There are ways of bringing the costs down if one so desires, but I think the biggest issue on the topic is when talking about public charging everyone always uses the most expensive ev charging as an example but they never state how much there petrol or diesel would be if they only used Motorway services?
It basically boils down to if people want to make it work, and the widely held opinion seems to be that they don’t.
You are right that it’s unfair to compare against the most expensive charge points only, as petrol and diesel prices at motorway service stations are indeed eye watering. I guess the point though is that our ICE car has a 600 mile range, so we would never have cause to put petrol in it at a motorway service station, however long the journey. With an EV however, with their much reduced real world ranges, you might have to unless you are prepared to make a detour from your route.
Someone has recently posted about an 860 mile road trip in their Bz4x and their charging costs worked out at 14p a mile, which is comparable to many ICE cars. I don’t know how many times they charged during that trip, and what the total charge time was, but if I’d done that trip in my petrol car, starting with a full tank, I would have only needed to make one 5 minute fuel stop. So on long journeys, which I do a couple of times a month, the convenience of an ICE car wins hands down for me. I don’t stop for coffee breaks. A 5 minute pee stop is it!
If people have the provision to charge off road at home, don’t mind doing so and rarely (if ever) do long journeys, then of course EVs are substantially cheaper to run, and I can absolutely see the appeal of them.
In what will (hopefully) be a car that gives us the best of both worlds, we take delivery of our first PHEV next week. Most of our local journeys (25-30 mile round trips) we can hopefully do in EV mode, and with longer journeys we can use it as a petrol hybrid with no need to charge. However, as with EVs, PHEVs have extremely high purchase costs which, as Motability customers, we are shielded from (APs are high, but the price premium is far less than retail customers pay).
I don’t think that the slow take up of EVs amongst private buyers is solely down to a mindset or, as others have suggested, down to what is perceived as ‘negative’ press. I think it’s far more to do with issues such as lack of off road charging, high up front purchase costs, limited range and concerns about residual values. Added to all of that, over time I suspect that many of the cost advantages of EVs will erode. Did I hear that Citizen Khan is going to start charging EV drivers in London? If so, others will no doubt follow. As the take from motorists through petrol, diesel and road tax declines, I strongly suspect that governments will have to find other ways to claw that back (pence per mile charges etc). In the future, I strongly suspect that we will be paying the same to run our EVs (in real terms) as we are now for ICE cars. Hopefully by then EVs will have the same real world range as ICE cars do now and charge times will also be equivalent to todays 5 minute fuel stops.