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Comment by Zadak | Hacker News Reader

What about the infrastructure? It always comes to this for any country, sadly.

There are over 120,000 public charging points across the UK, with over 25,000 of them being 50kW+ DC. That's averaging more than one charger per square mile of the mainland UK (density distribution of course varies).

These are very, very expensive to charge at.

Yes, I responded to your other comment about that. Charging at home is very cheap though and it's estimated that roughly half of housing in the UK has a driveway. Some more creativity is going to be required to address it for everyone else indeed, for example kerb or lamp-post chargers, or in flat building car parks etc.

Mainly due to the standard 20% VAT rate applied to public electricity (compared to 5% for home charging) which could be rectified overnight if there was political will.

Breakdown of UK Public/Private and EV/ICE Per Mile Costs:

* Home (Off-Peak EV Tariff): ~3p per mile

* Home (Standard Standard Variable Tariff): ~8p per mile

* Standard Public EV: ~15p per mile

* Petrol Car: ~17p per mile

* Diesel Car: ~17.5p per mile

* 50kW+ DC Public EV: ~22p to 23p per mile

17.5p per mile is wildly optimistic with diesel at nearly two quid a litre.

I'm currently paying around 95p/litre for gas, which works out at around 23p per mile, in something with a 4.6 litre V8 that's registered as a low-emission vehicle (so cheaper tax) that mostly gets used to drag heavy trailers about the place.

If I need to use a car it's because I'm unlikely to be doing less than double-digit miles to somewhere with no public transport.

If I pop out to the supermarket for groceries, I wouldn't even think of cycling. It's quicker to walk...

Yeah those were the pre-Hormutz debacle benchmarks.

At the moment for an ICE @ 40 MPG it's ~22.6p per mile for diesel in the UK

The neat thing about gas is it's essentially a waste product from plastics manufacture, and that's ramping up so it's just getting cheaper.

Imagine how clean our cities could have been if 20 years ago the government had gone down the route of getting people to convert cars to gas, instead of giving them a couple of quid to scrap them and buy a "cleaner greener" diesel.

The less neat thing is this is completely negated by the EU, and we will continue to suffer as VAT is added as % on top of Excise.

EU's Energy Tax Directive (ETD) enforces a rigid minimum excise duty of €0.330 (33 cents) per litre on auto-diesel used as a propellant. Ireland's VAT rate is 23%. Pre-tax costs account for about 62% and various government taxes/levies account for 38%.

It's running at about €2.16/l in Ireland so that's about $9.30/gallon today. It's €2.70 in Germany and around €2.50 in Greece. For reference Greece's statutory gross minimum wage is €920 per month and Germany's is about €2,400. People are going to starve/freeze this Winter.

Diesel *should* be ridiculously expensive, it's an absolutely filthy fuel.

Convert everything to run on LPG.

Where I live (central Europe) I noticed that public fast chargers increased by a lot over the last two years in particular.

Is it the same in the UK?

Recently they started builing a truck charging facilty on the outskirts of town.

Many new public charging sites are being built in the UK too, yes. Several thousand rapid charging points in the last year alone.

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