Electric Vehicles - an electric dream? It may come down to the charges

Consumers left to pick up the tab.

June 27 2023

Electric vehicles. They’ve been gathering in momentum and popularity since the 1st full EV rolled off the production line nearly 15 years ago, both in terms of their advances in development but also with consumers’ increasing appetite to consider making the switch, each passing year the warnings of increased global warming through tailpipe emissions becoming louder and bleaker. It is, broadly, within a human’s nature to “do the right thing” – in this case reduce pollution on Mother Earth so that we and our kids don’t suffer the consequences in later life due to our neglect and our ever-expanding carbon footprint. But what if doing the right thing meant paying more for an electric car than for a petrol or diesel car? In some cases, much more. Are you, during this cost-of-living crisis, prepared to do it?

Charging infrastructure is improving. But it needs to be accelerated.

Electric cars have been around for quite some time now. Nissan unveiled its Leaf model back in 2010 and it quickly became a cult classic, finding a niche spot in the market for those wanting an efficient, clean, easy to drive, easy to park run-a-round. It was a success, but it didn’t spark an immediate glut of copycat models eager to replicate the impressive sales figures. But slowly, and surely, others eventually followed with manufacturers researching, developing, and perfecting their models and ironing out the common design issues. Namely safety (those are big, hot batteries we’re driving around with), range (“what do you mean I can only travel from Edinburgh to Glasgow on 1 charge?”), Return on Investment (those big batteries are expensive to make) and marketing challenges (how do we sell these cars to an established, faithful Internal Combustion Engine driving market?).

The recent continued rise of electricity costs only adds to these challenges and the sustained high price of electric cars – high due to the research, development, and production costs - are deepening challenges for manufacturers, over and above the other issues mentioned above. But there are more challenges ahead.

How much?

Let’s start with the initial outlay. There’s no getting away from it, electric cars are expensive to buy. Some examples are up to 37% more expensive than their petrol and diesel Internal Combustion Engine (or ICE for short) equivalents. This is due to the cost of the materials, including the batteries, and the construction process as well as the huge Research & Development investment for this still relatively new technology. Take the Vauxhall Mokka, for example, a car at the budget end of the scale. The petrol GS Line costs £24,640, while its electric equivalent costs £31,945, a 22% price difference. The more prestigious and expensive the make and model, the more the price difference will be. The most popular electric car in the UK, the Tesla Model Y, has a starting price of around £50,000. A substantial cost when you base it on the average British person’s salary of just over £31,000. Of course, you could choose to lease the car and opt for a no deposit option, but the significant monthly price difference remains. Cost is a factor and always will be for consumers, but it should be noted that 20% of ICE cars sold in 2022 cost more than £40,000 to buy.

The 2nd is range – or range anxiety, more to the point. Ranges are improving all the time however, unless you opt for the pricey top-end long-range models, you are still looking at around 250-300 miles on average, almost half the range that you could get from a diesel. In my opinion, however, this is an ever-weakening argument. Ask yourself, how often do you need to travel on a 250-mile round trip? The average daily work commute is 29.5 minutes each way, or 59 minutes in total. If you are traveling at 30mph then this means you will be doing an average of a 30-mile round trip. Adding in the kids’ school run and the evenings football training taxi service and you’re most likely only still talking 50 miles in 1 day. Fair enough, you may have a staycation cross country trip or 2 in the school holidays but for this, will you exceed 250 miles more than 2 or 3 times a year? And with sufficient forward planning, is this an insurmountable inconvenience? For some, now, depending on circumstances and appetite for inconvenience, it may still be.

What's the charge?

Which brings us to charging points. There aren’t enough charging locations. And when you find one, there aren’t enough chargers. And when you find a charger, it isn’t always in service. And when it is, you may have to wait. Because there aren’t enough. Are you getting anxious yet?

Apart from the cost of the vehicle, this is the biggest mental stumbling block for drivers, the thought of embarking on a long 250-mile-plus drive and having to stop off for a period while you re-charge with the worry that the location you find can’t charge your car. With driving fatigue setting in, the kids crying in the back and your partner becoming increasingly frustrated that the car that you paid £10,000 more for compared to the diesel version (meaning you had to have a staycation in the Lake District instead of La Manga) is now costing you all time. And stress.

