The road to electric in charts and data | Hacker News Reader

The road to electric in charts and data

rac.co.uk

62 pointszeristor91 comments

EVs are great if you're wealthy and have the prerequisite 'EV-compatible home' (with garage/driveway for charging)

But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical. So far there's very little attempt to solve this, leaving green tech mostly as 'expensive toys for the rich'. Roll-out of public chargers is slow, and they're always going to be vastly more expensive to use compared to home charging.

Similarly, many people are locked out of heat pumps and home solar due to 'incompatible homes'. Most problems the UK faces come down to the excessive cost of housing.

(And meanwhile, the government are quite determined to keep the majority of PLEVs - e-scooters and >250W ebikes, entirely illegal, while illegal use grows rapidly and is policed very inconsistently)

> But a lot of UK housing relies on on-street parking, and there's flats with car parks where charging isn't currently practical.

You forget the larger problem less wealthy individuals face: They typically already own a ICE-car and can‘t afford to purchase a new car multiple times in their lives.

The used car market should solve that eventually - so long as battery longevity is there. A reasonably maintained ICE car can last 20+ years of low mileage use. We need battery packs that last that long, or that are modular and replaceable for a reasonable price.

Bollocks. We live in a flat in London, we have an EV. Charging isn’t cheap like if I was charging on my home tariff, but still cheaper than gas and there’s lots of options around me. I get a discount as a local resident too.

Your points on home solar and heat pumps are accurate, but people are working on splitting solar and battery across flats, e.g. Negativity isn’t the answer; especially not when there are actual solutions available.

How much per kWh are you paying and how many miles per kWh does your vehicle do?

0.49p, gets around 4 mi/kWh.

ChatGPT reckons this gives 7.6p/km when petrol would be 9-12.

Obviously it could be cheaper, but it’s still pretty good for us. We’re not using it for commuting or anything though.

So just a ~£400/yr saving at 10,000 miles, excluding capital investment (assuming 40mpg, £1.45/L). Though if you just do stop-start in London 30 mpg would be more accurate, so ~£1,000/yr in savings.

How much was your car (or, more usefully, how much is the depreciation per year)?

Honestly the car is a luxury for us and a minor tax dodge. I was a consultant with some retained profits in a ltd co so we decided to take advantage of the lease deductions. Got a great deal on a top end VW - £206pm ex VAT.

Ah I see. So the original claim you responded to:

> EVs are great if you're wealthy

Was in fact, not "bollocks" in your case.

What are you talking about? £206pm is the low range of the car leasing market, and the price per km is under petrol. Millions of people lease cars in the uk and can get favourable tax deals through their employers. So yes, still bollocks.

Same here, not a flat but rely on street parking. There's at least 20 public charging points in walking distance of my home.

There's more to the UK than just London, despite what politicians think.

I’m just providing a data point.

I don’t see why it would be different in another city, and in a less dense one you can home charge which is dirt cheap.

The only people I know with full EVs don't have driveways. It's not really an issue - you can charge when you go grocery shopping

Didn't work so well in my experience: it's about as expensive as petrol (on top of the car being more expensive) and it takes longer than a grocery shop for a charge. You really don't get much benefit unless you can charge at home.

Works just fine for me in Prague, Czechia. The running costs of my EV are exactly the same as those of my previous car (a 1-liter econobox). And it’s a 200hp RWD.

Truly rich people would never buy EV as pleasure car, maybe city workhorse but then, they don’t need a city workhorse. Lamborghini have just cancelled their electric car because of lack of demand. People love the roar of ICE

EVs are cars for the masses that are priced like goods for higher class with requirements that only well situated can fulfill. Hence they aren’t as popular as they could be.

Nah. EVs are the fastest street drivable vehicles you can get. Rich people want the best.

It's improving.

There might not be much of a market for true EV supercars, but that market is so small as to be inconsequential anyway, with many models selling 10s of units and many of these cars never actually being driven significantly.

In the 'high performance but actually driveable' toy zone, there are plenty of Porsche Taycan 'company cars' around London. But sports cars are niche. Lots of rich people drive SUVs, and there are plenty of Porsche / Audi / BMW, etc, SUV EVs around outer London.

