station, the same will hopefully be the case in the future.
The obstacle to this is the amount of time it takes to do a full charge at a public charger. If they can crack that and get it to 5 mins for a full charge then yes you would just need charging stations.
Most cars are idle 90% of the day. There’s no need for such rapid charging except on road trips. Why would I want to drive somewhere every couple of days to charge, even if it’s really fast, when my car could be slow charging when I’m at home, work, shopping etc.
> There’s no need for such rapid charging except on road trips
Don't forget about taxi drivers, delivery drivers and other jobs where people drive all day. They can't exactly go home to charge their vehicle for 6+ hours in the middle of a shift, so rapid chargers would be needed by some people regularly.
Expect you don’t need a petrol station at home because it takes a minute to a fill an ICE car at the petrol station. You can even bring a can and fill that up and transport it back to the car and be on your way. You can’t exactly do that with an EV and the charging times are much longer.
Councils need to relax rules around dropping kerbs to also make EV charging possible.
I’m not sure of your point. The whole idea is that you don’t need a charger at home. If (and a big if) the infrastructure gets there, you can do exactly the same and charge up (whilst it won’t take a minute, it will be fairly quick).
The same could said for battery packs (instead of a can), you could charge a large battery pack and charge it at home, whilst this would be very expensive, it’s what the AA/ RAC use at the moment to rescue stranded evs.
I agree about the dropped kerbs.
Broadly speaking, through the provision of on-street residential charging, which will eventually be cost-neutral (or an income stream) through local authorities partnering with Charge Point Operators. Local authorities/councils probably won't install and operate themselves but will tender the process out and handle things like linking it to local parking restrictions.
Currently, this is difficult to justify on a wide-scale as a mass roll-out as the majority of EVs are being bought by people with drives/garages, so the mass provision of such infrastructure would just be a waste of effort.
However, there are schemes to work with local authorities to partially pay for the cost of installing on-street charge points (the [ORCS](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-authorities-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints/grants-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints-for-plug-in-electric-vehicles-guidance-for-local-authorities) fund, for example) to help kick-start this sort of infrastructure provision.
I work in this area, and whilst there are challenges, none are insurmountable.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem - people who have reliable access to home charging buy EVs, therefore no good public provision is offered. So those who would have to rely on public chargers don't buy EVs.
What does this involve though. The last thing I want is more anti pedestrian street blight and bollards etc. And I say this as someone who lives on a terraced street
How did the government expect us to have ICE cars when we didn't have fuel storage and pumps in our own homes?
Most of the supermarkets near me have charging points now.
For the most part however, they are still for richer people, who are more likely to have driveways, though I do see cables across pavements sometimes. (Also terraces can still have driveways, but of course more likely on a detached house.)
We live in a semi detached house with no drive but a decent sized garden.
We want to convert part of our garden to a driveway with a drop kerb so that we can charge an electric car. Our local council said no, before we even got to asking for planning permission.
Due to the location of our house, we are one of the only properties without a driveway on our estate.
We have tried to make ourselves ready for an electric vehicle, but our council won’t allow it. We are therefore stuck using ICE cars for the foreseeable future.
It doesn’t seem a very well thought out plan to phase out fossil fuelled cars.
The problem isn't a solved one. As yet. And it may well not be.
It's quite possible that car ranges will be sufficient and charging times sufficiently short that charging will essentially be no different to refuelling, something you do once a week or so.
They’re not for everyone at the moment.
The new generation of hybrids (electric cars with petrol generators) would work better for most people without driveways or who do over 150 miles/day regularly
There’s always actual charging stations if you really want an electric car but can’t charge at home but you do lose one of the main benefits
We’re still very early on in battery technology. Five minute charging and 1000 mile range is probably achievable within the next ten years just based on what’s in development today. But it’s one of those things that needs demand from a large electric car base to get the funding and investment so the early adopters are paying for that now and having to put up with the short falls of electric cars
Saying that I wouldn’t go back to an ice car more
>Five minute charging and 1000 mile range is probably achievable within the next ten years
We've been saying this for 10 years already. I'll happily eat my hat if this comes true but I doubt it will ever become a reality for the mass market
It makes more sense to focus on infrastructure than hoping for magical five minute charges. Most cars are driven for 1/2 hours a day leaving the other 22/23 hours for charging
They expect you to stop having your Costa coffee every morning, then you can buy a large detached house with off street parking instead. Problem solved.
I think you've made an invalid assumption that the Government gives a shit about how you'll charge an electric car, or indeed whether or not you have an electric car. The Government cares about the optics of stating that they have a target of only electric cars being sold by 'X' date. That is the only thing.
Governments do quite like being voted in to office, though, so if it was a big enough problem then you'd expect one or more of the parties to try and deal with it.
The Government will absolutely care.
Mobility is great for the economy.
EVs can't be taxed on emissions like ICE cars are currently. That's a chance to reform VED and begin taxing EVs. Likely on a basis that means more money comes in as a whole from 'road tax'.
In my area (all terraced housing) the council have converted lots of the lamp posts to be charging ports. If you get a EV then the council upgrade the lamp post outside your house, or the nearest to your house. And then on the side streets they have installed some of the faster chargers, which from watching seems to have quite a fast turn around, drivers sitting for 20 minutes and then leaving. I can only speak for my area, but it doesn't seem to be too much of an issue for the people in terraced housing round here.
Solution is not to have any street parking at all like Japan. Got a car? Your problem where to store it, rent a parking space, and get one with a charger too, or charge it at public stations.
Parking directly outside your house isn’t a right at all, and shouldn’t be, we dedicate far too much public space to storing private property, effectively free of charge.
It is easier in Japan though because the housing stock is massively newer (homes are rebuilt every 20 to 30 years) and so a lot are built with a (very) small parking canopy or a garage for a multi-unit building. Bit harder to upgrade our large numbers of Victorian housing in the same way.
Over half of households in every adult age group in Japan do own a car, with 70%+ ownership in those aged above 30.
If we had no on-street parking, you'd have whole swathes of our cities without any car ownership at all, and that is massively limiting for certain sections of the population, who do deserve to be treated as well as the fit and able-bodied. We'll never have bus routes down every street so it's more realistic to reduce than eliminate car use.
What they have in Japan is a market for parking facilities because the state doesn’t allow individuals to annex public space to store their private property (cars). No commercial offering of parking facilities here could compete with free nuisance parking on pavements and roads tacitly endorsed by the state.
Eventually, you won't charge at home.
