[DBMandrake]

New cars and vans powered wholly by petrol and diesel will not be sold in the UK from 2030, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.
But some hybrids would still be allowed, he confirmed.

Those with combustion engines in them?

Sorry, but if hybrids with combustion engines are allowed, it's not a "Ban on new petrol and diesel cars" is it ? It's just a slightly more efficient combustion car which can maybe do the school run on electricity but not much else?

Wake me up when cars containing combustion engines truly are banned from sale.

 

[DBMandrake]

I read that sale of PHEVs would be allowed until 2035 but traditional ("self charging" 🙄) hybrids would also be banned from 2030 as only powered by petrol. Yes, they really are Toyota.

The problem is a PHEV can be used as a traditional Hybrid simply by forgetting to ever plug it in. How convenient... Will there be any roadside checks to ensure people are actually charging their PHEV's and not just driving them as regular cars ? I doubt it.

 

[DBMandrake]

“All cars must be hybrid by 2030” then.

No big deal, most of them are already.

That's my point.

It was the same point I made with the original 2040 "ban" which was reported in the media as a ban on combustion cars yet all hybrids with combustion engines that could achieve reasonable emissions levels would still be allowed under the original 2040 "ban".

 

[DBMandrake]

I think that petrol stations will be interesting to watch. As ICE fuel sales fall, no doubt there will be quite a lot of closures.

What makes you think they won't just progressively replace petrol pumps with rapid chargers as demand shifts ? Many service stations already have Instavolt rapids tucked in the corner. 10 years from now it may be the reverse - rapid chargers centre court and a couple of petrol pumps in the corner for those still spitting out fumes..

Service stations these days are already food shops that just so happen to sell petrol as well, EV rapid charging actually helps this as dwell time will be longer. Service stations will do just fine I think, if they adapt to the change in demand over time.

 

[DBMandrake]

I think the biggest challenge will for the 40% of the population that does not have off-street parking at home. With average mileage of 7,800 miles pa (per the AA), most EV users will only need to charge twice per week. But I think it will take a long time before new EV users don't want to plug in all night, every night 'just to be certain'. Twice per week for the 40% means sharing a charger at work, using a rapid whilst near to home and a mix of some local over night charging spots. I think we will see quite a few developments in this space and I expect to be surprised at how this ends up in 2030.

"40% of the population" is a meaningless figure. What you should be looking at is what proportion of the car driving population has access to off street parking, that is what really matters, and that figure is quite a bit higher.

If someone in London in a terraced house with no access to off street parking (or quite possibly no access to nearby parking at all) can't install a home charger that's irrelevant if they don't have a car in the first place or don't even have a drivers license. There are many places in the country where it's not feasible to own or drive a car, and there are also a lot of people who don't have a license and can't drive or don't even want to drive. These people are not suddenly going to go out and get a drivers license to drive an EV when they never could or wanted to drive before.

My mother in law lives in a terraced house without off street parking (although if push came to shove she could convert her front garden as a few of her neighbours have) but she doesn't own a car, doesn't drive, has never had a license in her life and has no intention of changing that. There are a lot of people like that.

Just count the people who do have cars and drive and the situation is a lot better than it seems from a simplistic population figure.

 

[DBMandrake]

I think the often quoted stat was 60% of households have off street parking. Which I take it includes apartment car park or a parking spot that is opposite the road. None of those example is allowed to install EV charging points by the home owner.

Fair point, so what we really need is proper statistics on the number of households in the country who drive cars and have the ability to install home charging should the need it. Does such a statistic exist yet ?

People also often ask, how can multi-car household charge their EV with only one driveway spot. My road for example, out of 9 houses, 4 only have a single parking spot and 3 of those household have 2-3 cars.

If they're moderately long range EV's (>200 miles) then I very much doubt that every car in the household needs to charge every day unless they're all road warriors. Do they all go and fuel up at a petrol station every night as well ? The answer is to simply take turns on who parks on the driveway based on who is more needing of a charge. I don't really see an issue here, this is only a problem with short range EV's which won't be common in 2030.

I think the ban can't come soon enough from our environmental footprint point of view. But at the same time, the infrastructure is so far from ready it's not even funny. Just yesterday, I discovered the new BP petrol station 150kW chargers don't accept contactless payments. It sometimes feels like the infrastructure is actually going backwards!

True, but the only way to make progress is to just forge ahead and go through some teething pains. You have to pull off the plaster at some point. You're not suddenly going to have 20 million drivers switch to EV's over night, it will happen progressively, and as it does infrastructure will need to keep abreast of that. Ten years is a long time. Ten years ago the 24kWh Nissan Leaf hadn't even launched.

 

[DBMandrake]

I spent a year and a half in Singapore (2007-08), with no car. That worked quite well for me, although I had no kid either, which probably helps.

No kid helps a lot...

We had no car for 3 years after I moved to the UK (after being a car driver all my life up until that point) and we got by - getting to work was easy enough, although grocery shopping was a chore as we tended to haul it back on the bus rather than get a taxi...

However now we have a car (two actually) and a kid I couldn't imagine going back to no car at all - it just wouldn't work in our current circumstances as public transport simply can't get us all where we need to be at the times we need to be there. (For example local buses stop running for the night before the final leg of the homeward journey which would mean a daily taxi ride or a 30 minute walk on a winter night with a toddler)