A piece for the Telegraph on driverless EVs and the supposed death of the private car

You’ll hear it everywhere: private car ownership is finished. Even the BBC suggests that “in less than 20 years we’ll all have stopped owning cars”. This will apparently happen due to the rise of “self-driving electric vehicles organised into an Uber-style network” – a concept often described as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).

One obvious point is that pure-electric vehicles aren’t very suitable for use as MaaS robo-taxis, or any kind of taxis. A dedicated taxi hoping to offer attractive prices cannot spend large amounts of time sitting charging, certainly not in expensive city-centre parking. Fast charging is not a solution: it requires troublesome grid upgrades in many locations, it still isn’t very fast, and worse yet it’s hard on batteries. Even without fast charging, battery wear is the great unmentioned problem of pure EVs, particularly in high-usage roles like taxis.

A realistic “electric” taxi, driverless MaaS version or not, must actually be an internal combustion hybrid of one kind or another – like London’s new “electric” black cabs. It receives most of its energy as fossil fuel.

Ironically, the vehicular use case which really suits pure battery EVs is the privately owned car. Private cars spend most of their time parked and tend to make short journeys. They can typically be charged up infrequently and slowly, preserving their batteries, using low-powered charging points which are easily installed anywhere. Anyone who would like to see a lot of actual zero-emission EVs in use should be cheering for private car ownership, not running the idea down.

Then we come to driverless technology. The first point here is that this simply isn’t happening. Sergey Brin said that driverless cars for “everyone” were five years away … in 2012. Nowadays people tend to say they are at least a decade off.

Read the rest at the Telegraph (free registration or subscription).