Prologue
As I come near to the end of my four years with an Electric Vehicle this is my final blog on this particular subject. I can't say I have enjoyed the experience, but I can say I am glad to see the back of the car. My next car will not be an EV, at most it will be a hybrid or one of those energy efficient, low emission cars that one can get now, such as my wife's 217HP VW Polo GTi..go figure!
First UK Petrol Station
When petrol cars first became readily available at the dawn of the 20th century the infrastructure to refuel them was not in place, indeed, for the first 25 years of British motoring, petrol pumps did not exist. Instead, people were required to buy fuel in two-gallon cans from their nearest petrol station, garage, hardware shop or hotel. The first petrol station was opened in November 1919 at Aldermaston, Berkshire by the Automobile Association (AA). By 1923 a total of 7,000 pumps were in use to service nearly 400,000 private cars. 100 years later we can draw parallels with the EV industry and the availability of infrastructure to support it; there are currently only 71,500 chargers for 363,000 vehicles, and when one considers that only 10,500 of those chargers are rapid chargers - able to charge a vehicle in an hour or 2 - then the similarities are even greater. However, a fossil fuel vehicle can be filled up in 10 minutes and if you were stuck 100 years ago without a filling station, you could at least buy a can of petrol. Such rapid filling or portability is not yet a feature of EV’s and may never be the case.
One other parallel between the adoption of the combustion engine and EV’s is the rapidly increasing popularity of the automobile in the 20th century saw petrol stations appear in almost every town and village with the available brands as numerous as the cars that they were designed to fill, from ABCO to ZIP petrol stations became the small entrepreneur’s dream. With EV charging there has also been an exponential growth in the number of company’s providing charging points, from familiar brands like BP to ones that offer only green electricity such as EV Energy. The similarity ends there though, because in the absence of a charging station one cannot simply buy a can of electricity from a shop or a hotel, further whilst the currency to buy fuel back then was, and still is, the same, one has to have dozens of apps on ones phone to be able to access the different charging networks, and pay several subscriptions in order to get the best pipe “at the pump”.
So, why is it such a challenge 100 years later to ensure that we can refuel the cars we are forced to have? I think the government has been frugal and lazy, relying on market forces in the face of their Orwellian mandate on the replacement of fossil fuel with EVs to drive (pardon the pun) entrepreneurs and corporations seeking to diversify to invest in infrastructure, rather than go to the trouble of building it themselves first. And there we have the biggest difference between the adoption of the automobile and that of the EV; we had a choice with the combustion engine. But pause for thought, do we have a choice? If we are to believe that EVs are much more friendly to the environment than petrol or diesel cars (and the jury is still out on that one, even in my own mind), then we don’t have a choice, we must move away from using fuel that destroys our environment, the only other question is whether EV are the answer.
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