I'd love one of these, but I think it would need a bit of dedication at this stage. Forgive the essay, but this is a topic of great interest to me
I have been driving an electric car for three and a half years now, and for most of that time it was my
only car. It's an i3, and it does have a range-extender engine, so I can add a bit of range with petrol if I want, but I probably turn that on less than once a month, and I've certainly averaged well over 1000 mpg since I've had it. I've done many longish trips on the battery alone (including to the Lake District and back from Cambridge twice), and mine's an early car with a battery range of about 70 miles, so it takes quite a few recharging stops! Long-distance travel is quite a bit slower, therefore, but I arrive feeling much less tired, more relaxed, and I'm sure it's much safer. Today’s cars like the Kia eNiro would make such journeys trivial. I sincerely hope those people saying they start their holiday with a 300-mile drive don’t do it without a rest! And, as a friend of mine puts it, what’s your bladder range anyway?
Just to deal with a couple of the points above, since I’ve been investigating this for quite a long time:
Yes, making electric cars does also have an environmental impact, but in general it’s much less than for fossil-burners. Batteries contain some toxic materials, but they are also much too valuable to be thrown away at the end of their lives. They become incorporated in home-based power packs, in grid-level storage, in electric boats, etc. Their lives are also much greater than most originally assumed; there are electric taxis which have done hundreds of thousands of miles. Don’t make any assumptions about battery life based on your electric toothbrush; it’s a very different world.
One concern about battery production at present should perhaps be that some of the metals — cobalt was mentioned above — are extracted in countries that have a dubious reputation. But that’s a temporary issue: there are many ways of making batteries, and this just happens to be the most efficient at present. We’ve already moved through several different technologies in last few decades and now, of course, there’s a huge incentive for anyone who comes up with new and better batteries. Many of the current prototypes do not depend on cobalt, for example.
Secondly, yes, of course you still need to generate the electricity and some of that process can be polluting. Even if the power is generated from fossil fuels, though, it’s nearly twice as efficient to do it in a power station than in a car. But the key thing is that by using electricity you then have the
option to produce some of it using renewables; in the case of the UK, we produce rather a substantial proportion that way now. I buy all my electricity from a company that gets it purely from renewables, and mostly from hydroelectric power, so all my car driving for the last couple of years has been driven by Welsh rainwater. This appears to be plentiful!
So I’m an enthusiast, and I think it’s unlikely I will buy a car with a combustion engine again.
With my van, though, there is a thrill about filling up the tank and seeing a range of 650 miles
(Not quite so much of a thrill about paying for the tankful afterwards!) And since my last long trip was to the Dordogne and back just before Christmas, I did have my trusty Webasto going almost all night every night, and I was wondering what I would do if the van were electric. In fact, of course, everywhere I stopped I had a hook-up, and I now have a little electric heater, so that wouldn’t be much of an issue unless I were staying a bit further off the grid.
Probably the perfect combination would be what I have in my car: a van that is mostly electric but with a few gallons of diesel for when you need them to extend the range or extend the heat.
And of course, if I were doing a long journey and
did need to stop every few hours to charge, the van would be a great place to do it. You could make a coffee, have lunch, or even a short snooze while you topped up. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase power-nap!
