What Are We Waiting For?

Welcome to 2020 - the decade of the electric car. Well, that's what everybody hopes anyway. We can now choose from a dozen new EVs capable of 200 miles or more on a single charge and the long-range battery Teslas are good for well over 300 miles. A real-world range I've tested myself. We're on the way to slaying the range anxiety dragon. And come April, HMRC won't charge us for any Benefit in Kind for EV company cars and businesses can even write down 100% of the purchase cost against profits in the first year. Perfect dynamics, you'd think, for the 2020 EV revolution. Well, not quite. Because there's another rather large dragon still to be dispatched, and that's infrastructure. Despite yards of flannel by the government we still don't have anything remotely close to the charging networks this country needs. And no real signs that these are on the horizon either. Our EV revolution risks being marooned on the hard shoulder - if we still have any.

I'm tired of hearing about the 15,000 public chargers we currently have when we know so many of those are older legacy slow 3kWh to 7kWh units and the amount of 50 kWh rapids is still only in the hundreds. Green lobby group Transport & Environment estimates that Europe still needs three million more charging points to power the 44 million EVs needed to meet 2050 net-zero plans. That infrastructure is going to cost around ￡25 billion. But T&E makes another very important point that investment in all that infrastructure will generate solid economic activity in the form of gridworks, manufacturing, installation, building and maintenance of public charging EV Hubs. So as well as the health and pollution benefits there are thousands of jobs to be created too. Venture capital fund, Atomico, reckons that the green energy industry in Europe could be worth $2.5 trillion. Get this right and the brave new EV revolution infrastructure might even become fiscally neutral.

Has anybody in government actually done the sums? Well, if they have, I haven't seen them. This is the sort of long-term economic EV strategy Boris and his ministers should be punching out now. The UK doesn't need three million new rapid chargers. 100,000 would be a good start. Understanding how much economic, health and societal benefits would accrue from a proper long-term EV infrastructure strategy is something we really need to work out - and soon. Nobody expects the Treasury to handbag the whole thing - just offer tax breaks, business rate freezes, interest-free loans and a bit of mild subsidy and the market will do the rest. Create the right supercharged (forgive the pun) economic environment and queues of eager young entrepreneurs will step in and start building the charging infrastructure the U.K deserves. And, forgive me, but building a 200mph railway that doesn't carry freight isn't going to do much to clean our polluted urban air. Wouldn't a fraction of that ￡100 million haversacks of taxpayer cash be better spent on building a charging network for emission-free road transport?

All this delay is getting embarrassing too. In London, we now have 2,500 electric taxis, but too many cabbies tell me they still drive around on their range-extender petrol engines because there aren't enough 50 kWh chargers for them to have multiple rapid charges throughout the day to run on battery alone. That's nuts. We're seeing charging congestion too with EV drivers queuing at chargers because the numbers of bigger battery EVs are starting to overwhelm the existing rapid charging infrastructure. There's a massive disconnect between Government policy and their lofty green ambitions and not enough people in Westminster or Whitehall who drive, understand or have long-term experience of EVs. Passively waiting for the private sector to solve what is essentially a national policy infrastructure problem isn't good enough. Those eager entrepreneurs need much more help. If the Government doesn't pull its finger out the progress of our EV revolution will be laboriously hand-cranked, just like the 1912 charger photo above. It really is time to get building.