EVs will keep getting cheaper as China puts pressure on the market and as the number of EVs on the roads increases. In the UK, you can already get a second-hand VW ID.3, a great EV, for well under £15. And new cars from BYD and MG are available at ever more reasonable prices.

I could see a market for hybrid supercars if cities go further on being clean air zones, enough of a battery to let the owner drive slowly around Knightsbridge.

I don’t get why someone would want to own an electric supercar. A Ferarri engine is beautiful even if it’s impractical. Electric motors aren’t special even if they are tremendously powerful and efficient.

Yup it's only the quite well-off round here with EVs. Who would want to pay 60-90p/kWh at public chargers!?

Nobody does that unless they’re travelling. Charging off grid power at 8-30c/kWh is where it’s at.

That's exactly what I was referring to by "public chargers" and you know it.

And yeah sure, who travels right? lol

> Charging off grid power at 8-30c/kWh

Nice how do I get access to this 8c kWh electric for 0 EUR capital investment, today? Oh, it needs some capital investment? 5-20k EUR worth? No wayy

> EVs are great if you're wealthy

Can you explain this more? I have an EV scheme through work where you can get EVs for £200/month on lease including insurance, maintenance and tyres.

Outside of these schemes you can buy a Dacia spring brand new for £10k, or a whole host of decent options second hand. £20k will get you a second hand Tesla with decent range and fast charging.

This doesn’t scream “wealthy” when an ICE Ford Focus is £30k new.

Estimations vary but it seems like at least 50% -70% of homes could support at-home charging.

There's different levels of 'wealthy'. £200/month over 10 years is still £24,000

You can buy an old-but-roadworthy Ford Focus for a tenth of that. And a whole lot of people rely on used cars in the sub-£10k range.

If you've got a £20k+ budget, then yes, the EV options are pretty good. Did browse used Teslas myself recently, but as I can't charge at home I'm pretty much stuck with ICE.

TBF these schemes tend to only be available from the better employers. If you're working a minimum wage job for anything but a ftse100 customer facing company you probably don't get the option of a 'cheap' lease.

We didn’t have a scheme at work until I asked for one. Now we do. Our company had around 40 people and the scheme is open to anyone.

None of this is an unsolvable problem.

For example, terraced housing with on-street parking can support EVs by allowing homeowners to place cable ducts[0] inside the sidewalk. With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers. With all other kinds of awkward publicly-owned spaces you can have the local government install shared chargers.

The irony with it being an "expensive toy for the rich" is that EVs are significantly cheaper to operate than ICE. Especially with the upcoming new generation of cheap Chinese EVs, it would be quite possible to have the government offer a low-interest loan where the total monthly cost of car ownership stays the same - or is even lower.

[0]: https://gul-e.co.uk/, https://www.kerbocharge.com/

This is already happening. Near where I live there is a newly built 7-home terrace. Each one has both a garage and a cable duct sprouting up from the edge of sidewalk in front of them.

(Coarse location: outer SE London.)

> With large apartment buildings you can incentivize (or even mandate) that whoever manages it supports installing shared chargers

And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(

This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.

> This isn't the nice future we were promised, with clean electric cars and plentiful renewable energy. This is the future of late-stage capitalism and the enshittification of everything.

/Exactly/ this! The UK is all about maximising rent extraction, enshittification of everything and profiteering.

I’d like to think governments would serve the interests of the people but in my experience it’s just been they serve the interests of the corporations.

FYI I’ve only lived in the UK and the USA, both of which are living far below their potential

> And then the the management company that controls the shared chargers can charge rates that are even higher than the vastly inflated costs at public chargers, as they know the users will pay for the convenience of charging at home :(

Or just have sane laws requiring management to provide it at-cost?

In my country the default is that the board of tenants is responsible for the management by themselves. Delegating all the boring stuff to a management company for a fee is definitely possible, but I don't think them charging a per-kWh premium is even allowed.

I live in a city which is far better navigated by foot or by bicycle than by car - it was, after all, designed for the horses ass.

