alt Hacker NewsEVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)
But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.
Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.
(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)
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> EVs are great if you're wealthy
Can you explain this more? I have an EV scheme through work where you can get EVs for £200/month on lease including insurance, maintenance and tyres.
Outside of these schemes you can buy a Dacia spring brand new for £10k, or a whole host of decent options second hand. £20k will get you a second hand Tesla with decent range and fast charging.
This doesn’t scream “wealthy” when an ICE Ford Focus is £30k new.
Estimations vary but it seems like at least 50% -70% of homes could support at-home charging.
Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE
EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.
> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.
You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.
The only people I know with full EVs don't have driveways. It's not really an issue - you can charge when you go grocery shopping
Yup it's only the quite well-off round here with EVs. Who would want to pay 60-90p/kWh at public chargers!?
Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.
Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.
None of this is an unsolvable problem.
For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.
The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.
[0]: https://gul-e.co.uk/, https://www.kerbocharge.com/