Lets just take the UK as an example.

There are over 30 million cars in the UK, of which 1 million are low emission vehicles, presumably electric cars, hybrids or cars that fall into the zero road tax bracket.

There are around half a million HGV’s, all of which are likely to be diesel and do around 8mpg unlike some diesel cars that do over 50mpg.

There are around 40,000 buses and 30,000 coaches, all of which will do 10-15mpg but admittedly with more than one passenger on average (you would hope).

I’m not going to google how many diesel trains we have. My point is this:

Even assuming that making every car electric would achieve net zero (it won’t, nowhere near), a big percentage of those 30 million cars will be worth less than 5k, many less than 2k belonging to families who need them to work and feed their families, who barely have enough to survive.

Yes there will be big depreciation on electric cars as they get older and the batteries deteriorate, but the only way an electric (or hybrid) car is going to be worth less than 5k is if the battery is totally knackered and a new one is needed at a cost of £15k plus. Even 5k is too much for someone who has a £2000 runaround.

Secondly, lets pretend we are all electric. An electric car takes what, 30 minutes or more to charge, when you can fill up with petrol or diesel in 5 minutes. So we are going to need 6 times more charging points than we have petrol stations. Already we see big queues for charging points. Who wants to waste their life worrying about all that bull?? Even if it were making a difference?

This is without going into other issues, where is the lithium to make the batteries (underground in Australia, shipped in a boat to be manufactured then shipped again), where are the power stations to provide electricity for them, why are we cutting down trees to ship half way across the world for our power stations, just so we can say we are green and blame everybody else, every house not being able to have a charging point because of local substation capacity etc etc. The fact that the USA and China get over 40% of their electricity from coal. No you can’t put solar panels in the Sahara either, unless the users are within 300 miles or so of the panels the voltage drop losses would be too high!

Finally, is there enough lithium in the world to electrify everyone? Its not just about the UK. The UK has 70 million people out of 6 billion on the planet. I read somewhere that if all the UK’s vehicles were electric, it would use up all the worlds supply of lithium. Although for the reasons stated here it will never happen.

We need to get our head out of the clouds and start doing sensible things now, like looking at ways to reduce the overall mileage. They don’t want to do that because they still make 50% in tax on every pound spent on petrol of diesel.

Please explore different parts of this site to find any ideas I come across that can help. As you can tell, I don’t think electric cars are one of them. Although I am grateful, because the price of some expensive petrol and diesel cars have come down, and I have benefited personally from all this madness, buying a good second-hand petrol car at a great discount to new a few years ago.