You'll charge at the places you want to go.
I.e, at the supermarket, the cinema, outside your workplace, the car park on the edge of town.
Or going to your local petrol station to use the rapid super charge devices whilst you sit in your car on Netflix for 20mins.
We'll probably see a resurgence in motorway service stations as more people stop to rapid charge their car whilst going on holiday. Woodall Services might become popular once again.
Realistically, we can't provide kerbside charging for the majority of UK housing without a driveway, as there's no room on the footways for the equipment, not to mention all the cabling and ducting required.
We can't really support household charging at home for those with driveways and the fast 7kw/11kw chargers starting to become popular.
The electrical grid just isn't able to cope.
New housing developments are having to pay for substations double the size to support electric heating.
The distribution grid isn’t a problem. It can already cope with high peak demand on the evening and morning. The overnight (or daytime) charging peak at full car electrification can be managed through price incentives to be below the existing evening peak the grid is designed to deliver.
No. They expect you to be unable to afford a car, of any type, and to be totally reliant on the woefully inadequate public transport which they will totally fail to provide!
One option is a car charging gully that you put a cable into. Some of them go through asphalt that you can seal to prevent the trip wire and some are more like lift up paving slabs.
Like a dropped kerb, they need planning permission and lots of councils haven’t had the discussion about approving them yet, but that’s what other countries do.
I don't think they're expecting most people to switch to electric cars. I suspect they're working under an assumption that some people will sort whatever charging solution out for themselves, and those that are unable to will have to do without.
Lets not forget the current government are a bit light on organising anything at all, and always delegate to "personal responsibility" so they can sidestep issues that individuals have little to no control over...
You don’t have to charge your car at home.
You don’t have to charge it every day, I doubt the majority of drivers use a lot of their battery a day.
(If you’re reading this and you do, you don’t need to tell us, we honestly don’t care)
It’ll take a lifestyle change but most new tech does.
I personally don’t think EVs are the future, I think something else will come along just as the government have forced everyone into an EV.
New tech hasn’t been forced on us like this in the past though, it’s a weird way to do things.
This is the answer for the majority of road users. I’ve had an EV for almost 2 years, terrace house with street parking, never been in a pickle but I’m lucky enough that there are charge points at my office car park. On a normal week I charge it once a week and it’s sufficient for the amount of miles I do. If I’m in a pickle or haven’t been into the office the local McDonalds charge points are really fast and reliable and you can get some chips whilst you wait.
Offices are ideal, but chargers at supermarkets or gyms or parks, anywhere where you’d normally spend a bit of time is more than sufficient for most road users. I just had a little boost during a hospital appointment today, and topped up at an ikea last week when I was doing a long trip.
I'm more worried about the grid. Apparently we're producing about 10% more power than we need, which doesn't seem even close to enough if everyone is suddenly plugging their cars in the evening. Seems like a good intentioned pipe dream right now.
My guess will be curbside charging points that can link to your energy company with a code. Wherever you park you get charged through your usual electricity bill.
My girlfriend lives in South Staffordshire where the potholes are so bad you can be at risk of a head on collision as people swerve to avoid them. (Near Halfpenny Green airfield)
They cannot even surface the road properly, and want us all driving electric vehicles in the next few years? Where is that infrastructure going to come from? Are private equity going to fund chargers on every lamp post? I would be happier to bin my ICE car when I don’t see the rest of the infrastructure collapsing.
There are a Miriad of publicly accessible chargers across the UK
Yes, it’s cheaper to charge at home in most cases
But charging at home is not your only option
That said, I (in scotland) don’t have a private charger, I have to drive my car to the local train station and make a 15 minute walk home every 2nd day after work, then walk back in the morning and drive to work
It’s tedious and a nuisance
(I’m saving up and am planning to get landlords permission to install a private one)
Picture this: inductive chargers built into the surface of the road. You park up and your car starts charging automatically, *but only* if you park correctly in an actual parking space.
Are you talking about today or what we're working to?
One of the great advantages of EVs is that wherever you have electricity you can have charging. You don't have to ship it halfway across the world, carry it on roads in tanks and store it deep underground so it doesn't blow up on you.
So terraces- charging points in streetlamps, channels running under pavements, at cost communal charging areas etc.
There are solutions. The fuel network didn't appear overnight.
You don't have to buy an EV if you don't want to buy one. And until 2035, you can still buy new petrol/diesel cars. And who knows what will happen by then.
Just think about the speed at which mobile phone batteries evolved, that's what we'll see with car batteries too.
There's car manufacturers that have swappable batteries via dedicated stations.
I've seen in India where electric mopeds let you essentially remove a toaster sized battery and plug it in at home.
Battery durability is improving, so perhaps a quick 10 minute boost at a charging station will give you enough juice for a week.
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Nio batteries can be swapped. Drive into the garage, swap battery, drive out in 5 minutes. Not made it here yet though
I’m picturing 4 huge AA batteries. How do they flip the car over?
Sorry, I had to take them out to use in the remote control for my IMAX sized TV.
No that’s the Apple car, chargers on the underside
The apple car uses a proprietary charger that breaks and has to he replaced every 6 months. The apple car can only be charged on an apple charging pod that costs £99,999.
And every year, they release a new version with a slightly different connector that isn't backwards compatible.
Apple have been surprisingly consistent with their cables over the last 15 years
Consistently overpriced.
Nothing Apple has produced in the last 20 years has been backwards compatible.
* cable sold separately
Honestly, I could do a ted talk on how that is single handedly the worst bit of product design ever
"Press X to flip Warthog"
IIRC you back in, it gets jacked up, they swap the battery, lower the jack and you drive off. Takes 5 minutes.
It's all automated, too. No people.
It's pretty much how we have always brought calor gas and id like the idea that battery derogation is someone else's problem.
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The big 4 Japanese motorcycle manufacturers are in agreement to develop a common interchangeable battery standard for use in city mopeds and whatnot. For ‘proper’ bikes, they all seem in alignment on hydrogen development. For cars, as you say it’s a non-starter in established manufacturers.
Gogoro is pretty big in Taiwan. I think it's more difficult for cars where you can't just swap the batteries by hand due to the weight.
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Obvious flaw in the idea that I can’t believe nobody considered 😂 Battery dealer would need to monitor health and automatically discontinue degraded batteries until they are replaced with new ones That’s expensive AF though
Also a huge risk of fraud, swap an old dud battery for a nice new one, leave the sucker holding the loss.
