jomukuk wrote:
I wouldn't bet my life on electrically-propelled vehicles being that commonplace.
The rest of the car industry is betting on a pretty rapid rise in EVs in the next 5 years. Personally, I don't think it will happen as quickly as the industry thinks it will, but I do think they're be pretty common as second cars in (say) 10 years time.
jomukuk wrote:
Battery technology is hardly forging ahead and providing us with cheap, easy and safe electrical storage.
It's advancing faster than any of the conventional IC engine technologies. I reckon we'll see one order of magnitude improvement in energy density within 5 years. We're not going to see any "order of magnitude" improvments in conventional vehicles in that time!
jomukuk wrote:
Charging overnight is hardly going to be cheap if prices keep going up, which the government seems to insist they must, even if only to force people to use less so as to meet emission reductions.
They can go up a long way before they catch conventional fuel up! Currently we're getting about 100 miles for about £2 using overnight charging. That's for Transit-sized vehicles.
jomukuk wrote:
I see the problems as being......
Companies, at the behest of government, keeping prices high no matter what.
As more battery/electric vehicles arrive their cost of operating is going to increase with the source of their charging increasing in price by some 10%/yr. When they reach a magical number, the cost of electricity will be higher, and it is by no means guaranteed that the cost of vehicle charging will be the same as that for household power (taking into account the push towards so-called smart meters and other means of limiting domestic usage.
At the moment their taxation is minimal, that will not be the case if widespread usage happens.
Hasn't happened with LPG though, has it? I agree that if EVs become very popular, the government won't be able to afford to loose the revenue and will, I'm sure, whack the tax take up. That said, we're a long way off that just yet. Besides, the nice thing about electricity is that unlike petrol and diesel, the general public have the ability to generate small amounts of it independently.
To my mind, the biggest current problem with EVs is the eye-watering cost of the batteries and the fact that they are likely to loose range with time. By the time the battery is 6-7 years old, it will be significantly down on range and the owner is unlikely to want to spend more than the car is worth on a replacement battery. There's no equivalent expenditure that becomes necessary on a conventional car about half way through it's life so we end up with the self-fulfilling prophecy in that as news gets round that they're likely to need a new battery at that sort of age, the cars' residual values will plummet (like buying a house 96 years into its 99 year lease)! This in trun, will make the owner even less likely to cash out for a new battery. Many EV suppliers lease the batteries for this (and other) reasons, but of course you're then still forking out a regular sum to underwrite the battery depreciation.