So I converted to electric - at first, electric moped, but now I ride a more powerful electric motorbike. It is simply a pleasure to get on and ride every day, smooth, quiet, efficient - and because I’m not car-sized, extremely fun to get around.

I encourage everyone to not just get off the petroleum treadmill, but to also try to live closer to the things that are important. I know a vast swath of humanity has to navigate the plains every day just for survival - but getting a closer, more local outlook on life can be rewarding too, and converting to electric has certainly provided that for me personally.

I found https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi... a fascinating report, especially how nearly half of London has off-road parking.

Thanks, this link therein looks very impressive, about the usage of space for parking, and the roads needed to connect them too:

https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/spa...

The "or with the potential to have" is hiding away a lot, to the point of being misleading. Most homes, especially in flats and terraced housing, which are the majority, won't have the infrastructure support for charging point conversion.

I don't think that's quite accurate.

Flats and terraced homes aren't the majority - about 55% of people live in detached or semi-detached houses. See the ONS Census data at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

My terraced house has off-street parking, as do most of them in my area.

Houses with separate garages are also fairly easy to upgrade - we had an armoured cable buried in a new trench to connect our old property.

Similarly, most flats with car-parks are especially easy to add chargers to. They can either be 7kW points or just regular plugs. We had slow chargers installed in our old flat.

Yes, there are many properties with no easy way to add charging. But none of those places have a petrol pump attached either.

"London" covers a quite large area and outside of central London houses are the most common type of housing.

Most of inner London doesn't need a car at all.

In my (generally affluent) zone 4 neighborhood in London, the number of green plate EVs had multiplied like rabbits over the past few years, but few houses have off-street parking. A huge percentage of the cars parked on street are EVs.

But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.

> But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts

Are these the standard UK 230V 13A fused single-phase receptacles? Those put out about twice as much power as a 120V 15A circuit protected by a breaker, 3kW vs 1.5kW

230 * 13 = 2990W

120 * 15 = 1800 * .8 = 1440W

Using those for L1 charging would be a lot better than US L1 charging.

No, they are 3.5kW - 5kW standard EV chargers. But it's probably easy to install them using the existing power run.

But you are right that standard wall charging is much more viable in a 230V system here than in the US. Some people just run a cable from inside to their car if they don't have a 'real' charger yet.

From html <head>

    "datePublished": "2024-09-26T13:11:00.000Z",

The content is just very old. This article is from Feb 2026: https://www.zapmap.com/ev-stats/ev-market

Here’s the RAC’s data from 2025 https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/choosing/electric-...

SMMT publish monthly data too

And which ever way we look at it electric cars are becoming more popular

Collated sales data for many countries:

https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/

In general, is it more efficient for society to invest in electric cars, or in electric trains?

French TGV trains have been planed as turbotrain powered by gas turbines, but after 1973 oil crisis evolved into electric trains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

Considering the article is talking about the UK, which recently axed a significant portion of its new high-speed railway corridor: don't count on it.

Even worse: railway electrification is not at all a given in the UK. A big downside of being the first country to roll out railways is that a huge number of railway lines (crucially, including tunnels and overpasses) were built to the dimensions of early trains. In practice this means that electrification isn't just adding some wires, it means having to re-dig all of the tunnels and having to raise all of the overpasses. To illustrate, the UKs universal loading gauge is small enough that you can't even fit regular intermodal container trains into it - and that's without overhead wiring!

A lot of the railway network uses a “third rail” to carry power. You don’t necessarily need overhead lines.

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/our-work/looking-after-the-rai...

There'll be no new third rail electrification, though (apart from some minor infill, or reorganisation around depots).

The conversion of remaining mainlines to 25 kV overhead AC is going slower than anyone wants, but already over 70% of passenger rail journeys use electric traction (and actually more like 80% by passenger kilometers).

There are an awful lot of low-traffic rural lines that it won't be economic to electrify using current technology, so we'll need to rely on battery electric for those.

Either way, it's largely orthogonal to the problem of electrifying road transport.

Oh, right, I completely forgot about those! To be fair, there are reasons everyone else usually sticks to overhead lines outside of subway systems.