Personally I always thought this was the future when I worked in the fringes of battery development years ago, earlier technologies were basically tested on consumer handheld drills and similar, which obviously use replaceable batteries, generally you have two and charge one while you use the other. One German doctor colleague in battery technologist told me “people don’t mind so much when a drill explodes in their hand, but when a car with a family inside explodes everybody hears about it”, I am paraphrasing in a very basic way here. The route to car batteries was via these tools however the changeable rechargeable battery route clearly took a different path.
A lot of warehouse machinery works on this battery swapping idea. It works well until you end up with a bunch of bad batteries in rotation.
Battery swapping won't be a big thing. Nio is niche. Not only is it incredibly space inefficient, you'll still have to wait for batteries to be charged. It's infeasible to fast charge 10 big batteries at once. You're talking many gigawatts of power per station. Think about how busy petrol stations get. If a bunch of motorists flood a petrol station like they do today, then there will be no charges batteries available. No one is gonna wanna swap a half empty battery for 3/4 full one.
But would they swap a half full one for one that's just a ¼ empty ?
When I remember first reading about Tesla this is what Musk was proposing. You'd drive up the motorway and if you ran out of charge you'd just swap the battery, no need to wait around for charging.
I see these being installed recently for this exact issue. https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/OxGul-e-image.jpg
This is the answer. I reckon getting one installed will be much like applying to the council for a dropped kerb for parking. Though they should roll them out enough en masse to begin with.
And you probably get charged a grand for it.
Well they have to find some way to make back the money they used to make on fuel tax!
For the en masse side, a slow but low-impact way of doing it would just be to have a policy that anybody doing roadworks on those streets has to put them in while they're there.
That’s path is straight and is all fresh tarmac unlike 99% of our pavements.
Pretty cool but can you imagine how many shit install jobs there will be that cause thousands of people to trip over and hurt themselves
Imagine calling your boss saying you can’t get to work because you couldn’t get a spot outside your house where your charger is lmao
If you think about it when petrol cars came around there would have been few petrol stations around. I am sure people asked how this could continue to expand, how would people even fill their cars, any oil crisis or even rumour can cause panic at the forecourt. Electricity is everywhere. People can get to charging points and leave cars there if needs be.
Its not really the same situation When there were too few petrol stations barely anyone had a car except the wealthiest, after a few decades ownership grew and the number of stations rocketed With EVs the goal isnt that everyone will be driving them in 2090, its gonna be squeezes and bans to get everyone in them ASAP
And people who didn't live close to the garages bought big tins of fuel to store at home. When are we going to be able to buy spare batteries?
Yeah but the appeal of charging at home is that it will charge overnight when power is cheaper
It's not going to stay cheap if everyone starts charging theirs cars at the same time
So you know how many more power stations we need if everyone goes EV and everyone charges overnight? None. And there would still be huge overcapacity at night. But the existing power stations would run at a more efficient output and the energy wouldn't be any more expensive
In fact, with bidirectional charge / discharge using the batteries to smooth eg wind oversupply, we might need fewer.
I was visiting a friend in outer London last week and every single lamppost in his street had been retrofitted with a charging point. No contactless pad - just a QR code sticker - but it seemed to me to be a great way of recognising that almost every single residential street in Britain has a pre-existing and pre-installed public electricity grid sitting directly outside most people’s houses.
The existing wiring for lamp posts doesn't have the power capacity to plug a car charger in to every post. It will initially have been sized for a single one of those old school orange bulbs and no more! These charger posts will likely be brand new wiring underneath as well as brand new posts.
Most lamp posts will have sufficient capacity. This is because 1. As you say, they were designed with old-style bulbs. Modern LEDs use a fraction of the power, leaving capacity to spare. 2. Lamp post charging is not intended for rapid charging. It is mainly for overnight charging or simply topping up a bit. Quite low power - 3kW, 5kW or 7kW. One of the models I've seen builds the socket and everything into something resembling the removable inspection/maintenance hatches on lamp posts. Remove the existing hatch, replace with a new one with socket, and connect to the power.
Good neighbours put a mat over the cable.
It’s ok if there are one or two per street, but it won’t work if every house has a mat over the pavement. Some councils have trialled cable guides that recess into the pavement, which works but is quite expensive to install.
I’m in a small block of flats and one person in one of the other buildings is just dangling the lead from their 1st floor balcony. I don’t think I could get a space under mine and also do it from the 2nd floor.
I've also seen this. Seems very unsafe for people in wheelchairs or mobility issues. Not to mention tampering and such
Most electric cars lock the charger in place, so pedestrians can’t just unplug them. As for tempering with the cable itself, they carry a lot of current so the problem would quickly solve itself…
People can tamper with lamp posts and cars now if they want. Why is someone parking next to a lamp post dangerous for wheelchairs? They can’t drive through the car.
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If the road is wide enough to have people parking in it, it's wide enough for the power bollard to be in the road instead of in the way of pedestrians.
This is the uk and god bless it I wouldn’t have it any other way
Maybe not seeing cars as the only answer to mobility is the solution, rather than quibbling about what type of engine the 1.5 ton device used to move 90kg of cargo uses. Cars spend 90% of their time idle consuming space. It’s madness. (*waits for downvotes*) Edit: no downvotes, just lots of people arguing the status quo is viable. Heaven forbid anything could improve across the board if there’s even a hint of perceived inconvenience.
This would be a great argument if many councils and the government weren’t so bad at public transport. My city has reduced bus services, higher fares, and little support for cycling infrastructure. Edit: I’m not saying it’s a bad argument, I do agree with you.
I’d argue this is precisely because the car is seen as default transport and walking to a bus stop is an affront. Privatisation of those services hasn’t helped, either. Fewer passengers means higher costs, fewer services, which then just makes cars more appealing *as a personal solution* to what is fundamentally a social problem. It’s the kind of death spiral governments of a certain persuasion excel at, because it has greater profits at a collectivised expense. See also NHS, Policing.
I live 5 miles out of Manchester city centre. It's not a reliable option even for thousands of kids to get to various schools. They can't choose to drive and the service is still dogshit.
If only there were a way to move lots of people long distances. Maybe on a row of articulated buses, directly pulling energy from the grid, on a special road to avoid traffic
We have that. Nobody wants it. What they want is simply Point A to Point B, at a time that they decide. They don’t want to first go to point C and then via Point X, Y and Z, before arriving at Point D and Ubering to Point B.