The charging infrastructure is improving, however. At the end of May 2023, there were 43,626 electric vehicle charging points with 70000 connectors across the UK, across 25,413 charging locations. This represents a 38% increase in the total number of charging devices since May 2022. Last month, 1,628 new EV charging devices were added to the Zapmap database which means that almost 20,000 devices are being added each year. The United Kingdom is home to 8,365 operational petrol stations. With an average of 6 pumps at each station this equates to just over 50,000 pumps. But they offer quick turnarounds with vehicles spending an average of 5 minutes or less at each pump. With the average car taking 60 minutes to recharge to 80%, we will need many more to satisfy demand and The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) advises 2.3 million charging points will be needed in the UK by 2030 to keep up with predicted demand.

The cost of charging is also a factor. Public charging can be up to 9x more expensive than home charging tariffs with some tariffs reported to operate at 56p per KW Hour. If you are on an off-peak tariff where it is cheapest to charge your car overnight between midnight and 5am, tariffs can be as cheap as 6p per KW Hour. Good if you can get it but it remains undeniably frustrating that renewable energy is being produced very cheaply but consumers are not seeing this due to various factors out with our control. Unfortunately, the Government has now also removed the Plug-in Car Grant incentive, a policy which paid out a one-off payment for turning electric.

More stations are popping up but costs can vary.

Hold on a second

All this sounds as if the switch to electric is the that last thing that you’d want to do right now. But that is not the case, and it is not the picture that I’m trying to paint here. Far from it. I am a hybrid car driver and have been for 2 years. My Volvo Plug-in Hybrid manages 23 miles on a single charge and although that sounds pitiful compared to new full EV’s, that distance is more than enough for 90% of my daily commutes. Like a lot of people now, I am a hybrid worker and I have an office in town which is within walking distance, so no daytime drive commute is currently required. Monday – Friday, the kids football training journeys are easily handled as well as any trips to the shops or other required jaunts. Saturday and Sunday trips to matches, country parks with the dog, breakfast or lunch treats or family visits are also accommodated 9 times out of 10 with only the occasional journey out with a single 23-mile round trip. Often, I come back at midday, plug it in for a couple of hours while having lunch, and this is enough for the next short drive in the afternoon. Otherwise, it gets plugged in every night for a fully loaded battery each morning. Rare, longer trips are taken care of by the Petrol engine. So not quit as clean as I’d like to be, but I believe this is the 1st step before moving to a full EV next year. Now if I can survive on a 12kWh battery, surely an 80kWh battery on a full EV is enough for most people?

In Pure Electric Mode it’s also quiet and relaxing to drive, I only need to visit the petrol station every 3 months or so (granted, I don’t do high mileage), my off-peak tariff means its economical to charge and the whole plug-in routine is strangely addictive and has become 2nd nature, like plugging in your phone each night when going to bed. I’m also content in the knowledge that I’m not polluting my local neighbourhood as much and I’m doing ”my bit” in the hope that others will follow.

In addition, the technology in EV’s is generally cooler allowing you to connect with the car in more ways to set up charging options and view efficiency stats. Servicing & Maintenance should be cheaper as there are fewer moving parts to maintain and aside from the initial outlay, it can be economically beneficial if you plan to use the vehicle for business purposes due to the favourable benefit in kind rates.

Trust me, there are numerous advantages to electric driving if you explore them.

So, with Electric cars increasingly looking like the future technology of motoring, should we be making more of an effort to make the switch, despite the increased initial investment and ongoing charging considerations? There’s no doubt, It is a chicken and egg scenario. Unless manufacturers sell more cars, they will struggle to lower production costs meaning purchase costs will remain high. Consumers buying more of them should aid cost reductions. But until range anxiety is addressed through charging infrastructure improvements drivers will remain hesitant to make the jump. And we’re back to square one. But why should the risks and sacrifices rest with the great British public? Shouldn’t the government be doing more, such as re-introducing an incentive, such as the Plug-in Car Grant or subsidising the purchase price? Or pouring more money and urgency in to increasing those chargers? Almost definitely, however with the challenges that the Government currently face, car drivers and their cost of ownership worries won’t be top of their list of things to address.

Decision Time

267,000 EV’s were produced in 2022 so the tide is turning slowly but with ICE car production set to stop in 2030 further incentives and reasons for drivers to change are required, whether it be from manufacturers or from the Chancellor. Otherwise, older, more pollutant cars will remain on the roads with drivers’ content to run their existing cars for longer. Time is ticking for drivers to make a choice but, more importantly, the time to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce those emissions is running out even faster. How quickly we do that depends on where we stand in the age-old money versus morals stand-off. And for all of us, it has rarely been a more difficult choice to make than it is right now.

Tell me what you think