I had a conversation with a friend in the pub the other week in which he told me at great length why he couldn’t have an electric car. (I hadn’t asked – people just tell me these things.) The charging infrastructure wasn’t there. They don’t go far enough. They’re too expensive. Much as he would like to support electric vehicles, he planned to drive his diesel until ‘they’ came to take it away.
I nodded politely and challenged gently, but these are familiar talking points and they only have a flimsy relationship with reality. Nobody will be coming for his diesel, and EVs are cheaper and better than he has been led to believe. These are commonly held beliefs, actively propagated by newspapers whose billionaire owners have investments in fossil fuels.
A recent survey for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit revealed the level of common ignorance around electric vehicles. Petrol and diesel drivers were asked to estimate how often EV owners need to use a public charge point. 4 out of 5 guessed it was once a week or so. In reality only 1 in 5 EV drivers uses a public charge point once a week, and 73% use them once a month or less.
Where are they charging then? At home, of course. Petrol and diesel drivers guessed that only 4% of EV drivers can charge at home – a vast underestimation of the real figure, which is 92%.
Half of petrol and diesel drivers think that EVs run out of charge at least once a year, whereas over 80% of those of those who actually drive them report that they’ve never had that problem. Over half of internal combustion drivers thought that electric cars are more expensive to run, which really isn’t the case unless you do all your charging on the motorway.
As someone who doesn’t enjoy driving, I can also tell you that EVs are easier to drive, as there’s no clutch or gears to manage. With fewer moving parts and no engine, gearbox or transmission, maintenance costs are often lower too. EV drivers spend an average of 23% less on maintenance. Again, this is something that rarely gets mentioned in the ‘EVs are too expensive’ narrative.
Electric cars aren’t going to work for everyone, that’s obvious. We all need to make our own choice for own context. But they would be a good choice for far more people if they didn’t have a tide of misinformation constantly telling them they’re too expensive and don’t work. We know active and public transport are the priorities for getting around sustainably, but for those that need a car in a landscape ordered around their use, EVs are going to be a really useful technology for a while.
If you’ve been thinking about one and aren’t sure, it’s worth mentioning that now is quite a good time to consider an EV. The lease is up on our EV and we’ve just picked up a replacement secondhand. We’ve been surprised at how many options there were. A lot of EV drivers who took delivery of new EVS in 2020 and 2021 are trading up right now, and there are a lot of very good secondhand EVs available in the UK. In the secondhand market, it looks like EVs have reached the long expected price parity with fossil fuels. You don’t pay any more – and often less – for electric than for petrol or diesel equivalents.
The Earthbound Report 