The rush to electric cars will blow a £9billion black hole in the public purse by 2030, ministers were warned yesterday.
What rush? Private buyers aren't convinced!
Experts said fuel duty receipts would fall by around this much because of the Government's 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Electric cars are also currently exempt from road tax, which is projected to cost the public finances hundreds of millions of pounds more.
Did anyone really believe the government would give that up? Really?
It will pile pressure on ministers to come clean about whether they will introduce new road taxes to plug the hole and about the true cost of going electric.
Why? We know whatever they say will be a lie...
Peers were also told that the 2030 cliff-edge could be counter-productive in terms of reducing carbon emissions because drivers may buy fossil fuel cars ahead of the deadline and hold onto them.
Incentives matter! They drive behaviour. How many times do we need to learn this lesson?
I've just bought a really cheap plug-in hybrid. It's an ideal halfway-house between petrol and EV cars. I've already had to download half a dozen apps to my phone to enable public charging (no home charging available) and that's nowhere near half way to the total number of apps I need for full coverage. I refuse to download the blatant ID-scrapers that require card details, address and blood type. But the lack of consistency in the presentation of the charging network is what is holding up electric vehicles. I stayed at a hotel next to a huge charging station with 30+ chargers. Each different type had a different presentation. This led to the EV-owner charging dance as the owners kept walking from the charger to that car window to peer at the dashboard to confirm charging, then back to the charger, then back to the car several times eventually walking away satisfied that once they've finished their Costa coffee that hopefully some exchange of electrons will have occurred and the car will have more range than when they parked it up.
ReplyDeleteIt's rather reminiscent of the 'phone charger' dilemma, where there's no obviously one good choice made by manufacturers.
DeleteThere is not enough electricity, grid cable, copper, safe parking spaces, chargers, lithium, cobalt, other rare earth elements, as well as land fill sites for the old, unrecyclable, waste.
ReplyDeleteSomehow they are going to find extra non "fossil" tyre rubber, brake liners and road surface to deal with 50% weight increase.
But nothing that more taxes can't fix.
The politician's mantra!
DeleteThe electric cars idea is a bust so you'll all have to move to 15 minute cities and rely on state controlled shops accessed on foot. Put on that cabbage soup and join that bread queue now.......
ReplyDeleteLucky that I like cabbage!
DeleteCan't find a charging point? Nothing that 23,000 Duracell AAA batteries can't fix.
ReplyDeletePenseivat
😂
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