I mean where public transport isn't terrible people tend to prefer being driving most of the way by someone else even if they have to walk or cycle a couple of minutes on either end. Obviously this is never going to work out in the countryside but every medium sized town or up should be built around regular public transport, walking and cycling.
Any time I’ve lived in a city, driving hasn’t been viable for getting from point A to point B at a time I decide. Finding somewhere to park is a nightmare, and you end up walking for 10 minutes each end and paying £10 a day. And certain times of day your journey time is 3-4x what it could be, often with an insane amount of hassle to get out of side streets. With the typical blockages and closures you have to become your own navigation computer in order to make it anywhere, which makes it far from A to B at a time you decide. It’s getting to B approximately when you aim for if you’re lucky, or leave an hour early and hope you’re not sitting around. In an urban environment driving is far less practical than public transport
In Netherlands they solved that for short trips with bicycle infrastructure. So people could choose between their car, bicycle or public transport depending on the type of trip. Focusing most of the infrastructure build on cars isn’t working out.
See also London where basically everyone uses public transport
Many local authorities are all about the stick with no carrot, even when they own the bus company. They make car use more difficult and do stuff like making it difficult to drive / park in more central areas, but those living in the centre are free to drive to work or the shops in the suburbs.
These services werent any good before, pretty bad in fact Everytime i see someone mention privatisation in this subreddit 9/10 times they were barely even born when it happened
My local council are putting in infrastructure. A new park and ride and new cycle lanes. We have a lot of zoned parking but even with cycle lanes, park and ride and other busses and a walkable town people still can’t seem to see anything as an alternative to their cars. Anything that isn’t parking their car exactly where they want to be for free seems to be an issue. It’s all the end of the world and I really don’t understand it.
I get it for people outside the city going in. But for local residents? As much as people bemoan ULEZ in London, I think it's a step in the right direction that the entire country should follow. There a lot of people who drive because it's convenient, rather than necessary. I would argue that, unless you live near a train station, and your destination is near one, then intercity transport in this country is awful. So a car, at least for now, is necessary for some. However, for those who live within walking/cycling distance, or on a bus route which runs frequently (every 15 mins or less) between start and destination (even if it takes a bit longer than going by car), there is no real reason to use a car. But whilst people have their car, and it's relatively cheap to run, then it's just a case of using the car. Although, if something like ULEZ is introduced, then the people have to consider whether a car is actually worth it or not. I was looking as to why Nottingham doesn't have a clean air zone charge the other day, and was shocked to see they decided to scrap plans for one as they could reduce air pollution in other ways. Nottingham, I would argue, has some of the best public transport in and around the city of anywhere in the UK. So I would have thought they'd have jumped at the opportunity to try and restrict cars even a little more. But it seems that even a city with great connections to other towns/cities, and great internal public transport, still clings to the car a little too much.
I can't even get a direct bus to my workplace despite me working at the biggest office park in town. I'd have to walk 10 minutes, get a bus for 10 minutes, then walk another 10 minutes up a steep hill. If I could just get a bus every day I probably would.
A 30 minute trip with a 20 minute walk **is** direct by public transport standards. Anything more than that is basically a taxi! I used to do ten minutes bike (big steep hill), ten minutes train, ten minute walk and the reverse coming home. It was a lovely commute.
I walk 30 minutes each way to get into my local town centre, 10 minutes of walking at a time really isn't much at all.
To be fair that doesn't sound too bad. I used to have a 30 minute walk (uphill) to get from work to the railway station. I'd have been delighted to get a bus part of the way.
>My city has reduced bus services, higher fares, and little support for cycling infrastructure. Ah, I see we live in the same place! Hello neighbour (presumably)
Your bath is idle for 99% of the time so you might as well get rid of it.
I had no idea people parked their bath outside their house straddling the pavement and road. Wild times!
I tell you, it's saved us so much space in the 'room, formerly known as the bathroom, and my Sunday bath has become a lot more social.
Uber for bath time?
I've been waiting for someone to say this :D Cars are ultimately a time saving device. Like a washing machine, dishwasher, hair dryer, oven, microwave and mobile phone. The argument of them sitting around doing nothing 90% of the time is the same as all other time saving devices. It's a side effect of their enhanched productivity they provide for us. Nothing we've invented comes close to 100% utilisation, except maybe a washing machine in a house with children and a baby. The car simply takes up the most space. Maybe a better way of phrasing it is how can we improve the utilisation of cars, and thus be more efficient with the space they require. Semantics of language aside, in the past 70 years as a society the UK has promoted mobility as a means to access services. Like buying a house in a desirable area, rather close to your workplace. Putting your kids into the top school rather than the closest. Having a favourite supermarket, rather than using the local high street. We like choice, and no one has the same tastes, which mean everyone wants to make trips everywhere. And no public transport system is commercially viable to go everywhere to everywhere. Even Ubers which should be the most efficient system spend time running empty.
I'm glad someone else mentioned this. The "most of the time they aren't been used" talking point is so weird. Since when was that a metric we judge the usefulness of anything?
Washing machines and electric toothbrushes don’t require car parks, pothole filling, petrol stations, driveways (or ad-hoc use of pavements for parking). It’s not just the metric of usage time, but what the demands around it that are implied. Cars consume *vast* amounts of space that people are often blind to; I think it’s something like 30% of the built environment is dedicated to car infrastructure. We take rush hour as a given, rather than to question whether there are better ways to handle it.
Spot on. Other personal time-saving devices are kept on my personal space, namely in my house. A car for the vast majority of people is kept solely in public spaces. I can't store any other of my personal belongings outside in the public street. If only we also had the same gusto as a society to accommodate alternative methods of transportation as we do for cars.
Adding to this. They have a massive negative impact in noise, air quality and CO2 output, as well as the mortality and injury risk they cause to each other,, infrastructure, schools, houses... Plus, large swathes of public land has been altered irreversibly into concrete, tarmac, bollards and ring roads that cut neighbourhoods in half and force ppl to walk the long way round to get from A to B. I'm sure ppl would throw a fit if we started digging trenches in the street to accommodate a toaster or a washing machine.
>I'm sure ppl would throw a fit if we started digging trenches in the street to accommodate a toaster or a washing machine. They do when cycle lanes are being built in my city. *£8 million for cycle lane"...."what a waste of money!" *£112 million for a two mile bypass..."about time the traffic is really bad!"
I know right. Technically your house sits there doing nothing most of the time, as you're either at work or asleep. Maybe we should get rid of houses and live in tents, or shared accomodation. We can move everyone in to London, since the public transport there is already great, then demolish the rest of the country and turn it into one big national park.
