The goal is to migrate everyone to EVs, and it sounds like the government incentive mechanism is working, albeit in a roundabout way.
It's PG&E for the most part, and their huge liability payout for burning a city to the ground due to skipping maintenance on their distribution lines.
Some places in California have prices closer to the US average.
For AC the rectifier is inside the car and the L2 chargers is just a fancy plug. Price should just be the base electricity cost.
I'd love to have slow chargers built into the street lights. Not everyone owns a house, and the public charging usually meets or exceeds the petrol price per mile.
Not sure fast charging all the time is good for battery life though. 99% of my driving in NZ is on a normal 10A overnight charge
Electricity is expensive in the UK (~25p/kWh) But not gas car expensive. It is £1.57/L (£5.94/gallon).
The EV infrastructure is also pretty dang far along, especially compared to the US. Remember that everything in the UK is a lot smaller and closer together than it is in the US. Further, the UK has a functional train system for long distance travel. You can go from the top of Dunnet Head to Lizard Point in a 15 hour drive.
People downvoting me, Look up chargers in plugshare to see just how many there are in the UK, it's a lot. And also correct my math if it's wrong. An 80kWh car costs £20 to fill up. A 55L car, which has about the same range, costs £85 to fill up.
Cost to fill up doesnt matter, only the cost per mile.
Annual train ticket form my small town (25 miles from the Zone 1 of London) is over £5,500. Five GRAND. For the pleasure of standing every time and a much higher risk of getting mugged.
£15k will give you REALLY nice bike or pretty new car. After third year you're saving thousands. Of course if you decided to buy something old and used, you're saving from the second quarter of the first year on.
It's only functional because not everyone can afford another car to work.
Staff per passenger hour has got to be far higher in the airline industry.
It can be, depends on a lot of factors. Obviously flying ryanair will often be the cheapest way to go, but if you do any sort of other regular airline trains will quickly start to win out.
And it's not as if you can fly everywhere in england. As soon as you start looking at more oddball flights (for example, london to birmingham) ryanair goes away as an option and all the flights end up super expensive.
Trains, on the other hand, remain cheap for pretty much the entire nation. You can basically go anywhere by train for under £60. A lot cheaper if you book in advance.
The same applies to workplaces, especially if solar causes electricity to cost less during daylight hours, and then it becomes convenient to get an EV if there is a charger where you park at night or where you park during the day.
The UK runs on 240V. A regular outlet would probably be fine.
There's usually very little of the garage space available.
And this is how the typical street looks like: no way to charge at home: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X6K1R4/typical-english-terraced-h...
https://transportandenergy.com/2026/04/16/42-of-councils-to-...
My Model 3 (RWD SR+ 2023) is 1847kg unloaded weight, including driver.
> The rate of tax will be 3 pence per mile for fully electric cars; this is around half of the 6 pence per mile the average petrol or diesel driver pays in fuel duty.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-...
This won't happen unless they outright ban non-EV vehicles which is unlikely considering how many people are still using old cars and cannot afford new cars, how many car enthusiasts are there, and not to mention potential lobbying from big oil.
Poor people don't buy new cars. New EVs being expensive is not a poor person problem.
The lowest end of the market won’t have electric cars unless the batteries are shagged (early Leafs)
And given how insanely cheap petrol is (15p a mile, so £450 for a low mileage runaround) the savings even if electric was free and they weren’t introducing a 3p/mile charge isn’t there.
And, as it turns out, a brand new 50kWh battery costs around £4000 to manufacture. Used will be cheaper.
Saying "It costs a lot of money to replace the battery" doesn't mean much as the battery, even if it has 70% of it's original capacity, is still perfectly functional. Very much the same as the engine which also costs a lot of money to replace.
Newsflash: you simply cannot "readout" the status of an engine, transmission, ...
But you can/could/should for a battery.
Now, someone hammer that into peoples brains...
Really not true at all. Care to share your sources for this claim? Anecdotally, I've (plus friend and family) owned plenty of beater cars in that ballpark price, and none had failures needing to replace engine or transmission. Most of their faults came in the electronics (sensors, actuators, fuse box, wire harness) plus suspension, body rust, etc basically the same parts EVs also have.
Meanwhile, if you look up 'EV clinic' postings online, you'll see they find plenty of design failures with European and Korean EVs that are basically ticking timebombs(sometimes literally, hello Stellantis) where electric motors, inverters or battery packs are guarantee to fail in a short timeframe due to various design faults that were entirely preventable. Most common faults with poor EV designs I saw, seem to be the seal of the electric motor stator cooling which fails quickly leading coolant to flood the motor rotor killing it, needing a rebuild.
