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UK switching to electric vehicles discussion
- Thread starter MattA7
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R
RailUK Forums
Never used BP or Shell facilities so far. No intention of doing so unless it's an emergency.
telstarbox
Established Member
To be fair the Shell near me has recently installed some decent CCS chargers and they were all in use last Saturday. It's the charger with the four buttons below a non-touch screen if that rings any bells.
It's more the 92p per kWh that I avoid them for.
Our Shell is replacing the chargers too, so I expect they're the same. The four they had before (one per bay) had all sorts of issues going by the red lights or being coned off. I think one of them was taped over and coned off for about a year.
I thought they had to have a certain level of uptime so could never have achieved that before. And during the work (about a month so far) there are no charging facilities.
Waitrose nearby has some but for rapid charging it's cheaper to use Osprey or Tesla (which is available to all).
Yes, but a key benefit of a ZEV over an IC, low-cost overnight charging, for long day-time journeys by ZEV the fuel cost is " pocket change".
marshlinker
Member
Absolutely but people with no home charging wont leave on 100% and wont want to get home with close to 0% charge. Its not the actual charging time either its the faff of getting to a charger. I agree that for a proportion of the population EVs are ideal but to suggest its a better solution than ICE cars universally is deeply flawed.
HSTEd
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I believe something like two thirds of households have access to off street parking - which most likely means they have access to home charging, even if its just from a 13A socket.
Those people will certainly be better off with an EV in the long run.
The remaining third would be operating in an environment where the market for petroleum fuels has shrunk radically, with attendant increasing marginal costs. I think the most likely outcome is the edge effects chip a way at the times ICE cars are "better" until the remainder is extremely small.
It's hard to think of a situation where a person can maintain a fuel storage tank but can't park off the road, and storage of large quantities of petrol (the most common fuel of the personal road vehicle fleets) is extremely problematic in legal and safety terms.
The petroleum statistics indicate 12 million tonnes of motor spirit and 22 million tonnes of white diesel used in the UK in 2025 (see data table 3.4). 34 million tonnes total, with two thirds of motor spirit gone and diesel essentially wiped out (goods vehicles will likely swing soon and hard for electric), the residual market for motor spirit for people without off road parking would be around four million tonnes of motor spirit.
A reduction of nearly 90% in demand for road fuels will do nasty things to the market for petrol, it will probably still be obtainable but probably more expensive and less ubiquitously.
That will cause a death spiral of falling demand and supply until it is a speciality product - infact I expect classic cars would be driven to convert to autogas because of its easier storage.
johncrossley
Established Member
When petrol cars become unviable because getting the fuel becomes too impractical, charging away from home needs to be a similar price to home charging, otherwise people forced into electric cars will be outraged because of the perceived unfairness, even if they are paying less than they currently pay. Not sure how this can be achieved. Maybe by then technology and market forces will dramatically bring down the cost of EV charging, or there could be price capping, similar to how domestic electricity is capped. Or maybe home charging will be taxed and it will be required to isolate EV charging from other domestic electricity.
There will be as much ire amongst those that have opted to pay more for homes with off-road parking and the cost of installation of a charger if they are also subsidising those that didn't (or couldn't) pay for those facilities for their chosen EVs.
It's not a faff. Car drivers you to the exact location.
They are better in every way:
Cheaper to run
Cheaper to maintain
Better driving experience
Quieter
Don't poison people with fumes and other combustion products
Much more efficient energy use (this will be increasingly important now that Trump has upended geopolitics)
Yes, market forces will bring it down. I also don't think these off peak EV tariffs are sustainable long term (they are selling at a loss a lot of the time against wholesale prices). I mean the ones which give you 6p/kwh for a few hours overnight, the wholesale cost of electricity is more than that most of the time. Octopus Intelligent is more sustainable as they move it to the cheaper parts.
The issue right now is that it costs a fortune to have a grid connection - a 1MW grid connection for a 12 bay ultra charger would cost probably £5,000/month in "standing charges", before you sell any energy. If you have poor utilisation of that it really adds up. But if it was busy most hours of the day, you split that charge AND the fixed costs of the site over far more kWhs.
Indeed. We've just commissioned a site (not EV charging) connected to 11kV. We have a 2MW import limit.
Standing charge £6,500 per month.
TNUoS and DNUoS charges probably £100k per year between them.
That's before we've actually paid for the electricity itself.
DUoS = Distribution Use of System, the high voltage network that moves electricity across the country.
TNUoS = Transmission Network Use of System - the local network, the local transformers and cabling.
johncrossley
Established Member
I see your point, however there is still the convenience of being able to charge at home and not to make a special trip to an EV charging site. Maybe in the future EV charging away from home will be so quick and affordable that people won't be that bothered about home charging.
