Electric Cars - just 50 sold in 3 months
Government figures suggest that the taxpayer’s efforts to bribe motorists to buy electric cars is a failure. Just 50 electric cars have been bought by private motorists in the last 3 months.
Our stance on electric cars is well known. As far as we’re concerned they are suitable only for urban environments, and only then as a (ridiculously expensive) toy for the well-off.
Because an electric car does everything worse than an ICE car, except its dubious ability to emit nothing in to the environment in which it runs. Of course, those emissions are simply moved to wherever the electricity is generated, and with 75% of UK electricity coal-generated it doesn’t take too much grey matter to work out that an electric car in the UK probably ’emits’ as much CO2 as a modern diesel.
The purchase price of electric cars is also ridiculous – in the region of twice a comparable ICE car – and the range woeful.
Many claim a range of over 100 miles, but in the real world – where conditions are not ‘ideal’ – you probably shouldn’t go more than thirty miles before you start thinking about turning round and going home. Especially if it’s hot. Or cold. Or raining. Or dark. And then your range will be even worse.
But you can go further – if you have the time. It should only take 8 hours on average to charge an electric car, so if you try really hard you could probably drive from London to Leeds in 24 hours. It was quicker when there was a man with a red flag walking in front of your car.
Thankfully, it seems the great British public agree with us. Figures just released by the Government Department of Guesswork says that in the last three months just 215 electric cars have been sold in the UK, and around 75% of those to businesses.
Which means just 50 individuals in the UK have bought an electric car, despite the Government’s £400 million scheme to bribe us in to paying through the nose for an inferior form of transport.
To be fair, so far this year there have actually been 680 electric cars sold in the UK. Which probably means 170 in private hands. Still a woeful number and, worse still for those trying to force us in a direction almost no one is willing to go, figures which appear to be falling as the year goes on.
Still, it’s only cost the taxpayer approaching £2,500,000 for every electric car sold to a private buyer in the UK so far.
Spangle says
The price of electric cars discourages the uptake of the vehicles, while the government seem to promote them. The same way that they seem to discourage smoking, while being desperate for the tax it generates.
Stef Walker says
Whilst some of your criticism of electric cars at this site is laudable as it forces them to try better and be better, I do wish you would back up your accusations with hard evidence. I challenge you to walk from London to Leeds with a red flag in 24 hours, it’s a distance of almost exactly 200 miles if you use the M1, which of course you can’t. So if you don’t stop to eat or crap, then you need to maintain a speed of 8-9mph, technically feasible, but I’m dubious you could do it. Plus of course the speed limit at the time was 4mph in the country and 2mph in town. So you would have had to have been travelling at more than twice the speed limit. So what is the point of that comment?
Your article is filled with probablys and suggestions rather than facts and figures and where you have added figures you have distorted them to create sensationalist headlines.
Where I really have a problem with your campaign though is that you’re not providing any alternative. What good is it to stand on the sidelines of an arguement bitc hing that the policy is wrong if you are not prepared to suggest a better policy. Oil extraction destroys the environment, whether or not you believe the climate change arguments. Yes, electricity generation does the same, so suggest your alternative. Is your editorial position that we should just keep on using oil, paying the higher and higher prices that chinese demand will foist upon us? If so come out and say it and stop whining when people try to design something for the benefit of all of us.
Personally I couldn’t care less about the environment, I don’t have kids, I love driving, and I couldn’t give a toss if the earth goes to hell in a hand basket after I’m gone. What annoys me is politically driven lazy journalism masquerading as some sort of righteous campaign. At least have the courage to stand on a platform and back it up with hard facts (exactly how much pollution is generated by a power station supplying the number of KWH required to charge an electric car from empty to full? What are the exact effects on the environment and people of the various different emmisions? How much damage does the extraction of Lithium for electric cars do? etc) Until you do this you’re just lazy journalists repeating oil company press releases, and the lack of hard facts just makes you look like your arguement is spurious and weak.
CarsUK says
The comment about the Red Flag was a throwaway line; an attempt at humour to illustrate how inept the electric car is, and not to be taken literally. Sorry it failed to amuse, but even if taken literally, and analysed as you have, it does show it is still only twice as quick to take an electric car from London to Leeds as it is to walk!
Your comments are fair although we would suggest most – if not all – your criticisms have been answered across many articles on Cars UK. This article is about the level of sales of electric cars and it wouldn’t be appropriate to go in to the depth you seem to want.
We do believe (paradoxically, you may assert) electric cars could be the future, but fuel cell electric cars rather than BEV. Some very good work on this is being done, particularly in Japan but also in Europe. The use of hydrogen as our main power resource – not just for cars – is probably the only sustainable power source for the future.
We are not Luddite about oil and we don’t, as far as any of us can recall, get press releases from oil companies, much less regurgitate their content. But we also don’t buy the peak oil theory; there is no prospect of the world running out of oil in any conceivable time frame that matters, but a fuel resource that is less ‘political’ than oil is a very sensible aim.
Our objection to BEV electric cars is that they are being sold to the public (or not, as today’s figures show) as replacement for ICE cars. They are not. At present the only ‘electric’ car that is a viable replacement is a range extender. But that is still a costly sledgehammer to crack an economy nut. A nut that is being cracked by high-efficiency diesels (albeit without tackling the emissions that really matter) which now offer power and performance at half the fuel usage we saw a decade ago.
To sell electric cars to the public is a little like TV makers trying to foist B&W CRT TVs – at twice the price of a flat screen LCD – on buyers with the assertion that it’s the only way to save the planet and really, who needs colour anyway?
We love that you care enough to criticize what we’ve written; we just want real debate on this without everyone playing the ‘Green’ card as justification for inept, over-priced product.
Stef Walker says
Well that’s a far better argument than your original article and I applaud you for responding properly. Your article basically said “Electric cars are bad mm’kay”, it didn’t really set out your position, which was my complaint. I appreciate that you try to bring comedy to it, but it risks trivialising your beliefs in the eyes of the reader.
I too disagree with what is in effect tax relief for pollution transportation, simply moving it from one source to another, and am dubious about whether the total energy consumption per mile of modern hybrids and electric vehicles is lower than decent modern petrol and diesel ICEs. I’d like to see the motoring press investigating these figures, but it does often feel like the argument devolves to a Jeremy Clarkson stance of stating that any other view is piffle and nonsense, which leaves us looking foolish.
I think that hydrogen and other forms of electricity generation, possibly at a local level in vehicles are a far more promising future, and am worried that modern hybrids may be being pushed by the manufacturers and oil companies as a way of pretending that electric cars are weak, and have a limited future, in order to maintain our dependence on oil and limit public interest in investment in better engine technologies. There is an awful lot of money riding on oil remaining the economic standard after all.
Anyone who screams “Its green” as a justification for any transportation specification is deluding themselves since motion uses energy, and energy must be derived from somewhere. However I’m sure you can understand how this article came across as sounding like a mouthpiece for any organisation that derides electric cars because they’re not ICE ones. If you state that certain things are true, then please reference them so that we can check your figures. It will lend your arguement the kind of weight it deserves.