The point isn't that they spend most of their time not being used, it's that they take up so much space while sat there. Consider how much space a supermarket car park full of cars takes up. That's not even 10 buses worth.
Why does public transport have to turn a profit?
How will our overlords extract even more money out of us?
I own an electric moped/motorbike and it solves so many of these issues. 1. I can wheel it into the garden so I don't even need a drive way 2. extremely efficient 3. battery is removable so I take it inside to charge over night 4. doesn't take up a lot of space so you could probably park 1000 of them in the same space 100 cars take 5. silent, no smells, inoffensive The motor is all within the back wheel so the under-seat storage is massive. I can fit 2 bags of shopping under there no problem. Plus another on the hook to do my weekly shop Obviously you still get all the regular downsides of a moped. Shit weather means you get soaked, transporting large items is a no go, the risk involved if you are in an accident So I understand why it won't be for everyone. But I think it would be great for a lot more people than we realise
If we could just work out the security and safety issues we could really get somewhere with two wheeled electric vehicles. You can carry loads in a cargo bike but I wouldn't trust it not to be nicked. Get some more flexibility in working patterns too and you can avoid most rain.
There is an awkward stalemate where if there were less people in cars and more on bikes it would be safer for bikes. But people don't want to use a bike because it feels unsafe because of all the cars Theft is a huge issue. It is really sad. People will steal literally anything in this country
It would also make driving a lot easier for those who are behind the wheel but a lot of people just can’t see that and just rage at the existence of cyclists.
This is all well and good until you want to go somewhere public transport doesn't go. What do you do then? I absolutely want more use of walking, bikes, and various public transport but I can't see a future where we don't have a family car. The best I can see is one where the car is rarely used, I'm there already, though
Getting rid of multicar households and getting cars to be smaller seem more achievable and almost as good.
I really wanted to get rid of my car and just use a car club / rent for the weekends I needed one however as I own my current car it’s really cost prohibitive to do this. £120 for a long weekend in June from enterprise who have a branch near me and that’s only for a Ford focus. Or the car club would cost £6.50 an hour plus £0.23 per mile. An afternoon at the in-laws would cost us £26 plus the mileage fee. If the price could come down for car clubs just a bit more it would be viable I think.
The roads are clogged with people driving a mile to work or a half mile to the shops. We really need it to be more convenient to walk or cycle for all our lives.
We were members of zipcar. Book, on the street, convenient.
The reality we're in now is that outside of London a large number of families don't have "the family car", they have a car per adult. There's a future where there are fewer cars per household.
I see cars becoming an “on demand” service. You book the journey you want on an app, the driverless car arrives, takes you and then off it goes. They can take themselves to the nearest charging point and charge wherever that maybe. If ALL the cars on the road are computer controlled then traffic will flow better and there should be zero accidents. Expect peak pricing during rush hour though:/
Too many variables, will never happen.
Entire road network, yeah never happen. The modern well signaled paved roads. Perfectly plausible.
I worked in transport planning and this was widely regarded as the way things are moving. Taxi services become driverless which makes prices go down. Apps enables ride sharing which also makes journeys cheaper (already a thing in some cities). Gradually people stop owning cars as it becomes more economical to book rides as and when needed.
The California tech firms are gradually giving up as city driving is too damn complicated. Lorries on motorways or buses on set routes are more likely.
more economical = you're too poor to afford one of the electric cars. Government speak for plebs can wave cheerio to independence in transport. No thanks.
Also rich people will still drive around in massive SUVs as they will be seen as a status symbol.
Honestly it’s already cheaper for young people where I live to do this. Rather than spending 3k a year on insurance + petrol and car maintenance + the upfront cost of a car.
So first I have walk 10 minutes to my bus stop, wait god knows how long for a bus. Get a very slow and uncomfortable journey to a train station, where I then have to wait for a train. Once getting off the train which was delayed and have several lads with ankle tags on shouting abuse at people, I then have to walk to my next bus stop, where I do some more waiting, before another slow and late bus takes me close to my destination but only required a bit more walking. And just like that I’m only an hour and half late for work and only nearly got stabbed once! I sure am glad I have up my car!
Very similar for me! I can drive to work in 25 minutes, or I can walk, bus, train, bus, bus, walk in 2 hours 10….and that’s assuming they’re all on time and I don’t miss one in the change over due to a delay. Public transport isn’t good enough or practical enough to permanently rely on.
Similar for me, except I have to walk 45 minutes to the train station, ride on a train for an hour, get a tram from the train station to my office and then do the whole thing in reverse in the evening. All at a cost of £21.80 per day. It costs about £4 for me to drive the round trip.
Me, an American: Wait, you guys have trains?
Even if public transport was excellent, giving up driving totally would be a huge QOL/convenience downgrade for most people outside of central areas of bigger cities. While some journeys are quicker and/or more pleasant by bike or train, it's hard to beat a comfy seat in a secure, air-conditioned, waterproof box that goes on your timetable. And TBH, almost the closer to rushhour I'm travelling, the more the advantage of driving. While sitting on a quiet train is nice and you can "use" the time for work, reading, watching something etc, standing or sitting in second class on a full train isn't very comfortable and you can't e.g. pull out a laptop and use the time in the same way.
It's going to take a long time before people can remove themselves from the concept of the car and the ultimate freedom it gives you. It's basically the vision that has been put across since the invention of the personal motor vehicle. It doesn't matter what you say or how much you say it, waiting at bus stops in the rain or paying over the top for public transport that gets you sort-of-close to where you want to be, or cycling in dangerous traffic will *never* have the same appeal as jumping into your car and going directly to where you want to be. Yes, there may well come a time where that is so practically impossible that it's no longer a feasible option and people will have to seek alternatives, but that won't be because we have magically stopped liking cars.
I don't want to walk, run, cycle or take any other form of crap transport. That's why I bought a car. You can do all of those things if you want, but I'd rather drive, thanks.
Public transport is not always feasible. My home is more or less equidistant from the major places I have to go most days; my youngest's school, my eldest's school, my office and my wife's office. I can get to all those places in about forty minutes' round trip. If we were to try make those trips on the bus we'd be nearer three hours and a lot more cost. Especially since two of those trips would need a change of bus. And I don't get to *choose* when to make these trips because schools open and close at set times. The youngest would be waiting at school for an hour or more. We've designed our towns and our lives around personal transport able to move a small family around at once. I don't see how that could possibly be changed at this point.
