Some of his customers appear less happy. For Mr Vince’s company is accused of hiking up prices at electric car charging points while at the same time ploughing millions of pounds into his football club.
On Monday, Ecotricity, which has the monopoly on motorway service station electric charging points, will introduce a new pricing scheme for electric vehicles.
Critics claim the new charges will make it as expensive to charge up an electric car as put petrol in a conventional, fuel-efficient vehicle.
I have absolutely no idea what the cost of filling up an electric vehicle should be. Not a scoobie as to even magnitude.
‘Leccie is 10 p a kW? So, how many kWs are they trying to stuff into a battery?
And how much cheaper than petrol should this be? If it should be at all?
Ecotricity, which used to offer free charging to encourage the take up of electric cars, will change to its new tariff from tomorrow. Motorists will have to pay £3 connection fee and then a further 17 pence for every unit of electricity used (kWh). Previously the company charged a flat fee of £6 for 30 minutes of charge.
OK, bit more than that but doesn’t seem like an outrageous price at all.
Erm, maybe electric cars just do actually cost as much as petrol? You know, even after all he tax petrol pays?
Kilowatt hour. Not kilowatt. kWh. 3.6 MJ. Please, FFS. One is a unit of power, the other is a unit of energy. This is important. It’s like measuring the range of a car in miles per hour.
Why should companies provide services for free? Loss leader, I understand. But that’s their decision. Not a permanent obligation upon them.
“Fair Fools UK”. Hmm. Well, the world just isn’t fair. Most people manage to learn this. Sensible people by four, most of the rest by 40.
But ‘fair’ and ‘free’ aren’t even close in meaning.
For me, the question is why was a monopoly given? This issue stems from that decision.
There are, give or take, eleven kWh in a litre of diesel, so this looks very expensive.
Raffles:
There’s no monopoly as such, just that Ecotricity are the only lot who bothered to put charging stations in most Motorway Service Areas.
I’ve been in a long argument on another site with someone who thinks that electric cars are the best thing since sliced bread.
My arguments against are very simple:
1) Not everyone can put up with a car that can’t do 150 miles in one go, or has the space to park a “spare” car for long journeys.
2) At the moment electrics are subsidised by the government in the form of no VED/car tax and (IIRC) a £5k discount on the purchase price. Once EVs get popular enough these tax breaks and subsidies will, like the cheaper VED on diesels, end up being removed or even reversed.
3) The depreciation on a new electric car is absolutely hilarious. Even the most popular models are looking at losing over 75% of their value over 3 years.
The Tesla model 3 seems to have an optional 75 KWHr battery that is good for 300 miles. Now 17p times 75 KWHr plus 3 pound plug in gives £15.75 for 300 miles, so about 5 pence per mile.
My old diesel car costs about twice that, but fills in about 2 minutes.
Company gets given monopoly, company exploits that monopoly…who gave them monopoly and why?
My car gets about 11 miles per litre, a litre costs me about £1.16 when converted, so about 10.5p per mile.
But the car cost me waaaaaay less than an EV.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/20/tesla-car-battery-production-releases-as-much-co2-as-8-years-of-gasoline-driving/
Virtue signalling is expensive and does nothing for CO2 emissions. Why should anyone subsidise such wankery?
It’s not a monopoly: you can still charge your car at home, and there are plenty of non-motorway places to charge. But the whole thing seems messy to me: there are multiple incompatible connectors, different power outputs; and you can never be sure that there’ll actually be an available space when you arrive.
In short, if you buy an electric car, don’t ever try to go beyond the home range. It’s just not worth the stress.
In the absence of a great leap in battery capacity and/or charging speed, a partial-hybrid (like the Golf GTE) seems like a better choice. Still not economically sensible though.
17p a unit is about what I pay for my leccy at home so fair enough, and there needs to be some charge for taking up a charging point space for however many hours it will take.
Most of the cost of petrol is of course tax, wait ’til lectric cars are popular and no doubt they will be taxed
Like Rhyds, I’ve been having an ongoing argument with someone about the current & future viability of electric cars. It’s depressing how little people people understand about electricity & electricity supply.
Point 1) You can’t charge a car from a 13A socket because a 13A socket passes a trivial amount of power.
