It is now four years since I bought my first electric car. At the time, I wished I hadn’t. The car, though solid, swift and fun, had the slight problem that it could explode at any time.
In 2019, a tranche of electric cars were sold to ingenues such as myself, only to be recalled so that their batteries could be replaced with ones which might not spontaneously combust. Once replaced, it was fine, but my home needed an upgrade, too – every fuse in the house blew when I first tried to recharge the car and boil a kettle at the same time.
Being an EV pioneer (I was the first person in my French village to have one) came with hardship. Road trips were experiences of anxiety, despair and finally anger, as autoroute charging in France was primitive. You never knew when you would arrive at a charging station, or if you ever would.
This has now completely changed in France, which has in four years completely electrified its motorways, installing banks of between 10 and 20 high speed chargers at almost every service area. Charging stations are so common and fast that ‘range anxiety’ is no longer a thing, and going electric costs roughly half the price per mile or kilometre as using petrol.
But as France has electrified, Britain has backfired. Where France has 100,000 public chargers, Britain has only half that. The rip-off in the UK is blatant, and the experience is miserable. On motorways in Britain it can cost more to recharge an EV than to fill a tank with petrol. There are reports (gleefully retailed in French media) of angry disputes at British recharging stations, as motorists dispute who got there first and fight for available stalls. It’s a dystopia.
Ross Clark had a downbeat story in Coffee House this week noting the confusion in government policy on compulsory electric car introduction, which Rishi Sunak has now pushed back to 2030. The delay was billed as a new, common sense Sunakian approach to the energy transition, but was in fact incoherent policy gobbledygook. Sunak left in place the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate which requires, from next year, that 22 per cent of new cars sold are electric. If manufacturers fail to persuade consumers to buy electric cars and miss this target, they will have to pay fines of up to £15,000 per vehicle. This is an interesting reflection of the government’s desire that manufacturers and consumers do as they are told, rather than what they want to do, or what is sensible given the lack of charging infrastructure.
When it is as easy to fill an electric car as a petrol one, even the petrol-headed grumps will discover the pleasure of electric motoring
There are British drivers who have twigged that, as a driving experience, electric cars are far superior to those burning petroleum. Those who are able to charge at home, have the money and who rarely make long trips are eager adopters. Surprisingly, there are in absolute terms already more electric cars in Britain than in Norway, a much smaller market but where 80 per cent of new cars are electric. In the UK, electric car sales were up 20 per cent last month compared with October 2022. Yet only 15.6 per cent of new cars were electric. Eighty-five per cent of British car buyers are not yet convinced.
The unpopularity of electric cars in Britain is partly explained by the loud sentiments of the aging petrol heads. ‘They blow up!’ cry these sceptics. Yet they don’t. Fires occur 61 times more frequently with internal combustion engine (ICE) cars than in EVs – that’s 25.1 fires for every 100,000 EVs, compared to 1,529 fires per 100,000 ICE cars. EV batteries are meanwhile getting cleaner and more recyclable, and the price difference with conventional cars is steadily narrowing.
When it is as easy to fill an electric car as a petrol one, even the petrol-headed grumps will discover the pleasure of electric motoring. Yet at present, there are only four high speed charging posts at Milton Keynes on the M1, six at Beaconsfield on the M40 and six at Stafford on the M6. Tesla – which is excluded from Motorway service areas – has 13 stalls at Newport Pagnell and 18 at Trentham.
The UK’s failure to deliver a high-speed charger network has a complicated history in which the Department for Transport has played an ineffective, often obtuse and obscure role. Dale Vince, OBE – the eco-energy activist-millionaire, major Labour Party donor and a one-time benefactor of Just Stop Oil – announced his Electric Highway in 2011. But the build was slow and the equipment unreliable, and in 2021, the DfT ordered his motorway concessions terminated. Vince quickly sold his busted Electric Highway to Gridserve, another self-declared sustainable energy company. Gridserve has replaced the essentially useless Ecotricity charging network, and other competitors have entered the market, but progress is chaotic. Even a merely adequate electric highway in Britain seems almost as far away as ever. It’s no wonder that motorists in Britain are largely and sensibly refusing to buy cars that they can’t charge.
Here in France, everyone seems to be raving about EVs, and so numerous are EV drivers that we’ve given up waving to each other. I recently bought a second EV (a Tesla) and can hum across France without souci, using Tesla chargers and all the others.
There are now at least 30 electric cars in my village and a dozen chargers at the local supermarket. Meanwhile in Blighty, the fuse seems to have blown. This has nothing to do with Brexit – it’s simply naive insouciance and incompetence. If there were to be an excellent charging network across shopping centres, town centres, railway stations and residential neighbourhoods, as in France, there would be no need for mandates and deadlines. Electric cars are great. But Britain seems to make it hard to want to buy one.
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