Slightly startling news about electric vehicles:
Cost of driving electric car up to twice the price of petrol or diesel
Eh? but, but…..
Motorists without space at home to charge their cars are facing prohibitively high costs at public facilities
Ahhh.
So, if you’ve a nice suburban des res and you can park the car in the drive and plug it into the domestic ‘leccie system then EVs are quite cheap to run. They’re still appalling expensive to buy and also the depreciation on them is somethin’ ‘orrid. But the cheap Chinese cars won’t be allowed in because we’ve got to keep European capitalists nice and rich, right?
That is, the overall cost - absent tax breaks - of running an EV is still a bit above that of an ICE. If you can use the domestic ‘leccie that is.
But what if you can’t use the domestic?
The UK has more than 12,500 rapid or ultra-rapid charging stations — a 40 per cent increase on a year ago — but data shared with The Times shows they cost an average of 80p per kilowatt hour (kWh), making the switch to electric cars prohibitively expensive for motorists who do not have access to cheaper at-home charging.
Goodbye to that massive liberation of autonomous transport then. Yer stuffed, Matey. But then that’s fine, obviously, who thought the proles being able to get off the estates was a good idea in the first place? Only those weird liberals and who cares about them?
The problem is rather large too. One estimate is that about 30% of the UK doesn’t have that ability for home charging. And with that planners’ insistence that we should all live in flats anyway that might well rise.
Now, OK, true, these direct costs aren’t the only costs. The entire climate change problem is that people don’t pay the full costs of their emissions. So, perhaps we should force EVs through anyway?
We do in fact more than cover our emissions costs on petrol and derv in the UK. That’s what the fuel duty escalator was. Introduced by Ken Clarke “to meet our Rio commitments”. The proper Stern carbon tax would be 11 p on a litre, the fde added 25p. We’re done. Everyone is paying their climate costs of driving an ICE.
And yet EVs are *still* more expensive. Which is where we meet that ineluctable logic. Our aim is to make ourselves richer - including all the costs. EVs make us poorer as they are more expensive manner of producing that autonomous transport. Therefore we shouldn’t be having EVs.
Or, perhaps, we should have them for those for whom they are cheaper - and we should allow in those Chinese cheapies, obviously. Fuck the capitalists after all. But insisting that everyone use them, even those for whom it is a hugely more expensive option? Even after they’ve covered that carbon tax cost?
Well, no, that’s known as making ourselves poorer and that really isn’t - despite socialism - the aim of public policy. Yes to EV choice, no to ICE bans.
Ignoring the hydrogen atoms a litre of petrol is around 1/1000th of a tonne of carbon, which produces 3.7 thousandths of a tonne of CO2 when burned.
CO2 price of £100/tonne would mean we uplift petrol prices by about 37p a litre (44/12)*(1000/100) to reflect the social cost. We can debate about including the hydrogen, inflation, whether that social cost should be $80/tonne of CO2, and get a lower number, but not a number as low as 11p, unless I'm missing something.
Yes, yes. If the politicians actually cared as much about the environment as they claim they do, they'd be cutting the tariff to zero and having a ceremonial champagne press event for the first shipment of £12K BYD Seagulls from China.
I think that even with some of the downsides of EVs it would be a gamechanger. So why aren't all the hippies talking about it?