2) Even with a special, high capacity cable & connectors you can’t get 40A from a 40A domestic supply. Because the existing 40A supply is needed to supply the house. If the house didn’t need a 40A supply there wouldn’t be one in the first place. Yes, you can “manage” consumption to use spare capacity. But that’s going to mean you can’t run the washing machine & use a kettle at the same time or all the lights will go out.
3) Yes, you could probably get your electricity supplier to run a larger supply to your house. Now. But they’re not going to do that for the whole street. Because the cable runs down your road was laid to supply 40A to each house. It doesn’t have the spare capacity to double that. And nor does the cabling supplies your town. And nor does the national grid & its distributed generating plants. And the grid does not have the capacity to move electricity from some imaginary giant windfarm in the Atlantic, off the coast of Scotland, to charge cars in Brighton. Not unless you want to build an entirely new grid.
4) And long term, you are not going to be powering a national fleet of electric cars on cheap electricity. Government relies on the tax take from transport fuel taxes. If it loses them it’ll have to tax elsewhere to make up the difference. The obvious elsewhere is the electricity being supplied to charge electric cars.
And a point 5)
Doing what would be necessary to power a national fleet of electric cars would cost a great deal of money. Money that would have to be recovered from the charges on powering the cars.
Might give a clue to the why of those motorway charge point prices. To provide significant charging capacity will use a lot of power. Yes the cabling supplies that motorway service area carries a lot of power. But that was installed to power a motorway service area, not charge electric cars. My guess is that Ecotricity is either having installed or contemplating having installed the cabling capacity to retail large amounts of electricity in motorway service areas. Running cable to motorway service areas, out in the boonies, miles from the supplies serve towns & cities is going to be damned expensive
On Monday, Ecotricity, which has the monopoly on motorway service station electric charging points, will introduce a new pricing scheme for electric vehicles.
Critics claim the new charges will make it as expensive to charge up an electric car as put petrol in a conventional, fuel-efficient vehicle.
Lol. This is EXACTLY what the State does. Get people interested in something with a discounted tax/price. People switch to it, Government shits itself and realises revenue is plummeting. Government gets some trained seals in the Lefty media to start a dishonest campaign, nine months later prices/taxes are raised to be the same as the other options. Consumers shafted.
For example, you swallowed the Governments bollocks about CO2 and bought a low-emission car, which the State didn’t tax.
The State wanted money and saw citizens with low emission cars which were untaxed. State forgot about CO2 and slapped a massive tax increase on said cars.
Consumers shafted.
Again, Hong Kong provides the test case. Normal first car registration tax is 100-150%. EVs were exempt, the value is now capped to around £10K, so Teslas no longer qualify.
EVs (mostly Tesla) sold to end of March 2017: 10,589
Budget announcement that Teslas would no longer qualify for tax exemption.
EVs, all but 20 were Teslas, sold in March 2017: 2,964
Teslas sold in April and May 2017: 0
Interesting business model.
In exchange for a “near monopoly”, whatever that means* he has invested a lot of capital in building and installing the pumps and getting them connected. He’s also also subsidised the operating costs to seed the market.
Presumably he now has enough customers to start clawing back some of that investment.
*My guess is that he was given something like [10] years exclusivity so he needs to have at least paid back the capital and starting to turn an operating profit by the time the exclusivity runs out.
The mobile market was very similar, very high set up costs a need to seed the market so the initial licences were about 15 years – 3 years to launch fro licence grant, 5 years to cash positive, rest to pay back capital and make reasonable return was the rough basis of most GSM licence bids I worked on around the world.
Between friends you get 10 kWh in a litre of petrol. so 10 kWh of leccie would cost you £1 at your tarrif (which sounds cheap for retail). Here, would be closer to €2.50.
So, delivered on the forecourt, you’d expect petrol and leccie costs of the same order of magnitude. Once you factor in the favourable tax treatment of leccie versus petrol for driving cars around with, the leccie is grossly more expensive.
Further to BIS’s point about connection fees. It can cost £100k+ to connect a rural site, usually around £40k even when close to a farm with a 3 phase supple, and they really aren’t as power hungry as a bank of electric cars.
The key issue for the power connection isn’t how much power, but how quickly, fast charge requires a lot of current which increases I^2R losses so needs bigger cables etc.
BiS,
On point 4, “The obvious elsewhere [to recoup the lost tax revenue] is the electricity being supplied to charge electric cars.”
