Okay… I’ll come straight out and say I think the current rush head long into battery driven cars is ill considered, with no thoughts about any form of ‘saturation coverage’ chargers that a country where everyone drives a battery powered car will require.
That aside…
We’re looking for a new house. Since we’re after a ‘period’ property you’re very lucky to get a driveway let alone a garage! Yesterday we went to look at a very nice 3-bed cottage in a small village. There was zero parking at the house and, since it was perched on top of a 12ft bank with a double yellow lined road there is no way to park anywhere close to the house. There IS a garage but it’s in a block of three which is 50 yards away down a dirt track. The garage has no water and no elec. with zero ways to get electricity to it! We loved the house but have decided to not go for it purely because of the parking/garage issue. Foremost in my mind is, when we’re finally forced to go the EV route, how will I manage to charge the vehicle?
To my mind, unless you have somewhere to charge your future EV, then any house has to be rejected. I suppose it might also mean a flood of lovely period cottages will be hitting the market place in a decades time.
I was waiting in my petrol car whilst wife was at Argos collecting an item by click and collect. It is in a small shopping centre with two free charging points. Well one was being used, and then 2 cars descended on the free charging point. A heated arguement broke out over whose need was greatest ( full BEV vs plug in hybrid). The adjacent shop had to call the shopping centre security staff to break it up😬
That rules out anyone buying (or renting) approx 50% of Britain’s housing stock! (~ 50% of homes in Britain are terraced houses or flats, and whilst a proportion will have garage availability, possibly with at least potential electricity availability, to balance those a proportion of semis and even some detached don’t have off road parking or garages)
What is needed is on-street charging provision anywhere that a car can legally be parked close to homes, to near saturation in towns and cities - and I guess that will take decades.
What we really need is free public transport - ideally electric buses - then half of us probably wouldn’t need a car anyway. The whole system needs to change - it’s not a case of assuming that every FF car will be replaced by electric. Hydrogen may feature too, and of course doesn’t need a charging point.
I think before you make it free, it needs to be convenient enough. If all you have available is two buses a day, the cost won’t matter, you’ll likely want a car anyway. If there’s a bus stop around the corner with one every half hour, it’s a different consideration already.
tbh it’s a bit like plastics. I was reading on the BBC about these rivers in Indonesia that are belching vast amounts of plastic into the ocean; I mean these rivers are choked solid with the stuff. I was wondering what difference me, and everyone else in the UK, are making to this problem by using less carrier bags at the checkout.
… and until Australia - the worlds number one coal exporter - stops selling coal …
Then add Indonesia, USA & Russia … the list goes on
and solwisesteve, we always take our own bags, the only plastic we bring home is prepacked items.
I guess that will reduce over time as the supply chain moves to biodegradable, maybe more pressure from supermarkets & governments would help ITR.
We in the west/first world led with pollution. We should lead with the cessation and clean-up. The east, second & third worls are simply behind us in the ‘progress’ that got us where we are today.
In my view it is morally wrong having led the pollution to not then get a grip, stop ourselves, and lead the change. And indefensible to expect other countries “behind” us to not pollute where we did, at least not without help from us for them to achieve progress in a better way than we did. That is what I believe it is right for us to do as societies and as individuals in those societies. The argument that each individual contribution is infinitesimal so doesn’t matter simply perpetuates the problem - the only way to improve is to stop being selfish …and for every one of us that means saying “I must do my bit regardless of whether my fellow citizens do”. It is hard. It is slow. But it is possible.
We have seriously considered electric cars over the last 4 years.
We could adapt our parking area for a charging point, but its the bigger journeys that are the trouble.
I love the new Honda e but the range is not the best and drops considerably in cold weather.
A few months ago we dropped down to one car, however if we did get a second one again, that would be electric, but only used locally.
The other major consideration is cost, newer cars with better range are in the late £20k region with most well over £30k…cars are not a cheap thing anymore…if ever they were. There is an endless push to move cars up market as that increases profitability.
tbh… going back to the original post, what about the idea of rejecting houses where there is zero options for home charging?
