Park your fears, petrolheads, there’s a clear roadmap to an electric car future

Most of us are unimpressed by any cited statistics, which are, after all, only averages, and we’ve all heard cautionary tales of people who drowned in rivers that were on average only 6in deep.

What, for example, asked one interrogator, “if I suddenly had to drive to Edinburgh to pick up my mother-in-law?” Well, I explained patiently (as you do), then you’d have to charge the car en route at a charging station. “Yeah,” came the response, “and where do you find one of those?”

Which is a reflection of the fact that, although more than a fifth of new cars sold in the UK this year were EVs, many internal combustion engine (ICE) drivers have never seen – or at any rate noticed – an EV charging station.

So maybe range anxiety is the wrong term; it’s infrastructure anxiety that we should be talking about. That’s why ICE drivers don’t worry about the range of their vehicles: in the end, wherever they are, there’s always a petrol station within reach, even in rural areas. But that is still not the case for EV charging stations, and it’s one of the reasons why many people are understandably sceptical about the wisdom of switching from fossil-fuelled cars.

Ah, says the EV enthusiast, but they can always charge at home. Ultimately, it’s cheaper, because they can do it using off-peak electricity from an energy company such as Octopus. Well, that’s assuming they have a a means of taking their car off the street to hook it up. Many people aren’t that fortunate. That rules out millions of urban dwellers – and there are precious few on-street chargers on British city streets.

Then there’s the issue of cost. A petrol-powered Fiat 500 will set you back about £16,000, but the EV version costs from £25,000. A conventional Vauxhall Corsa costs £19,000, but its electrified twin costs 10 grand more. And it’s the same story all the way up the line to BMWs, Jaguars and beyond. At the moment, EVs are still premium products.

On the other hand, while they’re expensive to buy, they’re definitely cheaper to run. According to MoneySavingExpert.com, the annual cost of driving an EV in the UK is about £1,195, compared with £1,720 for a petrol car, including fuel, insurance, MOT and tax.

Zapmap, an outfit that provides a guide to EV charging stations, calculates that the electric Volkswagen ID.3 costs about 6.2p a mile to run, whereas a comparable diesel Ford Focus costs 12.1p a mile.

This is partly due, I guess, to the fact that EVs are mechanically simpler than cars powered by controlled explosions (which, in effect, is what ICEs are) and servicing costs are therefore lower. But you’d still have to run an EV for quite a long time before the savings cancelled the premium you paid when you bought the vehicle.

All of which goes to explain why the transition to EVs is likely to be gradual; too gradual to meet the government’s plan to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. To meet that deadline, at least three things need to change: EVs need to be less expensive; people need to be able to charge them where they live; and public charging points need to be everywhere.

On the vehicle-cost front, things are looking up in two ways; the introduction of more affordable new EVs such as the Dacia Spring, which sells for about £15,000, and the growth of a real market in used EVs, which are undervalued because people mistakenly believe that battery degradation over time is a bigger problem than it is.

And even the outlook on public charging points is improving, though the government expectation of 300,000 by 2030 seems a bit of a stretch. Still, it’s a lot more than the 8,400 petrol stations we currently have – a number that’s likely to decrease as the 2030 ban on sales of fossil-fuelled cars looms ever-larger. So is the time coming when it’s the petrolheads who are the ones suffering from range anxiety?

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Photograph by Alamy