But it’s impossible to distinguish between electricity for car charging and electricity for domestic use. Or at least very difficult. We have “red diesel” for farmers; can we have “red electricity” for homes?
BiS crystallises the issues here. I would also add issues of grid stability. There seems to be a weird idea that a bunch of electric cars charging can act as the storage resource for the grid to accept unpredictable or marginally predictable power inflows from windfarms & solar cells. I can’t imagine the difficulty of producing control loops to stabilise the multifarious power flows thereby caused in the leaf parts of the network and balancing that with the needs of windfarms in the main grid.
Also, If I had an electric car charging overnight, I would not be chuffed to find it had only 40% charge in the morning when I had a long drive the following day because the wind dropped to zero overnight.
I don’t have all the details to give the exact numbers but electric motors are more efficient than petrol engines in turning stored energy into kinetic energy, so while the cost per MJ of electricity and MJ of petrol seem to be about the same, the electric car probably wins in terms of £/mile (ignoring capital costs/depreciation etc).
“The key issue for the power connection isn’t how much power, but how quickly, fast charge requires a lot of current which increases I^2R losses so needs bigger cables etc.”
This is something people really don’t get about electricity. There’s a sort of analogy with F1 race cars. Fuelling a road car at the pump takes a few minutes through the hose. It’s done at low pressure through a relatively small bore hose. When F1’s were refuelled at pit stops it was done in a few seconds, at high pressure through a large bore pipe. With the pit crew wearing fire resistant suits.
You are not going to recharge an electric car through a lawnmower extension cable. At low voltages, quickly, it’s going to take some very meaty cable. High voltages (think pressure) would require a step-down transformer in the car, very large & heavy & chucking out a lot of heat from electrical resistance. Unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors, mighty fast.
@ Rhyds
Thanks for the clarification. Then we can just wait for the market to sort the correct price. If there’s money to be made, other suppliers will come.
However, as others pointed out, one day all electric car owners will have to pay the market price for electricity (+tax).
“I don’t have all the details to give the exact numbers but electric motors are more efficient than petrol engines in turning stored energy into kinetic energy,”
It’s not simply the motor. There’s inefficiency losses. Charging the batteries consumes power. They heat. Drawing on the batteries consumes power. Again, they heat. And there’s the energy required to cart around the mass of the batteries in the car. And as the batteries go through repeated charge/discharge cycles they begin to degrade. Store less power. Need to recharge more often. But you’re still carting around the same mass of battery
@Andrew M
Yes you can. Very simple with “smart” metering. You “tag” the car so the smart meter knows it’s recharging a car, not powering a washing machine. Of course, that’d require the expense of yet another generation of smart meters (after the first one’s turned out to be not compatible with metering requirements) and all require replacing…
And come the day, I’m going to be looking round to invest in a nice little, highly illegal, black box defeats the tagging. Doesn’t even matter if it works. You’ll still clean up, from the gullible
So you pull your electric car into motorway service station to charge up . . . and there is a line at the charger. You are 4 back.
Ha ha ha ha. Your last EV road trip.
Not to mention several large pitlane fires when the hose disconnected before the high pressure pumps had cleared.
The point on Tesla in Hong Kong is a tad disingenuous….tesla had been here 3years and sold approx 10k cars. They are extremely popular and anyone that has driven one recognises they are DVD to VHS. Smooth, fast, low maintains ce and of course cheap to run (yes I have one).Then the lobbyists at BMW and Mercedes did what big motor always do and lobbied (bribed) the authorities to change the policy. Everybody that was going to buy one before end of March did so to avoid a big jump in duty. They sold a years worth in one month. No surprises then that they have sold none since. Incidentally if I plug in on a standard plug overnight it has 400km of range in the morning…..having said all that the hybrid to watch is the Nissan e note. Cheap, no plug in 500km range and 90mpg
@MarkT
There’s something wrong with your figures. Presuming you’ve a Tesla S, electricity consumption is 20kWh/100. So 400km = 80kWh. UK standard socket’s rated at 13A 13x240xh=3.1kWh before allowing for inefficiencies. 80 over 3.1’s = 25.8 hours. Do you get very long days in HK?
Or should I be using the argument: Because the full tank range of my car’s 700km & my daily use is 5l, my fuel consumption is 140km/l ?
