I’m old enough to remember when the prices went above £1 a litre, all the garages having to get their signs updated so they could have four digits on the price. Some of them using wheelie bin stickers or handwritten "1"s as a stop gap.
Wonder what they’ll do this time around, the ones that didn’t think far enough ahead to have a full seven-segment display fitted?
Having moved to the US recently and encountering the insane distances people drive here.
I do wonder why (other than the downwards mobility of a decayed empire) everyone in the UK isn’t using EVs, unless you’re doing donuts on a roundabout on your way beat up staff over a ham sandwich, an EV can get you from Birmingham to anywhere south of Glasgow on a single charge.
Is it still cheaper with fuel prices rising?
Because huge swathes of UK housing is hundreds of years old and doesn’t have driveways or even nearby on-road parking so cars can’t be charged at home, and the charging infrastructure that does exist is insufficient or inconvenient.
Incoming planning changes means you will be able to get a channel put through the pavement so you can install a road side charger outside your house. Obviously this doesn’t help people without assigned/adjacent parking, but helps a lot of people get over that hurdle.
This is a huge part, I used to live in an upstairs flat which formed part of a house in a Victorian terrace. Parking was parallel parking in any nearby street, with no front garden worth mentioning, and definitely no driveways.
There is literally no way that I can think of to make a situation like that work with home charging, and sadly similar situations will apply to millions of people. If the only solution involves me driving to the nearest supermarket car park and plugging in there for an hour every few days, then that isn’t a solution at all unfortunately.
Especially as commercial chargers are waaaaayyy more expensive per unit, makes the financial savings argument disappear too.
A few months back we idly pondered using my partner’s PIP towards getting a new EV. As we don’t have a driveway and we rent, we’d have to take the offer that includes membership to one of the charging schemes. Thing is, it includes the subscription, but not the cost of the charging, which ends up being only just shy of what petrol costs. And the nearest charger is a mile away.
So we just bought an old, cheap petrol car.
The chargers need to be everywhere. And sadly they’re not (yet). That’s going to take decades.
Where needs chargers? you can cross the country on 2 charges, the UK isnt a large country, how many people really drive more than 5 hrs without stopping. 70%+ of people have a garage or driveway.
My whole street doesn’t have driveways. In a whole neighborhood that doesn’t have driveways. That’s about 500 houses with about 400 cars. No shit. Some houses have multiple cars. The infrastructure isn’t readily available yet. It needs to be.
In comparison you can drive to the petrol station, fill up a whole tank, pay, get a bar of chocolate, drive back home in about ten minutes round trip. That’s just one example of how different the infrastructure is.
I totally agree that electric is the way forward, but let’s not pretend the situation is perfect.
That’s an exception, most homes have driveways or garages, there being places with less driveways doesn’t explain the nationwide trend
https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/cars-parked-23-hours-a-day
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/standing_still_off_street_parking_by_LA_A-Z.pdf
Most places that have less than 60% driveways are in London or other major cities with transit networks.
Sorry it’s early on the morning and I haven’t woken up fully but the pdf you linked talks about off street parking. Not driveways or garages. What am I missing?
Are we expecting people to drape electric cables from their front doors across the street to their cars? And that’s assuming they are able to park directly outside their house and not down the road even on the same street.
A third of English homes is hardly the exception.