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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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