This seems to lack 2025 data, unless BEVs have suddenly disappeared! (Which they haven't, everyone around here in stockbrokerland seems to have one.)

The data point for BEVs in 2025 is off by a factor of 1000. It reads 1,747.961; the decimal point instead of thousands separator is surely an error.

I am embarrassed for the RAC that they put out a graph with such a blindly obvious error. I spotted it within 10 seconds. Did they not read their own report?

I included this as an example of garbage data:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/03/29/stop-publishing-ga...

Petrol is just too cheap to justify the cost unless you drive massive amounts. I do 3,000 miles a year, that costs £400 a year

The cheapest electric car I can see is £2500. It would take me 6 years to get the money back even if the electric was free

Average car does twice that mileage but that’s still a small part of the total cost of ownership.

I got petrol Friday for £1.45 a litre. In July 2022 it was £1.90 a litre, or £2.20 inflation adjusted. In 2012 it was £1.40 or £2.05 a litre inflation adjusted.

Maybe if petrol was in the £2-2.50 a litre it would make sense

Petrol has never been £1.90 a litre for any length of time

https://www.racfoundation.org/data/uk-pump-prices-over-time

Thank you for linking to the data showing petrol at about £1.90 a litre in 2022.

That was for a weekly peak in the data… Britain has never had a price of 1.90 / litre for any sustained length of time

Your original comment remains misleading

I think the real way I've lost money is on depreciation - that's more severe than anything else that happened - even though I always buy second hand.

If you're buying second hand, like it would appear from the price you quoted, then reliability could be the thing that makes the price worthwhile.

I also don't do high mileage but as our petrol car gets older, it's starting to be less reliable. I've had brake issues - EV regenerative braking should ease that problem - and the engine is starting to use more oil. My car has a reputation for gearbox issues from the Uber drivers that I know.

Every time there is some problem my wife gets more freaked out. To avoid total disaster I'm going to have to get something and if it's an EV I just hope that it will give us some years of plain sailing.

I bought my car 4 years ago with 12 months MOT. It’s just passed again, with two new tyres and some suspension work. And a new bulb. It’s only needed tyres, wipers, and a new wing mirror in previous years.

Not bad for £1200.

The killer cost is the massive VED, way more than petrol Tax. I’d far rather VED were removed and the revenue reclaimed by taxing per mile. Seems crazy to have high fixed costs and low marginal, that just encourages driving.

VED is coming in on electric cars, and so is per mile charging. Meanwhile politics won’t allow fuel to return to 2012 levels in real terms let alone expanding beyond.

Far better ways to invest cash - home battery for example - than in an electric car. Maybe in 5 years there will be reasonable specced second hand ones.

You're fortunate on what you've spent so far. The problem is that the moment something does go wrong it can be brutal.

Personally I think cars can't be considered an "investment" because they just suck up money.

I do get this view and in many ways I agree - for me a car in an investment in flexibility.

I could hire a car/van as an when I need one, and send my kids to school by taxi and do my local shopping by bike (which I already do other than the 'big' shop that my wife does).

But investing £3k 10 years ago on a 10 year old car (now 20 years old) has proven a great investment. In a bad year it has cost £500 pa in maintenance, but in an average year I pay more in VED(tax) than I do on a service and mot.

I could have bought £3k of ftse 100 stock and have used the dividends and growth for transport, but I think that has turned out better for me. But I'll be honest, I've not done all the maths, but I don't think investing £3k would cover my costs and I would have eaten into the principle long ago. At best I have a £250 (scrap value) asset now, but realistically if I continue to spend £200-500 a year on looking after my investment, I'll get flexible transport.

Of course it’s not an investment on its own. They’re a consumable. But without the car it limits your options - my kids can’t do after school clubs unless I can transport them as we live too far from the nearest school and the bus doesn’t cover after school clubs. So the car is an investment in their future.

Unless you’re doing higher than average mileage though a cheap car with 12 months MOT is going to last several years, enough that the cost of tax and insurance is going to dwarf the cost of the car.

