The average driver travels 20 miles a day, and modern EVs can travel 200 miles on a single charge (some even more). This caters for the vast majority of journeys. For very long journeys, resources like Zap Map ensure recharging need not be an issue.

Currently, the upfront cost of an EV is higher than a petrol or diesel car. However, when you include lower running costs, reduced tax and other perks, an EV becomes a cheaper option after a few years. There is much less to go wrong on an EV, so you will experience lower maintenance costs

Even with higher electricity prices, EVs are so much more efficient that they are cheaper to ‘fill up’. The cost of EV home charging can be a third of what was spent previously on fuel. Because the car doesn’t care where the electricity comes from, consumers can seek out the lowest tariffs. Petrol costs will only get worse over time due to market uncertainty. You can compare your current car and an EV using a calculator:

https://www.zap-map.com/tools/journey-cost-calculator/

Many people can charge at home, using off-peak rates for electricity. Most petrol stations will have EV charging points soon, so a 10-minute top-up will be easy to find. For a fuller recharge, fast charging points are increasingly available and growing in number across the UK (and Europe). ZapMap is a great tool to find the nearest EV charging stations to your location.

Studies have shown that modern EV batteries will retain their charging capacity much longer than the fabric of the car will last. Data on a Tesla S showed it had 90% of its capacity after 200,000 miles, and the lifetime for batteries has been continuing to grow.

A UK Government study showed that EV emits 1/3rd of that of a petrol/ diesel car over its full lifetime. While batteries are energy-intensive to produce, this ‘carbon debt’ can be paid back after as little as 7,000 miles. This distance will get less and less as the UK grid gets greener and greener.

An added bonus is that EVs don’t pump out noxious Nitrogen Dioxide and particulates from the exhaust that are so damaging to our health, especially children.

It is a ‘Fallacy of Perfection’ to demand zero impact from EVs while ignoring the much greater harms from petrol/ diesel car production and use.

In cities where people can live, work and play using excellent public transport, it should be the case that public transport meets everyone’s needs, but in a rural setting, this is not the case.

Bus services are often infrequent or unreliable. Homes and places of work are not well connected by bus routes. Cycle routes are often unavailable for those that want to get out of the car. We should not replace 30 million petrol/diesel cars in the UK by 30 million EVs, but zero cars is also not the answer. While car-sharing services can help in many cases, they won’t work for a family with two working parents and children in a rural setting. Transitioning to a greener future is not about black and white choices.

Car manufacturers like VW are no longer pursuing hydrogen fuel cell cars because they are much less efficient than EVs. Hydrogen infrastructure will also be hard to roll out, whereas we already have an electricity grid. Hydrogen will also become very expensive because it will be needed for ‘hard to decarbonise’ sectors like fertiliser production, steel and aviation, and for inter-seasonal energy storage.

This has been an issue, but we have to also acknowledge the huge environmental burden of fossil fuel extraction directly on communities and the global heating that results from its use which impacts us all.

Cobalt child labour is a quickly disappearing problem due to pressure on companies to clean up their supply chains. And while electric vehicles are indeed far from clean, they are much cleaner than the gas guzzlers that currently are the alternative for many people (A Fossil Fuel Economy Requires 535x More Mining Than a Clean Energy Economy). We shouldn’t expect perfection for EVs while ignoring the harms from petrol/ diesel car production and use.

But the best news is that new battery designs don’t require Cobalt. Innovations are already happening in batteries [9] to reduce the use of problematic materials, and also, to make them lighter and more compact.

One article in The Times in 2017 claimed we’d need 20 new nuclear power stations to deal with a switch to EVs! The flaw in this argument rests on the assumption that everyone is charging at the same time, but in reality, the load can be spread, lowering the peak demand.

Nationally, 73% of cars are garaged or parked on private property overnight, according to RAC Foundation. Utilities are offering householders perks for signing up to flexible charging.

So the peak demand will be considerably less as a result, and in fact, EVs with their batteries will then become part of the solution, rather than the problem. EVs will actually help create the flexible and adaptive grid we need in the move to renewables and electrification of transport, heating and much more.