But the main advantage of charging from one’s own house is financial. On today’s smart overnight tariff, charging a battery from empty to full costs less than a fiver. In comparison, filling up an average family petrol car costs £75, according to the RAC Foundation. A full tank will go further than a charged battery, but the difference is still huge on a per-mile basis: around £2 to drive 100 miles in the EV, compared to £14 for petrol.
This has always been the promise of electric cars, even for those unconvinced by the environmental factor: while the car’s sticker price may be higher, you will save on running costs in the long-run.
That calculation, however, has completely broken down for those who are unable to plug in at home. While the rise of smart meters and EV-only energy tariffs mean charging at home costs almost nothing, soaring electricity prices have led the price of public charging to hit an all-time high.
Powering up at an ultra-rapid station costs the equivalent of £28 for 100 miles – almost double that of a petrol car – and this has risen significantly in the last two years. Slower chargers, such as those placed in lampposts by councils, are slightly cheaper, but not by enough to make EVs financially viable. Supermarkets and other shops that once offered free charging as a way to get people in the door have stopped doing so.
When electric cars are both more expensive to buy and more expensive to run, owning them makes little sense.
But that’s alreight, obviously. Only the little people don’t have a driveway and such proles shouldn’t be looking for private means of transport anyway. Buses exist, don’t they, for the poor?
A huge proportion of the price of diesel and petrol is fuel duty and tax. Does this fool think that he will carry on getting mates rates for his leccie for ever? Has the massive depreciation of EVs been taken into account in these calculations? Or the fact that an EV can be written of by a minor bump? On depreciation, I don’t suppose that my thirteen year old, hundred thousand mile plus car will depreciate much at all now. As long as it stays reliable, and it doesn’t cost the earth to MOT it. I will be keeping it.
It would be hard to separate the electricity used for charging an EV from the rest of the household electricity. So there is always going to be an advantage to being able to charge an EV at home using a domestic tariff.
But I do agree with Stonyground that a government (the current or future) will get around to raising the tax on EVs in order to compensate for the loss of tax from hydrocarbon fuels. The best one I have heard of was the idea that your yearly car tax would be calculated from the milage driven and the cars weight. I could see that one working.
Electric vehicles – worse in every conceivable way
Lower range, lower towing capacity (lowering range even further, heavier, longer to refuel, lower vehicle life (ten year battery life? Woo. A maintained engine will last longer), less resistance to impacts With even small bumps potentially writing off a vehicle. Range negatively affected in a major way by things such as: weather too hot, too cold, towing, using air con, driving on a motorway, using the heater, using heated seats, too much load, using the car too much, using it too little, charging too much, letting battery drain too far.
There is a case for them, but only in certain use scenarios. They aren’t a one size fits all solution that they’re being presented as.
Quite amused at the moment by Ford facing £100M in fines or thereabouts for not selling enough milk floats.
Of course they have the option buying credits from BYD or Tesla , or they can bring forward some credits by beating the target next year and exceeding that… Lol. They weren’t even close this year, never mind the higher target next year.
Will they be the first to leave the UK?
As @stony says, pretty much the entire difference in running cost per mile is tax. That’s not taxing off the pollution either, which is about covered by road fund licence.
If you are rich enough to afford the (taxpayer subsidised) cost of an EV and have a drive you can then avoid a lot of the tax the plebs have to pay.
#taxthepoor
Stony – Does this fool think that he will carry on getting mates rates for his leccie for ever?
It’s not mates rates, we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
A wonderful example of regressive taxation, the whole “green” business.
Why is it only anti-socialists who point this out?
If you go to the British Car Auctions website you can find countless numbers of EVs that are about 18 months old, have two previous owners, but have recorded mileage in single or double figures. I’ve seen one such car with one mile on the clock. These have been bought and pre-registered by dealers and parked in fields in order to get their sales figures up. Next time a pro-EV shill boasts about how EV sales are increasing faster than those of conventional vehicles, ask them where their owners are.
Buses exist for OAPs who (mostly) don’t have to get to work on time and get free travel with their bus pass. For most journeys it’s quicker to walk unless you strike lucky with a bus actually coming when you want it.
They are creating a world that can only be comfortably inhabited by a certain type of professional desk jockey. Unfortunately that world cannot function solely on the productivity of desk jockeys. This is not going to end well.
The next big divide in society will be between those who can afford to (and have the land or space) to own solar panels solely for the purpose of charging their cars. If the panels are used solely for your car and never to feed into the grid, then you could safe a lot, especially if the government starts to put up VAT or create some other tax on electrical charging.
Then again, they could then use the fact that you have solar panels to increase your council tax.
@salamander: could one design an electrically powered weapon that could be used to shoot down any drones that might fly over one’s garden to photograph the solar panels?
You need a dedicated circuit from the fuse box to an EV charger, and you also need a separate SMART meter.
What do you think of the odds of something like this then occurring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaZiLdF9-WU
Low voltage, local equipment serves a cluster of properties in a neighbourhood, so a long street may be serviced by two or more LV distributors.
It is expected on average the load per property will be 1kW to 2kW – at times it will be greater for short periods in some when electric cookers, for example, are in use, but the actual average load will be distributed over the properties with some at times using very little.
