It seems as though I’m not the only one who doesn’t crave a Tesla! I think that they look as bland as hell. They remind me of Japanese hatchbacks of the 1990’s. Given how expensive they are, it’s incredible how many you see on the roads. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we can’t go 10 minutes from our house without seeing at least 3 of them.
The fact that you see so many of them highlights one of the big issues about EV adoption, that those getting them at present are mostly the wealthy (who probably have an ICE car in the household as well) and company car drivers who are motivated by the current low tax rates. Most of these people probably have a private driveway or garage for most of their charging. These groups are adopting EV’s and PHEV’s at a rate of knots, hence the big percentage growth that’s quoted regularly, however in spite of this they still represent, in total, significantly less than 5% of the cars on our roads at present. A third group (probably much smaller) will be Motability customers who don’t benefit from the tax savings but don’t have to pay the price premium that EV’s currently carry.
Once all these groups are sorted with their EV’s, you are then left with the vast majority of motorists who don’t buy brand new cars and don’t have any facility to charge at home. Millions of these folk drive cars that cost just a few thousand pounds at most (many much less) and how does that work when we only have EV’s? As EV’s get older they will need new batteries which mean that they either get written off way earlier than ICE cars would (as they would be uneconomical to repair) or having had a new battery they won’t be bargains any more! I’m sure that ways will be found around all of this (cheaper replacement battery costs, longer life batteries and batteries that don’t degenerate as much as they age than they do now) but it’s going to be fascinating how it all pans out.