We’re looking at a retirement home and these houses are in remote hamlets or villages. I’m not convinced that a supermarket 20 miles away that has a charger in the car park is the answer. If you go out to your car one day and it hasn’t got enough charge then I suppose you would have to get a diesel generator out and run it for a few hours!
Of course it depends on where your garage is, but my friend had a wooden garage 20yrds from house, which admittedly faces the road, and the electrical company put in mains supply at a cost. Always worth asking if you really like the property you are looking at
In general, in my country, the remote hamlets / villages have sufficient space. We are looking to add a solar carport to our garden once we get an electric car.
A solar carport will never provide sufficient energy to charge our future car given the mileage we have, but if one is retired and does a bit of local driving, it might actually be sufficient.
I agree, firstly I believe we have to ask ourselves why we need to own a private car at all? I think that most drivers would argue that there is too much traffic on the road anyway, how ironic!
Assuming for one moment that we are never going back to living and working and shopping in our own ‘village’, an efficient public transport system seems to me to be the best answer, with short term ‘lease a car’ available for when it is absolutely needed.
For me it was interesting to see how my colleagues based in London chose where to live, proximity to tube and major bus routes had a big influence on where they settled with all bar a few turning down the offer of a Firm’s car in favour of the cash. So in areas which have good travel infrastructure and where the use of a private vehicle is all but useless, public transport not only works, its cost effective and quicker. (I almost forgot the downside, of never having so many colds as when I regularly travelled on buses)
Ultimately, if we agree that we care about not polluting the world, the biggest change will come from changing our travelling behaviour. Mass adoption of private electric cars massively reduces pollution at point of use, but does little to address the other impacts from car ownership.
A similar issue concerns the building of power stations (whatever the technology), all of them are, large, expensive and long term infrastructure projects, of course, we cannot just stop building electricity sources, but using less energy in everything we do would give more immediate relief to the current infrastructure and reduce pollution.
We have to decide whether we are prepared to change our behaviour?
If you are looking for a period property in the country you should be OK as many will have decent outside space to locate a garage if there isn’t already one there. I live in a cottage set on its own and had a double garage built for my motorbikes before we moved in - priorities!
When we were looking for a property and giving estate agents our list of characteristics we needed, they would usually say “there aren’t many around with all that” - to which our response was “that’s ok - we only need one!”
The last two houses, including the one yesterday, AND the one we currently live in, have zero options for getting somewhere close to park your car. For example our current house is a mid-terrace with a tiny path out the front and then it’s the road. You can’t run a charging cable across the foot path. The one yesterday was 12ft up a steep bank. Zero chance of getting the car close to the house. It might be that you could speak to the leccy board and get them to run a mains lead BUT would you buy under the assumption that this would be possible at a sensible price? btw the house yesterday has had two days of solid viewings and, after today, it’s going to be ‘best offers’ with a decision by Monday. It looks like a lot of buyers don’t think about these things.
Yes, if you want to spend even more money on your house, then you can get a property where it’s possible to add a drive on the side or a car port. As we’re finding though, this means add 100K to the price of the house… has anyone else noticed that the house you REALLY want is always 100K over your budget?
As street lighting now uses less energy lamps, there was a talk a while back about adding attachments to lamp posts to allow on street parking. Dont know how this idea has progressed. They wont be fast chargers though.
And remember we in the so-called developed nations exported our manufacturing over there, so shifted the pollution to the rapidly industrialising nations, giving companies bigger profit margins and us cheaper goods.
Yes the frequency of public buses has always been a stumbling block for me, and my major complaint. If you live well into the city (Toronto), then a bus comes by every 10 or 15 minutes, and many times you’ve only wait 5 minutes or so. But out here in the burbs, you can easily wait half an hour for the next bus, something I would never even consider doing.
I believe it would be a good idea to jack up the petrol prices and funnel the extra funds into public transit. When the buses are more frequent like they are in the city, many more people would consider using them and they would begin to fill up over time, I think.
They could easily just run a test on one or two routes to see if this strategy increases the use of public transit.
