The Green Blues

Everyone wants a cleaner, healthier environment. And vehicles are a significant cause of local air pollution –even if they’re far from the worst cause.

So the switch to electric cars makes sense at that level, though it’s not without eco-drawbacks such as Lithium extraction or Cobalt mining. But the revolution appears to be running out of steam, just at a point where we seem to have chosen to throw a century of technological development in the bin.

The internal combustion engine undoubtedly works, but it will from 2035 be replaced by a technology that, right now, seems decidedly inferior, has significant performance disadvantages and relies on a decidedly shaky infrastructure in order to work.

The picture is significant. It shows one of the latest EVs on the market, the Volkswagen ID.5, at a very significant location in British motoring history. The car is parked at Micheldever Station in Hampshire, and it’s significant because the first ever British car journey started here.

On 5th July, 1895, the Hon Evelyn Ellis waited at the station for the train from Southampton to arrive. On board was a new 4hp Panhard et Levassor, shipped from France and taken by rail to Micheldever. From there he drove the car to his home in Datchet, near Windsor.

Today, that 45-mile journey would take less than an hour. But at a time when there was literally no infrastructure – no proper roads, no filling stations, and no other traffic – it took Ellis more than 8 hours, travelling at a maximum speed of 4mph.

If you needed fuel at the dawn of motoring, you bought a bottle of “spirit” from a chemist. Or paraffin from a general store. It would take some time before an organised system of fuel distribution and retail was established.

This is almost where we are with electric cars today. Infrastructure is, at best, random. If you’ve got a drive or a garage, you’re quids in. If you haven’t, it becomes a postcode lottery. Some local councils have installed on-street chargers; others have not.

Rapid chargers are installed wherever one of the many new operators can find land. Supermarket car parks, fast-food drivethroughs, hotel and pub car parks. Anywhere that’s prepared to give up a couple of parking bays. Sadly, there isn’t one at Micheldever Station, though I’m sure someone has their eyes on the car park.

It’s also a lottery when you go to a charging station to see if it’s working, or available. And if it is, will it work at the advertised speed?

In our experience, the answer is likely to be no, and the car companies’ claims of a 10-80% recharge in 15 minutes are just not possible.

Unless you have a home charger, or you don’t do large mileages, an EV is not the easiest thing in the world to live with. Unfortunately, many chauffeurs, private hire or taxi drivers fall outside the low mileage/ home charger Venn diagram.

In fact they’re more likely to live in a flat or a terraced house, and they’re doing way above the average daily mileage of a private motorist. Yet from an air quality point of view, switching a taxi or PHV from diesel to electric will have a much more dramatic effect than swapping a private car.

A taxi might do 50,000 miles a year or more; a private car might struggle to do 10,000. So each PHV that switches to electric is worth at least five family runabouts in terms of air quality improvement.

But many drivers are loath to switch. They simply cannot make the numbers work. An EV is typically more expensive – maybe up to 50% more expensive – than the equivalent ICE car. And if they have to use commercial charge points rather than home charging, it’s more expensive per mile to fill up with electricity than it is with petrol.

Then there’s the time factor. If you have to spend an hour a day waiting for the car to charge, that’s an hour of earnings down the drain. Seven hours a week, 350 hours a year. That’s a lot of lost revenue.

It’s no wonder that a number of drivers are sticking with either ICE or PHEV until such time as the provision of charge points matches the demand for charging. And that’s a challenge – EV sales might be slowing down, but the number of cars per charge point is growing. There’s the root of the problem.

Maybe it’ll take a technological breakthrough to double battery life and halve charging times. It’s not unreasonable to expect this, and by 2035, when a ZEV will be your only choice, we’ll be 25 years on from those early Nissan Leafs and their 60-mile ranges.

Twenty-five years on from Evelyn Ellis’s journey takes us to 1920, by which time there are 300,000 far more capable cars running on tarmacked roads and filling up at service stations. We’re into the age of motoring, and there’s no turning back.

If EVs are going to succeed completely, the technology needs to advance at a similar pace. A 200-mile range is not enough. The 2035 EV needs to be able to travel 500 miles on a charge, and it needs to recharge in just a few minutes, not an hour.

If this doesn’t happen, the EV revolution could fail. And then where do we go?