I suspect MarkT isn’t filling up his Tesla from empty (it’s hard to drive 400km round Honkers in one day). I run a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, which has a 50km (nominal, reality more like 35km) electric range and then switches to hybrid petrol mode. I absolutely coin it from government grants (BiK 7%, about a quarter of an equivalent Beemer) and save on fuel too.
I signed up for Ecotricity when they were free, but I won’t use them now, because they work out about 3x the cost of petrol (per km of range). But I know people who run one for the tax benefits but never charge it, so it’s just a 35 mpg 4WD tank subsidised by the rest of us.
I think 32A (8kW) is the largest domestic charger in the UK, and they need to check your leccy supply fairly carefully before installing one (there are gummint subsidies for that, too). I can recharge from ’empty’ (electric cars are never ’empty’ because that risks crippling the battery, they usually stop at ~15%) in 5 hours from a standard 13A plug, which takes about 10kWhr.
The fast chargers (at m’way services and other locations) will only take a battery up to 80%, because at that point the internal resistance would generate too much heat. If there’s no-one else waiting and you have the time, you can leave it to ‘trickle’ charge much more slowly up to 100%.
@BiS and others:
Of course you can charge an electric car from a normal household socket – just don’t expect the process to be very quick. A 13amp socket will supply 3kW, and the industrial 16amp version about 3.6kW, so do the maths. As long as the charger is either a) intelligent, and can determine how much power to draw from whatever it’s connected to, or b) this can be preselected (different dedicated leads, for example), there is no reason why it couldn’t be plugged into a portable genny if you REALLY get desperate. Such technology already exists for marine use, where shorepower can be of highly variable quality. In this situation the onboard charger/inverter(s) will only use what mains power can be taken without overloading the supply, and can even draw battery power for short periods to supplement the mains. This same bi-directional capability is being touted as a way of employing millions of electric cars to support the grid when “Renewables” can’t…
And note that the 40 amp domestic supply described by BiS is bit low by comparison with the UK. Our 50 year old house has a 60 amp mains fuse, and most newer properties will have 80, or even 100amp supplies. At the moment the odd customer charging an electric car at night isn’t likely to strain local grids. HOWEVER, expecting the present system to cope if this mode of transport ever becomes the norm is an entirely different matter. I doubt that I’ll be alive to see it…
My 20-year-old Polo cost me £500 and costs 15p per mile in petrol. When an electric car’s costs are comparable, then they will be directly comparable.
Hong Kong is a bit of a special case. It’s so small you’d be hard pressed to empty the battery in a day, and are never more than an hour’s drive from your own personal charging point. Private cars are very much restricted to the super-rich and people in the sticks. So I can see electric cars working there in a way they won’t in most places.
@Dave Ward
I don’t know why so many people have trouble in getting their heads round this. A house’s electrical supply is rated to supply the needs of the house. Be it 40A, 60A or 100A. No one went around installing power supplies that greatly exceeded the needs of the house, because higher ratings cost a lot of money.
The rating needed for a house has to take into consideration not only smooth use but peak loads. There’s lots of appliances draw considerably more power when they start up compared to their subsequent power use.
None of this will have been designed to take the superimposed load of charging cars.
Although a 13A plug may be able to deliver 3.1kW, the 30A ring it’s connected to may not be able to. Because there will be other things plugged into the ring. So, in practice, you need a dedicated run from the consumer unit.
And, Chris Miller, if someone’s managed to pass 10kW through a UK 13A plug they’ve either rewritten the laws of physics or wedged a nail in the fuse holder. 10kW over 240V = 41A. 40A twin & earth cable’s thicker than your thumb & about as easy to coil. Putting 41A through 2.5mm T&E is a pretty reliable way to heat your house. Until the fire brigade comes & puts it out.
“There’s lots of appliances draw considerably more power when they start up compared to their subsequent power use.”
Those who push the case for electric cars gloss over many of the problems with connecting to the domestic supply by waving their hands and claiming “overnight charging” when everything else is switched off and people are in bed.
The problem is people will connect as soon as they get home and expect charging to start straight away, in case they need it for emergencies, and then walk in to the house and put the kettle and electric cooker on as well as firing up TVs and other assorted appliances. This will cause a new load spike for the grid which will be exacerbate the problems they already have when the adverts start in the middle of Corrie or other popular programmes.
As bis says, this is going to take a lot of very intelligent supply and metering systems and why Govts are desperate to get the Internet of Things kicked off.
