Lots of nice adverts on the TV now trying to tempt people with more money than sense to buy. I don’t think everyone will fall for it though. Electric cars are not all they are cracked up to be. Why not?

• They are not zero emission thats for sure. Just because you can’t see the emissions. Typically the emissions are around the 50g/km mark, maybe more in countries other than the UK, e.g. America, that still burns a lot of coal to produce electricity.
• They don’t have enough range, particularly if you drive “normally”, i.e. without a very very light right foot. The actual real range could be half that advertised, that is until you realise you are running out of power and drive very very slowly. Its not practical to go to London from Manchester for example. For that you would have to use the rail (why don’t they invest in the rail – because it doesn’t make them the amount of money the tax on petrol and diesel does – I’ll bet that’s why).
• There aren’t enough charging points, and it takes too long to charge, so many more charging points are required to prevent having long queues, with drivers facing hours of wait with no power left to go anywhere else.
• There isn’t enough lithium in the world to make all the batteries if everybody wanted one.
• The batteries are end of life when they reach 80% capacity, and are difficult to dispose of. There isn’t a market for batteries with 80% of their life left, although they would work very well with solar panels or other things that could use a battery (laptops maybe?).
• Where does the electricity come from? There aren’t enough power stations to meet the projected demand for electricity. Electricity generation already produces 40% of the world’s CO2. Is chopping down trees to produce electricity really viable when we need the trees to consume CO2 in the first place?
• Most local substations would need upgrading to allow every house to have a charger. They currently can’t be fitted to every house because switching them all on at once would overload the local electricity supply.
• The cost to the driver. With rising gas and electricity prices.
• The cost to the government. The UK government currently makes 50% on all petrol and diesel sales. If this was to go away, this would mean doubling the cost of electricity for electric cars in order to make up a massive loss of income for the government, or massive taxes elsewhere to cover it.
• We already have electric cars – and they don’t need batteries – they are called TRAINS. More investment is needed here, and not in HS2, which due to the speed is not carbon efficient. We need more local services. Politicians in the UK are still trying to justify that all the cut backs in train services/closure of trainlines was a good ideas in 1969, when there actually has been a massive increase in travel since then. Yes – in petrol and diesel sales filling the politicians coffers.

The world has gone mad, we have these powerful cars with much more power than is needed to drive from A to B. With electronics onboard and finally “self driving” to try to improve safety. As a motorcyclist I fear for my life when I read about self driving cars. They don’t even test them against motorcycles. Self driving will never be as good as a real driver and varying the speed to suit as any good drive will do. Why all this investment in things that aren’t needed? Why not reduce the power of the cars and increase the fuel consumption? I’m never going to be stupid enough to buy any of this rubbish. Expensive to buy expensive when it goes wrong.

Its about time we invested properly in the railways. Which probably means sorting the unions out at the same time because it will never be successful while the unions are in control of it and its too important – we need good railways for both goods and passengers. Talking about electric cars what about articulated lorries – they are diesel and do 8mpg that is over 5 times more CO2 than a diesel Mercedes! We desperately need much more investment in the railways in my view and stop being so stupid – we need solutions that will work NOW!

All Electric Car Posts.