A car's assumed lifecycle is around 15-20 years. Practical suburban EVs have been around for around half that, practical ICE-replacement EVs for about a third. Consequentially, EVs have not yet arrived in the econo-shitbox segment of the used car market, and it will still take some time for them to get there - this is simply a lifecycle question and not a "new product introduction question" (which most of the press gets wrong for obvious incentives).

That being said, there's an argument that even basic EVs are often much more pleasant to drive and less hassle overall, which could be a reason for them to command a sustained premium on the used market.

How are EV's going to get to econobox/shitbox levels when the batteries go bad in less than half the time you mentioned and it costs ~£5000 for a new one?

Because newer batteries are not degrading as fast due to better thermal and load management. Because newer cars use newer chemistries that are less prone to degradation.

Moreover, just like some cars are good enough for people now, the cars with some degraded batteries will be good enough for some second hand buyers.

I saw a Nissan Note ev around here for £600 - the battery is good for around 24 miles - which exceeds what I'd do in a day on school run, gym run and shopping.

I would need to pay for a home charging point, but that would be a long term investment.

For me that Note would likely do me another 4 years of easy and cheap driving. An ice car of the same price would have more to go wrong and I'd be lucky to get 2 years driving from it. We are getting to the usable 2nd hand market already, and it is only going to get better.

I see 4,000 petrol cars under £1500 on auto trader. I see 1 (one) electric.

Upto £2k it’s 9,000 and 9.

Facebook market place had a few near me recently under £1k, but they certainly sell fast!

"An ice car of the same price would have more to go wrong and I'd be lucky to get 2 years driving from it. We are getting to the usable 2nd hand market already, and it is only going to get better."

Stop extremely, wildly exaggerating.

This is a conception primarily based around the Nissan Leaf battery, which combined poor BMS, a badly chosen chemistry and no thermal management. (People sometimes claim that the batteryleaftime is because they're passively cooled, but there are other, similarly old EVs, with passively cooled batteries, that have nowhere near the battery degradation that the Nissan EVs had).

Was 'battery _leaf_ time' intended?

Would be amazing if you could stop blatantly lying.

Excuse me? Lying about what you moron? Try not to be a electro-zealot and communicate normally.

> the batteries go bad in less than half the time you mentioned

This.

3,000 miles a year is very low, I think the average in the UK is 7,200. Interestingly that has declined since the nineties (presumably because we have more two car households).

I drive a bit more than you at 4000 miles a year but most of that is outside the UK so would like to see more details on the recent proposals to tax electric cars on annual mileage.

Current petrol car is 13yo so will need replacing eventually.

It doesn’t much change your calculations, but if you charge at home in the UK (we trail a cable across the pavement with a low-profile cover) then the electricity _is_ all but free.

We pay 7.5p/kWh for 6 hours overnight, but we also get £5 per month back (if we charge at least 10 hours) in return for having charging interrupted for up to an hour each night when the grid has least capacity. I drive about 7000mi/year, which means I’m paying about 1p/mile on average for home charging.

(The £5/month is from the charger manufacturer, SyncEV).

Remember a flat fee of 3p/mile tax is coming in a couple of years. That’s going to quadruple your per mile cost.

You are comparing against a free ICE car? And it still works out financially after just a few years for the average driver?

And you think this reflects badly on the EV transition?

No, I’m comparing the cheapest ICE car and the cheapest Electic car over the lifetime of the car, and the petrol one comes ahead even before the coming electric car tax.

2025 data https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/choosing/electric-...

Moving to electric is not some optional thing that you can choose not to do. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. They will run out at some point.

We can either make the shift now or we'll have to do it later. Much better to do change early and invest in it early.

When I was 12 my school books said we would run out of oil in 20 years

I’m older than 32 now

Do you believe there is an unlimited amount of oil in the world?

At least until the end of our respective lifetimes

When you were 12 it probably said the life expectancy was X years. If you reached X+1 years would you conclude that you would live forever?

Strictly speaking fossil fuels being finite does not mean we have to move to electric vehicles. We could switch to 'green' hydrogen, biofuels, or synthetic fuels. We'd still switch to renewables (or maybe nuclear), just not necessarily to electric.

(2024)

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