If I'm honest I have no idea if buying an EV really helps the planet.
It does and has been clearly shown to be so. In the earlier days of EVs, opponents in the motor industry and elsewhere made lots of false claims against them with spurious statistics, all completely disproved since.
However, personally I'm not concerned if it does or not. The first thing that concerns me is that it definitely helps locally, in a city with some of the worst pollution in all of Europe and where even the death of a young child has now been attributed to traffic caused exhaust pollution. The second thing is that e-cars are so vastly superior to ic cars in so many ways not understood by those who have no real experience of them.
I'm not in a position to make the change at the moment unless someone can convince me an infrastructure which even comes close to the support of ICE cars exists across the whole of the UK.
That's an easy one. First regarding charging. There are some 6000 IC fuel stations in the uk now, well down from what it was at one time. There are now over 36,000 public charging points with over 61,000 connectors in over 21,900 locations, huge coverage.
Admittedfly not evenly distributed, but that isn't as important as the doubters imagine. What matters is that almost all who have bought an e-car have a home charging point, that being well over half a million points additional to the public ones. That means that unlike ic cars, they can always leave home with a full"tank". Since most of them sold today have a circa 200 mile range and the average UK driver covers just 7300 miles a year, 20 miles a day, they don't need lots of public points in their area. And on the rare occasion when they do need one on a long trip, theres bound to be many ultra fast ones well within 200 miles of them!!
Second regarding maintenance. The e-side needs no attention, being like the old milk floats unfailingly reliable year after year. The rest is just an ordinary car, except not wearing the brakes out since the motor does most of the braking by regeneration. So any competent existing dealer is all one needs.
My view comes back to other posts regarding government control of our freedom. I think the ICE supporters will make the governments master plan very difficult to achieve.
No chance for them to succeed. As we get ever closer to the 2050 deadline to achieve carbon neutral the government will act ever more decisively against the existing ic cars with compulsory scrappage schemes and other restraints.
The other problem will be that as IC cars wear out or crash so disappearing over a 20 year average life period, their fuel stations will too. The sheer inconvenience of that will make ic car use increasingly annoying, back to the earliest days of the ic car when their drivers went to the chemist to buy a can of petrol!!
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