I used to live (renting) in an extremely attractive and desirable small town/large village. It was very historic and quaint with tiny narrow roads and when we were looking to buy in the area we quickly realised that having a drive or even access to private parking would easily add 50k, if not more, to the price of the home compared to those houses with no parking. That was over 10 years ago now.
The ability to charge at home will start to influence houses prices. Houses with no potential ability to charge at home will be less desirable to car drivers and those houses with home charging (or the potential) will become more desirable. That in turn will influence the price that folk pay. I’m not saying this will happen overnight, and it certainly won’t be as extreme as my example above, but it will happen. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing as it will enable folk who don’t have need of car to find slightly cheaper housing.
SargeNpton
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You are assuming that all that off-street parking is adjacent to where the driver lives. A lot of off-street space is in communal areas, and even if you have a designated parking bay in that space it may be too far away from your residence to run a cable across.
I think that at some point in the future, charging facilities will be installed at dedicated community parking bays with a charge added to any service on the property charge. Typically they might be 7KW output, the same as most current domestic installations. Any need to limit peak demand can then be managed by the connection application.
HSTEd
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On the other hand, substantial numbers of people with on street parking will be able to obtain home charging through use of cross-pavement gullies and similar methods for carrying cables across the footway.
I suspect it will probably come out at about a wash.
johncrossley
Established Member
I can't remember if I've said this before, but communal parking should be the *easiest* to electrify. It should be no more difficult than how charging is installed in public or supermarket car parks and the cost is spread across all the users instead of just one household.
We could also minimise the home charging infrastructure needed by having more car pooling. RAC Research suggest cars spend 95% of their time parked, split roughly 75% spent at home and 20% elsewhere. Obviously you need to account for peak flow times like commuting hours when you calculate demand for pooling, but certainly where I live most cars are just sat there all day with the occasional use. If people were willing to pool car more, not only could they save money, but the number of chargers would be reduced.
SargeNpton
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Car pooling only works if enough people living in the same area travel to/from the same work area, and pretty much have the same working hours all the time.
With the increase of suburbs, edge of town commercial/industrial areas, shift working and flexible working; the chances of a near neighbour having the same travel needs is unlikely.
Apologies, by pool cars I meant car-sharing schemes like ZipCar or Enterprise Rent-A-Car, where anyone can sign up and rent a car by the hour.
SargeNpton
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That will be the ZipCar that ceased its UK operations at the end of 2025 because it was losing money.
People want door to door journeys, they don't want to travel to wherever the nearest pool car is parked. Especially true if the journey involves luggage.
ZipCar was one example.
Currently operating in London, unless they've also all halted, are Hiyacar, Turo, Co-Wheels, and Enterprise Car Club.
There's clearly some demand for it still. Obviously not everybody is going to sell their car and use car sharing schemes, but it works for many and could work for more if rolled out further, especially like the apartment blocks example.
SargeNpton
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And what is the optimal number of pool cars that need to be available per 100 households, to ensure that everybody's need can be met without undue delay? Whilst many journeys (especially long ones) are pre-planned, so many are undertaken at short notice. It's the latter that prompts many people to own their own transport.
6,471?
In cities and larger towns, where I'd expect these to be deployed like they are in London, you can have multiple pools to account for one being empty, and in any case you build in a buffer of what your expected demand is. In the same way if I go to rent a car from Enterprise, I've never had them say sorry we're out of cars, but had they been, head for another.
But it's not that difficult to roll out such a scheme because you'd start with a small number of cars and it's not like if you drop 4 car share cars into a communal car park that 20 people are going to sell their car the next day. You'll adjust supply as the demand increases. In the US and mainland Europe, it's on an exponential rise. I don't think the UK is so unique that we couldn't also do it (well we already do, in London, but I mean rest of UK).
Might as well ask a breakdown company:
Breakdown Cover | UK Roadside Assistance & Recovery | RAC
Breakdown cover is a type of insurance that provides roadside assistance if your car breaks down. Choose vehicle, personal or family cover for complete peace of mind™.
RAC said:
Though RAC do have this table comparing themselves with AA and Greenflag and you can see 'Electric vehicle rescue' is ticked for all 3, and 'Mobile EV charge' is ticked for RAC and crossed out for AA and Greenflag. So perhaps the minicab driver was referring to (or confused by) the lack of juicing up at the roadside?
For clarity, from AA:
AA said:
johncrossley
Established Member
There is now an acute shortage of kerb space to park cars. Curiously it can be worse in villages with terraced housing than in some leafier parts of London, such as around Bromley, where there are wide residential roads and plenty of houses with driveways. For years it was assumed that car ownership is not a problem, only car usage, but it is getting to the stage where there is literally nowhere to park the sheer volume of cars. So car clubs increasingly make a lot of sense and it would make sense to prioritise kerb EV charging for these vehicles.