Car battery chargers draw 7kW continuously. If a number of properties within a cluster have battery chargers, and each are drawing 7kW for hours on end, this will overload the LV supply which will fail. Added to this will be those magic heat pumps which draw continuously 3kW to 7kW and then there will be the clothes/ dish washers etc on the “smart meter” using “off-peak night-time power.
In order to accommodate Net Zero, a complete upgrade and extension of low voltage, local supply will be required to cope with the increased load by switching from 87% of energy provided by fission fuels, to over 90% supplied by electricity.
It’s a complete fantasy – unachievable.
In Greece the government decided to raise taxes and came up with the idea of taxing domestic swimming pools in people’s gardens. This was shortly after the financial crisis. They even flew aircraft overhead to try and spot where the swimming pools were and to try and estimate the size of the pools.
The owners of the swimming pools responded by using a special paint that would made the swimming pools appear as lawns when viewed from an aircraft. I have always wondered if the paint had to be developed specially for this purpose or it was a case of trial and error with a set of existing paints.
JohnB’s entirely correct. The local cabling was laid to the demand was envisaged at the time. With little overhead. Cable’s expensive, so you don’t lay what you don’t need. To move to the sort of all electric world they’re demanding will require replacing all of the to-individual dwelling cabling in the country.
@Addolff: I suspect that in the long term houses with EV charging points will have to have a dual purpose meter, like the current economy 7 ones, with the EV charge point running through its own meter. This will allow the State to get its 20% VAT on vehicle charging for starters, probably exclude that usage from domestic price capping, and of course be subject to load shedding at will, as it would have to be a smart meter.
john77,
I use the bus a lot. I work from home, have a gym and shop in walking distance, get most stuff delivered. But sometimes need to go to town, railway station.
The bus apps have been a gamechanger for me. No need to carry a load of change, timetables, plan out routes and stand in the cold. I can buy a ticket, see the route and if it’s running late, stay in the warm until just before. It’s not as convenient as a car, but it’s also a lot cheaper than running a car.
What moron only considers running costs for anything? £5 per top-up vs the price of a small house for the capital costs totals small-house, not cheap. £1000 for a ICE car plus £150/m for tax+mot+insurance+petrol+oil+etc makes £40 for a full tank peanuts.
“Hey, buy this house, the gas’n’leccy bills are only £80pm”
Yebbut, the mortgage is £1500 per month.
“No, bollocks to paying the mortgage, just pay £80 for the gas’n’leccy”
….says nobody ever.
Then again, they could then use the fact that you have solar panels to increase your council tax.
Council tax is a tax on property values, so yes indeed the council tax should and would increase if you put solar panels on your house.
@jgh
Council tax is a tax on property values, so yes indeed the council tax should and would increase if you put solar panels on your house.
Are you sure rooftop solar increases the property value? It looks more like sprayed insulation or cavity wall filling to me.
But the main advantage of charging from one’s own house is financial. On today’s smart overnight tariff, charging a battery from empty to full costs less than a fiver. In comparison, filling up an average family petrol car costs £75, according to the RAC Foundation. A full tank will go further than a charged battery, but the difference is still huge on a per-mile basis: around £2 to drive 100 miles in the EV, compared to £14 for petrol.
“Smart overnight tariffs” have been around for ages (electric storage heaters, anyone?), they give you cheap leccy overnight (when demand is low, but for how much longer?) and make it up by charging you more during the day. They can certainly save you money if you’re charging your EV every night, but you can’t simply say “this is the cost per mile” without taking account of the increased costs you’ll be paying elsewhere.
I keep very careful track (or rather, my car does) how much electricity and petrol my PHEV consumes. It’s very close to 3x cheaper to run on electricity than petrol. By an amazing coincidence, ⅔ of the cost of petrol at the pump is tax, compared to 5% on domestic electricity.
I’d say there’s one thing you can count on. Government is not going to relinquish the revenue it’s been gaining from fuel revenue So it’ll be looking for somewhere to obtain the revenue it isn’t going to be getting. And the obvious targets are going to be the people who have temporarily been gaining by not paying fuel revenue by going EV. So don’t expect your good fortune to last.
“It’s a complete fantasy – unachievable.”
Which is why I have said since the very beginning of this milk float obsession that our Lords and Masters have no intention of allowing the hoi polloi to be able to afford personal transport.
BiS @12:51 plus the 11kV cables, and the 33kV cables etc etc. The whole system is dimensioned for the expected load at all levels. The Tesla chargers at Fleet Services southbound on the M3 were unconnected and unusable for years because the local 11kV/33kV infrastructure was full to capacity. If EVs become significantly more popular than they are now that capacity limitation will happen in all sorts of random places in the network. I’m not sure the network planners even have the tools & data to predict this ahead of time.
@ Western Bloke
Good for you – that’s intelligent use of technology.
But it does rely on honest data being supplied by your local bus company. Our local bus company has installed screens at most of its bus shelters (not all stops have shelters but many do) telling those waiting when the next three or four buses are due. Regrettably, a few of those buses get gradually, but slowly, closer and then evaporate into the ether.
I’m on a bus right now, (morning frost, and an icy descent to the main road so opted for this). Grateful for the comments, especially WB. About 40 minutes worth makes the commute home perfect. Apps from arriva and Megabus/stagecoach very good as feature live trackers. Ignore departure boards at the stops as they usually show the timetable, not what’s happening