Let the EVs Take the Strain

A recent BBC article says EVs won't solve congestion problems. It's yet another negative headline about EVs to follow from yesterday's negative EV headline where they said EVs were falling in sales for the first month in whatever (when in fact BEV sales had gone up 67%). They even go to the trouble of showing a picture of a rare EV, an 8 year old early prototype Smart ED TwoFour, rather than - say EVs hundreds of times more popular, to get across the idea that EVs are toys. Next week, watch out for the Tesla-bashing article ;-) and no mention of how sales of real EVs in the EU, the US and globally are rocketing.

Similarly, this article uses a bit of truth to hide a bigger lie. In fact EVs will go quite a long way to solving congestion.

Car Use is Falling

Car use is already going down in some parts of the UK, mostly because in London, they're not needed much and elsewhere because insurance for young drivers is prohibitive.
But actually, the nature of EVs will themselves radically change our vehicle usage, primarily because they have so few moving parts and batteries last much longer than originally expected (and will get several times better), to get sufficient wear and tear we're going to have to drive them much more often.

ICE Drives Congestion

The problems we see with urban vehicles are problems relating to ICEs themselves. For example, you can't have a filling station at everyone's house - it's far too dangerous and far too expensive! ICEs force us to place filling stations as widely as can be tolerated and because the effort taken to fill up (compared with plugging in an EV); this in turn forces infrequent filling; large tanks and very long ranges.

But long ranges themselves have the side effect of increasing our journey lengths which impacts everything: distance travelled to shop, to our workplaces, to schools and hospitals and all this increases traffic.

EV Transformations Will Blow Our Minds

EVs will change this radically. We'll have to share cars to get the wear and tear out of them and because charging will become ubiquitous (think every forecourt where your car might hang around); we'll need cars with much shorter ranges on average than even the first generation of EVs: think 10KWh or even 5KWh for the majority of cars and in turn two person EVs will dominate for the vast majority of journeys. But in turn, because we can charge easily, we can expect journeys to shorten too.

Remember in this model, people don't own their cars as much.

Why will people choose tiny, 'under-capacity' cars? It's simple, they'll be much cheaper to build, sell and drive! My Zoe (22KWh) gets about 4 to 4.5 miles per KWh at maybe 12p/KWh. Given a gallon of petrol (4.5L) = 4.5*£1.25 = £5.63, I get 5.63/0.12*4.5 up to 210mpg running costs.

But a Renault Twizy (a 2 person EV with a 6.7KWh battery) will get 6 to 8 miles per KWh, equivalent to 300 to 400mpg running costs.

Given a typical day's travelling in the UK is only about 10 to 20 miles, about 3KWh, that's only half a Twizy's battery. And considering the sheer number of charging points there will be, the average needed journey between charges will only be 5 to 10 miles, just 1.5KWh.

On that basis, a future EV with a 5KWh will seem ample, even though right now, all the talk is about 50KWh to 100KWh batteries.

So, EVs will go a long way to reduce congestion in themselves owing to the different driving model.