The face of change to come

[Workingman]

Well done, Suff, 10/10 for totally missing the point.

Millions of homes and, therefore their owners of EVs (if they have one), cannot have a personal charge point of any description. They will all be relying on public charge points, all the time. That is reality for many people.

A couple more...

From Jan 2024 the government has mandated that 22% of new car registrations will be EV. At current levels that will be over 320,000 more EVs on the road - 27,000 per month. This mandate will continue so that by 2028 the figure would increase to 52% and then to 80% by 2030. Of course it will be 100% after 2035. The charger situation will only get worse.

Zapmap's figures that you quote are meaningless to those in the homes mentioned above. There are 77,531 connectors at 29,709 locations. There are 3,873 ultra-rapid, 5,336 rapid, 26,406 fast and 14,252 slow - the last two are what most people will have access to for their top-up because many of the rapid chargers (43-50kW+) are at out of town motorway or A road services - not where people live. If people are going to top-up charge, as you suggest, that could be 1.45 million charges per week - most of them on fast or slow chargers taking hours for an 80% charge, and as the RAC says, the government needs to increase its average monthly installations by what appears an insurmountable 215 per cent. The RAC forgets to mention that they need to be where millions of people can get to them i.e. locally. Charging reality is nowhere near the Utopia you make it out to be.

[Workingman]

Cromwell, there will not be factories. We will all have a lab in the garden, along with the greenhouse. We will be able to grow chicken nuggets, rump steaks and salmon fillets to our heart's content. Then we can go to the greenhouse to harvest the multiveg shrubs of their peppers, onions, bananas, apples, cucumbers, potatoes and lettuce from just the one plant.

Tony said so...

The old farms will be for growing biomass fuels for our driverless AI hovercar taxis (to avoid the old EV pot holes) and get us to the augmented reality cinemas for a break from the real reality.

I watched Tomorrow's World on the BBC from Raymond Baxter to Kate Humble and in all those 35 years or more only a few dozen things became mainstream. The present future will be much the same.

[Suff]

Someone is missing the point.

These cars do not charge several times a day. Or even several times a week. Most of them will charge once per week. As the models advance and they stop trying to sell V1.0 tech as v3.0 tech then they will take a 15 minute sip once a week for most driving.

The whole point is the way we will "fill" these vehicles will change. Charging offerings will change with it. As happened in Norway once it passed critical mass of adoption.

You are looking down the wrong end of the telescope. Those who are making it a reality are not.

[Workingman]

Someone is missing the point....

Erm, yes, someone certainly is!

Most of them will charge once per week.

And that is precisely what I said. I.45 million cars with a plug charging up to the 80% level once a week. It's right there in my post

Nothing wrong with my telescope. It is perfectly focussed and without misted up rose-tinted lenses.

Btw, 52% of public chargers are either fast or slow (your quoted figures) so people using them will need a lot lot more than a 15 minute sip. However, a good book and a flask of hot coffee.... maybe a pillow and a blanket.

[Suff]

Just have to watch and wait. From my viewpoint everything is moving faster than promised.

[cromwell]

Mixed news on EVs.
Global EV sales went up by 49% in the first half of the year.
But this figure is skewed by Chinese sales, China being responsible for 55% of all global EV sales.
But rising intrest rates mean car finance is not as easy to get, and is more expensive for the top end of the market, like EVs.
Car companies have scaled back or abandoned plans to produce more EVs.
Ford has halted $12 billion of spending on EV production.
GM has abandoned it's goal of producing 400,000 EVs by the end of 2024 and GM and Honda have cancelled a, 18 month old joint programme to produce cheaper EVs.

But this is the bit that puzzles me.
UK motorists are expected to be guided towards making their next purchase electric under the zero-emission vehicle mandate (ZEVM) scheme, which is expected to remain unchanged despite Mr Sunak's net-zero U-turn last week.

It will require car makers to ensure 22 per cent of new cars sold in the UK next year are electric or hydrogen-fuelled - known as 'zero-emission' vehicles (ZEVs) - before jumping to 52 per cent by 2028. And by 2035, 100 per cent of new car sales will be zero-emission.

How can you actually do that? How can you ensure that X percent of car sales will be zero emission vehicles? How can you make people buy something that they don't want?

The ZEVM programme, announced during Boris Johnson's tenure as PM, will fine car makers an expected £15,000 per car and £18,000 per van sold outside of the target that isn't electric. That's one way I suppose.

But this is all a mess. It's OK for politicians to make grand gestures and strike noble poses; but out there in the real world they have no clue as to how to make these grand schemes actually happen.

If we aren't careful, some car makers will go bust because of all this.

[Suff]

Word to the wise. Almost all the legacy car manufacturers are going bust. The UAW in US are driving them right over the cliff throttle wide open.

So some numbers. China is half the EV market in the world. OK you might say, they have a big population, so waht?

Well it means that any EV vehicle manufacturer in China has a base market from which they can then export around the world. BYD being a case in point. BYD now produces an EV, the Seagull. They launched it back in April. Viable town range, 4 person, approx cost $13,000. Probably £13,000 in the UK but that's life.

BYD produces more "electric" cars than Tesla, but that includes hybrids. In BEV vehicles Tesla still leads. But the margin is slim.

BYD is looking for a factory in Europe and has already bought a factory in the US. It may be the first Chinese manufacturer to do so but it will not be the last.

As for the pitiful GM target for EV? Tesla makes more in one quarter (even a low sales quarter like Q3 which had long shutdowns), than GM targeted in 2024. The problem is that your view is from the traditional media and the traditional media get their money from advertising and some of the biggest advertisers are legacy auto. So you hear what they pay the media to tell you. If you want to know more about the EV world you need to go to cleantechnica or electrek.

If you want to have an idea what is happening in the legacy auto (OEM) world, you could do worse than spending 45 minutes watching Sandy Munro talking about where they are headed.

Or you could have a look at X but that is a very noisy place to try and get solid info.