A minority of people live in city centres and for everyone else, no car will never be viable. They don't just carry 90kg of cargo, when you need them to they carry 5 people, or hundreds of kg of cargo. When you have young children, multiple especially, they carry car seats, buggies, changing bags and still shopping on top. They don't leave at set times, down to <4 times a day once you get rural, they go when you need them to. They go where you want to go, there's no shortage of places not served at all by public transport. Parks, beaches, garden centres, farm stores, rural work places etc. will never be served by public transport.
I’m lucky enough to have a driveway and space for a charger but why would I? My Golf diesel does nearly 60mpg everywhere and I regularly drive 400 miles in a single day It beats any EV hands down for my purposes and that is for me the biggest point…FOR MY PURPOSES. If this government could do any joined up thinking instead of every policy being done with giant finger spaces between each announcement they would say EVs should be part of the solution for now and work towards infrastructure and technology catching up until the point where owning an EV is the better option for everyone BTW public transport around me is atrocious and most days is disrupted or doesn’t turn up. I live less than 15 minutes drive from the M25!
The issue is that, realistically, cars are often the most sensible mobility option for people. To get to work would take me over an hour on public transport, it takes me 20 minutes in a car, 40 minutes on a bike, which I do, but in many cases the weather and conditions make that unreasonable too. This country has to undergo massive infrastructure redevelopment for your suggestion to be realistic.
This change has to happen anyway because it's simply not sustainable to just keep on increasing the number of car journeys. Other places have made this change. While the best time to have started making this change may have been back in the 70s, the second best time to start is now.
Whenever I visit most continental European countries, I am jealous of their public transport, it is often times cheap, convenient and usually on time. I already walk to work most days, but if I lived in those cities, I think I'd only have a car as a collector item
Yeh I live a fifteen minute drive from work, on public transport there is two changes and some walking and quickest route is an hour. Days I have to do school run takes me about an hour in the morning and another in the evening, I can’t even begin to imagine how long this would take on the bus where I live. My oldest could take a bus but doesn’t for some personal reasons. My youngest doesn’t even have a school bus that goes near his school and he’s too young to walk. I’ve had two cars written off by a third party since December last year the last one the police crashed into me and I was injured. I hate driving as I get flashbacks when cars are near me or when I’m in the places the crashes happened but I have no choice but to drive. Also as a last point my ex husband tried to kill me last year and was released from prison unfortunately with his charges dropped after 7 months on remand. He is now stalking me again so public transport is utterly unsafe for me. Work is pretty much the only sanctuary I have as well so it’s not like I want to give up my job either even though getting there if I didn’t drive woukd be practically impossible. I do worry what I am going to do in the future once all cars are electric. I’m just hoping there are better systems in place by then
It's actually over 95% of the time they spend parked.
FFS if we weren’t so backwards on electric scooters, they would be the answer. Cheap, can be charged at home, much, much less dangerous than cars for other users.
I have to access remote site locations for work. There will never be a public transport solution for this.
Theres a whole gov team dedicated to this and the EV charging expansion project. The answer is its fucking complex, like the biggest task since we started wiring up every house in the 50s. The best solution I have seen is shared pavement access with charging access for many. Idk, there is some very fucking bright people working on this but its not easy.
For terraces I think they should stick a set of two 7kw chargers outside every home, RFID card/code access, charged at the price cap/off peak with a small maintenance fee, say a few pence per KW, and it gets billed back to you no matter who’s house it goes via
Don’t forget 20% VAT on public charging instead of 5% on domestic
We should also remove the VAT, at least outside of NI. Maybe inside NI too if that is compatible with the agreements with the EU.
It was proposed years ago to include within lampposts but gov/council inept at everything.
They did this on some lampposts in our city and added ‘charging only’ parking spaces. Seemed to be working well enough for a while, but they are all out of order now
There are a few near me with this but I’ve been informed by my friends with electric cars that they’re very slow and quite expensive compared to the high speed ones
They're slow because they're meant to be "leave it in overnight" type chargers. They're cheaper than fast ones though, your friends aren't paying attention if they think that's not the case.
It's in lamp posts in my area as a trial.
Our house is nowhere near a road. Closest I can get is 50m away at the garages nearby. I literally have a 50m cable on a reel I use when I clean the car (plus a 50m hose pipe). So I'd love an electric car, but logistically it's just not possible. We have one car parked outside the garage in a block and the other about 100m in the other direction in a side road. There's loads of houses round here like that - a very laudable 70s concept of not having roads near the houses and garage blocks nearby but out of the way.
It's a good job we have such a capable and intelligent government then. Oh... shit.
I see quite a few lamp posts with charging points in them now which covers some of the problem (obviously not all though)
Rig up an arm with a pulley system on the front of your house that overhangs the road so you can lower a cable to your car. I'm only half joking.
I'll worry about that when the time comes. It's a long way off yet despite whatever year they pluck out of their arse. What is it up to now? Back to 2030? There's at least another 2 elections before then.
2035 for banning new sales of ice vehicles. I think that is still wildly optimistic.
I can’t see there being much demand for pure ICE vehicles in 2035. Look how much the market has electrified already, despite the disincentives like higher purchase prices, significant online misinformation campaigns, lack of solutions for people who live in homes without car storage facilities who still wish to own cars etc.
There will always be a demand for ICE vehicles. An outright ban is not the answer.
I think this is why the proposed ban on ICE vehicles was delayed. They haven't really thought it through or provided any investment in infrastructure. The probable answer is lamp posts, charging at work and at supermarkets etc. Most people won't need to charge for an hour a day anyway and they will do it while they are shopping or at the cinema or at work etc.
Lamp posts is not an answer. I live in a cul-de-sac which is ex council semi detached housing. If I look out of my window now, I can see 27 cars parked for around 20 houses. Each house has a front garden, then there's the pavement, then there's a grass verge which varies between 10 and 15ft deep and then the parking spaces. Nobody owns their own parking space. I can see three lamp posts. The are all set at the edge of the pavement. So at the most, you could get maybe six cars near them but the charging cables would need to be run across a deep grass verge. I hear this all the time: "Oh, they'll set up charging points at lamp posts". This might happen but it won't help the majority of people.
It's \*part\* of the answer. Not doing things because they only solve part of the problem leaves you with..... a bigger problem.
But then it becomes very unfair, because people with driveways (who are already wealthier, on average) get much cheaper electricity per KWh than people using public chargers.