Something else worth mentioning. The smart meter initiative is supposed to be part of a government scheme to get consumers to switch consumption to off peak hours. If it’s at all successful, there won’t be any off peak hours to charge cars in.
A fine example of government doing two mutually incompatible things. Or SNAFU.
BiS
Chris Miller didn’t say 10Kw. he said 10KwH over 5 hours, ie ~8 amps rather than 40?
And if one is doing this overnight (most likely?), it’s less likely to be competing with kettles and other etc.
But otherwise, no, similarly I wouldn’t touch of any of this crap with a barge pole…
And – re black boxes – if I am ever “compelled” to have a so called smart meter, there will be a firewall immediately upstream (it’s not illegal once it’s your side of the demarcation point). (Or wharever else is required (wi-fi?) to reduce its capability to “communicate” upstream)
@PF
IIRC smart meters use their own built in Mobile data connection rather than use the local data network
@BiS @PF is correct. I’m drawing 2kW average, but in practice 3kW for 3 hours and then a ‘trickle’ to complete the top-up. You can do this on a built-in (to the car) timer, to take advantage of cheaper, off-peak electricity. The process appears to be surprisingly efficient – almost all the kWhrs you draw from the mains seem to end up in the battery (the car has a built-in system that reports on these matters in excruciating detail).
FWIW I get about 90mpg (3.1l/100km) looking purely at petrol consumption. If I factor in the cost of electricity (10kWh on my domestic tariff costs about the same as a litre of petrol), that brings it down to around 60mpg (4.7l/100km) – which I consider bloody good for a two-ton brick-shaped SUV.
@BiG Honkers is a fairly extreme case of a ‘big city’ environment, where electric cars can be reasonably effective. But then, so can public transport – I know plenty of people in London who don’t own a car (because parking is an expensive pain and driving anywhere in London tends to be s-l-o-w), and just rent one when they’re going away for the weekend. But you see a lot of Mitsubishi PHEVs (like mine) in central London.
Golly, isn’t petrol a wonderful transport fuel!
“This same bi-directional capability is being touted as a way of employing millions of electric cars to support the grid when “Renewables” can’t…”
So we could use petrol in hybrid cars for electricity generation for the grid. Blimey!
@Chris, that’s my point. The price makes no difference to the kind of person who drives a car there at all. And unless you invest in two numberplates you cannot physically drive beyond the “combat radius” of an electric vehicle. But there are only a handful of such places on the planet, so it ain’t worth developing cars just for them.
We had this “overnight load” stuff before, didn’t we? With storage heaters. All to be driven off the white heat of a new fleet of nukes, which needed overnight loading because you only fire them up and down twice a year.
That worked out, didn’t it.
If you have a moderately windy summer’s night, there will still be an excess of electricity coming from wind farms. So there’s still a place for off-peak (at least, suppliers are still offering it).
“… that brings it down to around 60mpg (4.7l/100km) – which I consider bloody good for a two-ton brick-shaped SUV.”
This is one of the things that puzzles me. Electric car owners singing the praises of economy.
I drive a diesel. I do so because the second hand market of the make & model I prefer seems to be devoid of petrol variants. (Not even sure they exist in Europe) And I’d much rather someone else takes the initial depreciation hit of new vehicle. But as the owner of a £40k+ car, fuel economy’s a long way down my list of plus points. I infinitely preferred the power & response of its petrol version predecessor of the same model. Even with the high mileage I do, saving a few Euros on fuel’s a trivial matter. If I was worried about fuel costs I wouldn’t drive a bloody great expensive car.
Rhyds
“IIRC smart meters use their own built in Mobile data connection rather than use the local data network”
Sure, I wasn’t thinking “internet data” firewall. I meant firewall as a generic term.
Someone suggested, and it’s way above my pay grade, that something that simply blocked “non 50 Hz” transmissions would be the ultimate “indiscriminate block”? Is that complete nonsense (technically)?
“Golly, isn’t petrol a wonderful transport fuel!”
Yes it is. It’s got ten times the energy density of TNT, it’s cheap as chips if you take the exorbitant Government woggery out of the bill, the infrastructure’s already there, in five minutes you can put enough of it in a car to go 500 miles and, number one, above all else, YOU CAN FUCKING STORE IT UNTIL YOU NEED IT.
Electric cars are shit.