From what I gather from their analysis', the crux of this issue seems to be that some modern EVs, especially those less premium ones, are cost cut to the extreme in a race to the bottom to maintain shareholder value, both at manufacturing but also at design phase, leading to cut corners everywhere and such issues being a common occurrence and manifesting en-masse after their warranty runs out. From their analysis, IIRC Tesla's powertrains seem to be some of the most reliable and well designed, with the likes of Audi, VW, BMW, Mercedes being less so and Stellantis being trash tier.
Meanwhile, plenty of older ICEs are largely immune form such massive reliability faults, because they benefited from decades of industrial design and development experience done in a past era where race to the bottom cost cutting and planned obsolescence weren't yet a thing. So I wouldn't be surprised when an older 1500$ ICE car will last longer than a 1500$ EV.
A logical future market is battery-refurbished EVs, just a question of where the crossover point is.
For example, I have 2 gas stations within a mile of my home. They stay pretty busy because people around me constantly need to fill up. I, on the other hand, basically never visit either of those stations since I switched to an EV. I charge at home.
If everyone around me switched to EVs, those stations could not stay in business. There's a grocery store in the same area which makes anything those stations offer obsolete.
Those are the majority of gas stations that die with a mass switch over to EVs. There's a gas station for my hometown without an attached convenience store with 300 people there. There's no way that station stays in service if a significant portion of the community switches to EVs. It already struggles to be profitable as is (I know the owner).
Where I live (Spain) that's not the case at all - our towns are very dense. People in big cities tend to live mostly in flats (Europe's highest elevators-per-capita). Even people in the countryside, where it's more common to have a 1-family homes, often don't have a dedicated garage.
- Gas Station = retail outlet that sells and dispenses gasoline and other petroleum-based fuel products
- Charging station = place to charge your EV
Could be an interesting long bet. Will the number of retail locations selling gasoline in the UK in the year 2045 be higher or lower than in 2026?
I don't see how this is an interesting bet. No new petrol car will have been sold for 10 years. Places selling fuel for large lorries etc will last a bit longer, but these are already a fraction of the total.
Also, with Chinese manufacturers increasingly pushing out batteries capable of 1000+ km, you'll be able to charge fully at home for increasingly long road trips.
In contrast, my cheaper 'leccy rate is now about 25% less at 5.2p per kWh than it was. Electricity is weird in the UK - its pinned to the price of gas and is currently (lol) rather expensive "on peak" at 27.87p per kWh and there is a day standing charge of 47.71p. That's from Octopus.
We also have a petrol car - an elderly Renault Clio. It does just run and run and is pretty economic for a pretty shagged out ICE.
My EV is cheaper to run, by far. However, its unlikely the battery will last 20 odd years. I haven't yet sat down and done some whole life costs for ICE vs EV yet.
My Saic MG4 can do 300+ miles on a 100% charge of its 78kWh battery. After two years, it still manages to exceed its WLTP (with care, when required) and I quite like the ridiculous 0-30 acceleration etc.
Given how long we have all been subsidizing ICE buyers, I think it is fair to spread the love around a little.
I live in the UK where we pay heavy taxes on fuel and we pay higher taxes on vehicles with higher CO2 emissions.
Funny how their solution was to subsidize burning fossil fuels for car commutes to the office instead of, oh I don't know, MANDATING WFH!, given Germans are such staunched green environmentalists. Sure, let's turn off nuclear and ban plastic straws, but let's also subsidize the generation of diesel, brake pad and tire fine dust particles we breathe in, for commuting by car to work. We can't forget our car industry lobbyists.
But put a $7500 point-of-sale rebate on an electric car and people go nuts. So the solution is either make the EV subsidy less obvious, like we do for fossil fuels, or try to educate people on where their tax dollars actually go. The former is more feasible, certainly, in the modern political environment where ideology rules over facts.
The subsidies you talk about are US specific and was in rely to one about ICE buyers subsidising EV buyers in the UK.
In the UK we pay heavy fuel duties and car taxes so ICEs have not been subsidised any time recently, but, have been very heavily taxed.
There is no fairness in taxing UK ICE owners for subsidies received by American ICE owners.
ICE cars are already hugely subsidised by ignoring the health issues they cause e.g. air pollution
What we really need in the UK is better mass transit systems in cities and their commuter zones to remove cars from the roads