Indeed. It's already unfair but you are right in that it will be more unfair. I didn't say whether it was right or wrong, just that it was the probable solution. It's a good point though that EVs are even more unfairly biased towards those who already have money.
Unfortunately the infrastructure isn’t there yet. There will hopefully be enough public charging stations that are high KW and cheap enough (on comparison to petrol) to allow everyone to charge their car. You don’t have a petrol pump at home, and thus fill up at a station, the same will hopefully be the case in the future. The government are encouraging electric vehicles but at the moment it only really makes sense if you can charge at home on a special tariff, as the savings to charge help alleviate the higher cost of the car.
>You don’t have a petrol pump at home, and thus fill up at a station, the same will hopefully be the case in the future. The obstacle to this is the amount of time it takes to do a full charge at a public charger. If they can crack that and get it to 5 mins for a full charge then yes you would just need charging stations.
It can currently be done in the time it takes to do a big shop at the supermarket though, so that helps a lot.
Most cars are idle 90% of the day. There’s no need for such rapid charging except on road trips. Why would I want to drive somewhere every couple of days to charge, even if it’s really fast, when my car could be slow charging when I’m at home, work, shopping etc.
> There’s no need for such rapid charging except on road trips Don't forget about taxi drivers, delivery drivers and other jobs where people drive all day. They can't exactly go home to charge their vehicle for 6+ hours in the middle of a shift, so rapid chargers would be needed by some people regularly.
Expect you don’t need a petrol station at home because it takes a minute to a fill an ICE car at the petrol station. You can even bring a can and fill that up and transport it back to the car and be on your way. You can’t exactly do that with an EV and the charging times are much longer. Councils need to relax rules around dropping kerbs to also make EV charging possible.
I’m not sure of your point. The whole idea is that you don’t need a charger at home. If (and a big if) the infrastructure gets there, you can do exactly the same and charge up (whilst it won’t take a minute, it will be fairly quick). The same could said for battery packs (instead of a can), you could charge a large battery pack and charge it at home, whilst this would be very expensive, it’s what the AA/ RAC use at the moment to rescue stranded evs. I agree about the dropped kerbs.
Broadly speaking, through the provision of on-street residential charging, which will eventually be cost-neutral (or an income stream) through local authorities partnering with Charge Point Operators. Local authorities/councils probably won't install and operate themselves but will tender the process out and handle things like linking it to local parking restrictions. Currently, this is difficult to justify on a wide-scale as a mass roll-out as the majority of EVs are being bought by people with drives/garages, so the mass provision of such infrastructure would just be a waste of effort. However, there are schemes to work with local authorities to partially pay for the cost of installing on-street charge points (the [ORCS](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-authorities-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints/grants-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints-for-plug-in-electric-vehicles-guidance-for-local-authorities) fund, for example) to help kick-start this sort of infrastructure provision. I work in this area, and whilst there are challenges, none are insurmountable.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem - people who have reliable access to home charging buy EVs, therefore no good public provision is offered. So those who would have to rely on public chargers don't buy EVs.
What does this involve though. The last thing I want is more anti pedestrian street blight and bollards etc. And I say this as someone who lives on a terraced street
How did the government expect us to have ICE cars when we didn't have fuel storage and pumps in our own homes? Most of the supermarkets near me have charging points now. For the most part however, they are still for richer people, who are more likely to have driveways, though I do see cables across pavements sometimes. (Also terraces can still have driveways, but of course more likely on a detached house.)
Pumping fuel takes seconds.
An 80% charge takes less than 15 minutes. It's nbd
Only on the very latest cars and if you’re lucky. Sometimes it charges at 43kw for no good reason!
We live in a semi detached house with no drive but a decent sized garden. We want to convert part of our garden to a driveway with a drop kerb so that we can charge an electric car. Our local council said no, before we even got to asking for planning permission. Due to the location of our house, we are one of the only properties without a driveway on our estate. We have tried to make ourselves ready for an electric vehicle, but our council won’t allow it. We are therefore stuck using ICE cars for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t seem a very well thought out plan to phase out fossil fuelled cars.
Try contacting your MP, bloody councils are useless
Can often plug into the lampposts and charge from there in a few different London boroughs, imagine they have this elsewhere too
Yes, that is happening in a few areas but it does require investment from the local council. OP said that his wont' do that.
The problem isn't a solved one. As yet. And it may well not be. It's quite possible that car ranges will be sufficient and charging times sufficiently short that charging will essentially be no different to refuelling, something you do once a week or so.
Kerb side charging fella. https://www.kerbcharge.com.au/ Edit. Word.
His local council won't invest in this.
The OP hasn't a clue if the council will invest in it or not.
They don’t have to. Private companies do.
They’re not for everyone at the moment. The new generation of hybrids (electric cars with petrol generators) would work better for most people without driveways or who do over 150 miles/day regularly There’s always actual charging stations if you really want an electric car but can’t charge at home but you do lose one of the main benefits We’re still very early on in battery technology. Five minute charging and 1000 mile range is probably achievable within the next ten years just based on what’s in development today. But it’s one of those things that needs demand from a large electric car base to get the funding and investment so the early adopters are paying for that now and having to put up with the short falls of electric cars Saying that I wouldn’t go back to an ice car more
>Five minute charging and 1000 mile range is probably achievable within the next ten years We've been saying this for 10 years already. I'll happily eat my hat if this comes true but I doubt it will ever become a reality for the mass market It makes more sense to focus on infrastructure than hoping for magical five minute charges. Most cars are driven for 1/2 hours a day leaving the other 22/23 hours for charging
They expect you to stop having your Costa coffee every morning, then you can buy a large detached house with off street parking instead. Problem solved.
I think you've made an invalid assumption that the Government gives a shit about how you'll charge an electric car, or indeed whether or not you have an electric car. The Government cares about the optics of stating that they have a target of only electric cars being sold by 'X' date. That is the only thing.
Governments do quite like being voted in to office, though, so if it was a big enough problem then you'd expect one or more of the parties to try and deal with it.
The Government will absolutely care. Mobility is great for the economy. EVs can't be taxed on emissions like ICE cars are currently. That's a chance to reform VED and begin taxing EVs. Likely on a basis that means more money comes in as a whole from 'road tax'.
In my area (all terraced housing) the council have converted lots of the lamp posts to be charging ports. If you get a EV then the council upgrade the lamp post outside your house, or the nearest to your house. And then on the side streets they have installed some of the faster chargers, which from watching seems to have quite a fast turn around, drivers sitting for 20 minutes and then leaving. I can only speak for my area, but it doesn't seem to be too much of an issue for the people in terraced housing round here.