@BiC
+100
I do get the feeling, sometime in the late C21st, some clever guy’s going to be marketing an IC engined vehicle burning refined petroleum as a revolutionary replacement for the electric vehicle. It’s pumping out plant fertiliser wherever it goes will be an environmental plus point.
And, of course, as a valuable greenhouse gas to avert the coming Anthropogenic Global Cooling the consensus of scientific opinion is warning heralds climatic crisis & a new Ice Age
I run a 2016 Mustang GT350. I get 13.5 mpUSg.
Also have a 2016 BMW R 1200 R. 41mpUSg.
Who do you think is having the most fun?
For grins:
Jump to 1:00.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHc-r2LKB2E
From the beginning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHc-r2LKB2E
PF,
It’s 35+ years since I did any serious electronic design but the answer depends on how much higher the frequency is that you’re trying to block, but in principle, yes.
@Bloke in North Dorset, June 25, 2017 at 10:25 am
“Further to BIS’s point about connection fees. It can cost £100k+ to connect a rural site, usually around £40k even when close to a farm with a 3 phase ”
Correct. Telegraph reported average installation cost of motorway service area charge point is £50,000.
> Between friends you get 10 kWh in a litre of petrol.
I think your internal combustion engine wastes 75% of that as heat. That why leccy cars are more cheaper to run. Especially on overnight electricity.
BiND
Interesting. At which point, presumably restrict the smart meter with a faraday type cover (for wi-fi?), and it’s lost its upstream mojo… They can still switch you off, of course.
Gamecock
Excellent stuff. For anyone who doesn’t understand why the medical profession calls bikers “donors”..
If I was worried about fuel costs I wouldn’t drive a bloody great expensive car.
Fair enough, it’s your money. But if you can get the advantages of a big, expensive car and lower fuel consumption, that’s a good thing, yes?
PF,
No, if they are using the power line for control then any intervention has to be inline, which would be both dangerous and, I suspect, illegal.
BinD
Upstream? I accept that you can’t touch anything on their side of the meter (or the meter itself). But simply adding wiring on the appliance / household side of the meter? I’m not sure why that wuold be illegal – it presumably isn’t at the moment?
“For anyone who doesn’t understand why the medical profession calls bikers “donors”..”
Agreed. But . . . although I have the same bike, I don’t ride like him.
My state, South Carolina, doesn’t even require wearing a helmet when riding. I do, but I see some who don’t. I like that; I’m going to call them donors.
Range anxiety and wondering how and where to plug in are concerns that are encouraged by the big auto companies. I can point out that the average car journey is 20 mins and that you plug your car in at night just like your phone, but emotion kicks in. This is why I believe the Nissan e note technology will be the category killer. It has all the great driving aspects of electric motors but has a conventional petrol engine driving a dynamo. This enables smaller, cheaper and lighter battery, conventional fuelling, far lower but not zero emissions and around 90mpg. It is already the best selling car in Japan.
PF,
My mistake, I was on the wrong side of the consumer unit.
@MarkT
Well, yes. I think it may have been a Nissan e-note I had on rental couple of months back. Enormous fun. Took it through a road not dissimilar to the one in Gamecock’s bike vid. Although it did have a kilometre drop on side. About as quickly. (Probably why it’s fuel consumption over the rental period was about twice my big diesel’s.)
Total trip distance was over 1000km. Streetparked overnight near a city centre hotel, so no chance of a recharge. Other than the initial charge, the whole trip was done on petrol (although I presume there was a certain amount of energy capture from the regenerative braking)
Lovely car. Acceleration was startling. S’pose you could save a few bob, running around local on a battery charge. But hardly much of a feature. They’re serious money. If one wished to economise one’d buy a cheap Korean microhatch for less than half the cost.
“Range anxiety and wondering how and where to plug in are concerns that are encouraged by the big auto companies.”
Ooooooooo, the big bad auto companies. The same ones still hiding the 100 mpg carburetor?
One major problem for the widespread use of electric cars in the UK, and no doubt plenty of other places, is that a high proportion of car owners only have access to street parking. Either there are going to have to be public charging points (supplied by councils?) every car’s length or people are going to have to be allowed to trail their own charging cables across pavements – assuming that they can even park that close to their own house.
I frankly can’t see either happening, so electric cars are likely to be confined to the demographic with the idealised gleaming white garages of the TV ads.