My experience is less positive. I’m at an age where most of my car journeys are regular ones, most notably the one between our London home and our hobbit countryside cottage. This is a journey of under 100 miles, so there and back is comfortably within the range of my Tesla. And in any case, I can recharge under cover at both ends, while I drink, watch telly, and sleep. I hardly ever use public charging points.
But a few weeks ago we had to go to an event on the far east coast of England, and one charge of the Model S wouldn’t be enough. There wasn’t a convenient Tesla Supercharger on the route (they’re excellent, but not plentiful enough) so I would have to find a regular charging point.
The ZapMap website is great for working out this sort of thing. There were a few charging points in the town, but not near our hotel. And they might be occupied. I might have to move the car onto a charge point at some time in the evening, but then move it off later to make room for someone else, and that could interrupt bar work. In the end I thought “Sod it” and we went into my Porsche 911.
The charging conundrum
This, I think, is where the whole BEV argument crumbles. Our anxiety is not really about range. The ranges of electric cars are pretty feeble, in truth, and my 2.2-ton Tesla is only good for 300 miles in the real world.
Our real worry is about the ball-aching inconvenience of public charging, because it takes too long and requires too much planning. And in the near future, a lot of people living in towns and cities in flats and pre-car terraced houses are going to need to charge publicly.
Those 8,378 surviving petrol stations are remarkable places. One I recently visited had 20 pumps, and the throughput was very rapid. I’m sad enough to time this sort of thing, and I’ve achieved FUPUPO* in as little as three minutes. Let’s call it six minutes with a wee and a flat white. That station could still handle 200 cars an hour.
Fuel stations are also very apparent, with giant and comforting illuminated beacons visible for miles around, like the reverse of a lighthouse, drawing us in instead of warning us away.
Charging points are much harder to find; you will need online assistance. Do you need an app or can you just swipe your bank card? They can be occupied for anything from 20 minutes to several hours. On-line help (ZapMap is not bad at this) can tell you the status of at least some of them, but not hours in advance. The worst that happens at a fuel station is a bit of a queue.
I know this sounds a bit reactionary, but it’s not meant to. I’m all for this future, but I think we mustn’t kid ourselves about the viability of it all.
Looking forwards
To this end, I’ve done a bit of a back-of-napkin mathematical modelling. Over the last five years cars have been replaced at an average rate of over two million a year. There are almost 33 million cars on our roads. By 2040, a decade after the ICE ban comes into effect, more than half the fleet will probably have been replaced by BEVs.
By that time, if charging points proliferate at the current rate (I accept it may be more) there will be around 300,000 of them. But I think we will need millions for the car to remain a workable proposition. As of November 2022 there were 620,000 BEVs in the UK, and that isn’t enough to expose the approaching problems.
The real issue here, as it has been since the first electric cars were built well over a century ago, is storing electricity in any meaningful way. An ideal BEV would have a modest range, meaning a smaller, cheaper battery and less weight, but would recharge in a few minutes. But that’s not possible, so we fudge the issue with huge batteries and range. The truth is that, fantastic though the advances of the last few decades have been, battery technology still isn’t good enough for cars.
I hope my doubts prove unfounded, as I’m approaching that age where I will decide on having just one car that will “see me out”, and I want it to be electric. Bring on supercapacitors or whatever it is that will solve this conundrum, otherwise the BEV love affair will end and we will enter that well-documented difficult period.
*Fill up, pay up, piss off
James May’s five most significant battery-powered cars
Battery-powered vehicles were popular in the early 20th century but the internal combustion engine soon assumed superiority. Then these came along