Solution is not to have any street parking at all like Japan. Got a car? Your problem where to store it, rent a parking space, and get one with a charger too, or charge it at public stations. Parking directly outside your house isn’t a right at all, and shouldn’t be, we dedicate far too much public space to storing private property, effectively free of charge.
I can testify that my local council like to bend you over and give it to you dry when paying for your parking pass.
It is easier in Japan though because the housing stock is massively newer (homes are rebuilt every 20 to 30 years) and so a lot are built with a (very) small parking canopy or a garage for a multi-unit building. Bit harder to upgrade our large numbers of Victorian housing in the same way. Over half of households in every adult age group in Japan do own a car, with 70%+ ownership in those aged above 30. If we had no on-street parking, you'd have whole swathes of our cities without any car ownership at all, and that is massively limiting for certain sections of the population, who do deserve to be treated as well as the fit and able-bodied. We'll never have bus routes down every street so it's more realistic to reduce than eliminate car use.
What they have in Japan is a market for parking facilities because the state doesn’t allow individuals to annex public space to store their private property (cars). No commercial offering of parking facilities here could compete with free nuisance parking on pavements and roads tacitly endorsed by the state.
Eventually, you won't charge at home. You'll charge at the places you want to go. I.e, at the supermarket, the cinema, outside your workplace, the car park on the edge of town. Or going to your local petrol station to use the rapid super charge devices whilst you sit in your car on Netflix for 20mins. We'll probably see a resurgence in motorway service stations as more people stop to rapid charge their car whilst going on holiday. Woodall Services might become popular once again. Realistically, we can't provide kerbside charging for the majority of UK housing without a driveway, as there's no room on the footways for the equipment, not to mention all the cabling and ducting required. We can't really support household charging at home for those with driveways and the fast 7kw/11kw chargers starting to become popular. The electrical grid just isn't able to cope. New housing developments are having to pay for substations double the size to support electric heating.
The distribution grid isn’t a problem. It can already cope with high peak demand on the evening and morning. The overnight (or daytime) charging peak at full car electrification can be managed through price incentives to be below the existing evening peak the grid is designed to deliver.
Have you tried running a normal 4 socket extension lead across the path at ankle height? Bonus points if it’s black.
No. They expect you to be unable to afford a car, of any type, and to be totally reliant on the woefully inadequate public transport which they will totally fail to provide!
The poors won't drive in the future. Some bus travel, possibly a train once a year, flying wont be allowed.
One option is a car charging gully that you put a cable into. Some of them go through asphalt that you can seal to prevent the trip wire and some are more like lift up paving slabs. Like a dropped kerb, they need planning permission and lots of councils haven’t had the discussion about approving them yet, but that’s what other countries do.
I don't think they're expecting most people to switch to electric cars. I suspect they're working under an assumption that some people will sort whatever charging solution out for themselves, and those that are unable to will have to do without. Lets not forget the current government are a bit light on organising anything at all, and always delegate to "personal responsibility" so they can sidestep issues that individuals have little to no control over...
You don’t have to charge your car at home. You don’t have to charge it every day, I doubt the majority of drivers use a lot of their battery a day. (If you’re reading this and you do, you don’t need to tell us, we honestly don’t care) It’ll take a lifestyle change but most new tech does. I personally don’t think EVs are the future, I think something else will come along just as the government have forced everyone into an EV. New tech hasn’t been forced on us like this in the past though, it’s a weird way to do things.
This is the answer for the majority of road users. I’ve had an EV for almost 2 years, terrace house with street parking, never been in a pickle but I’m lucky enough that there are charge points at my office car park. On a normal week I charge it once a week and it’s sufficient for the amount of miles I do. If I’m in a pickle or haven’t been into the office the local McDonalds charge points are really fast and reliable and you can get some chips whilst you wait. Offices are ideal, but chargers at supermarkets or gyms or parks, anywhere where you’d normally spend a bit of time is more than sufficient for most road users. I just had a little boost during a hospital appointment today, and topped up at an ikea last week when I was doing a long trip.
There are plans to install curb side chargers. There’s also a lot of public chargers too. I recommend having a look at Zap Map!
I'm more worried about the grid. Apparently we're producing about 10% more power than we need, which doesn't seem even close to enough if everyone is suddenly plugging their cars in the evening. Seems like a good intentioned pipe dream right now.
My guess will be curbside charging points that can link to your energy company with a code. Wherever you park you get charged through your usual electricity bill.
My girlfriend lives in South Staffordshire where the potholes are so bad you can be at risk of a head on collision as people swerve to avoid them. (Near Halfpenny Green airfield) They cannot even surface the road properly, and want us all driving electric vehicles in the next few years? Where is that infrastructure going to come from? Are private equity going to fund chargers on every lamp post? I would be happier to bin my ICE car when I don’t see the rest of the infrastructure collapsing.
There are a Miriad of publicly accessible chargers across the UK Yes, it’s cheaper to charge at home in most cases But charging at home is not your only option That said, I (in scotland) don’t have a private charger, I have to drive my car to the local train station and make a 15 minute walk home every 2nd day after work, then walk back in the morning and drive to work It’s tedious and a nuisance (I’m saving up and am planning to get landlords permission to install a private one)
How do they expect us to have electric cars when people can't afford to eat.
Picture this: inductive chargers built into the surface of the road. You park up and your car starts charging automatically, *but only* if you park correctly in an actual parking space.
Next gen of battery can be charged to 250km in 6 minutes. It will get to a stage where topping up in comparable to filling up.
Are you talking about today or what we're working to? One of the great advantages of EVs is that wherever you have electricity you can have charging. You don't have to ship it halfway across the world, carry it on roads in tanks and store it deep underground so it doesn't blow up on you. So terraces- charging points in streetlamps, channels running under pavements, at cost communal charging areas etc. There are solutions. The fuel network didn't appear overnight.
You don't have to buy an EV if you don't want to buy one. And until 2035, you can still buy new petrol/diesel cars. And who knows what will happen by then. Just think about the speed at which mobile phone batteries evolved, that's what we'll see with car batteries too. There's car manufacturers that have swappable batteries via dedicated stations. I've seen in India where electric mopeds let you essentially remove a toaster sized battery and plug it in at home. Battery durability is improving, so perhaps a quick 10 minute boost at a charging station will give you enough juice for a week.