The Natural Philosopher gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:

Can your local substation cope with every house it supplies pulling so
much extra current?

Probably at 30% market penetration and when other domestic usage is
low..e.g. at 'cheap rate' times.

I am sure the same gumenst were applied to the motitr vis a vis the
availability of petrol when horseless carriages were first discussed:
now we have a multi-=billion pound insdutry tankering fuel around to
garages.

At least THEY would diappear from our roads..

Not if 70% - especially since that 70% is going to include trucks, vans,
high-mileage cars - are still petrol/diesel.

Anyway - if 12hrs is only giving you 50 miles range, an hour on a
meter's barely worth bothering with.

you are getting confused. 12 hours at 3Kw is 36Kwh. That is the limit of
a standard 13A socket.

Which, on the Pious's 2-miles-from-1.5kWh, is a bit under 50 miles.

Hardest one is on street unregualated parking. Poeple will have to
find sopmewhere else to park their cars overnight. Oh dear. What a
shame.

Congratulations, you've just waved your hand and removed a very large
percentage of urban residents from the equation.

If only it were that simple ;-)

grin

Your estate agent will specify house electrical capacity and off street
charging points as part of the literature, and houses which have neither
will not sell well.

Back to where we were decades ago - private transport was only for the
wealthy.


And where's all this extra electricity coming from, anyway?

About 70 nuclear power stations by my reckoning, and a 3:1 upsize in
the the grid overall.

Quite.

So? that is not half as lunatic as other greenwash ******** that is
propounded.

Indeed not. That's not what I was meaning. It's a realistic assumption,
which nicely illustrates the fact that it's physically impossible and
would be political suicide for any government.

Howver tht would happen over a couple of decades progressively

Oh, well, that's OK then... Just remind me of the timescales being
talked about for the couple of nuclear power stations we might one day
get round to building? Then, of course, there's the political
implications of building even those couple, let alone 70 more...

when its costing you a quid a mile to run the diesel and 2p for the
electric, its amazing how fast peoples objections will disappear...

IIRC the timescale for nuclear power station building is as much down to
the availability of the boys who can do it as planning laws.

..even to maybe coal fired stations.

wince

A 5000 mile a year driver is probably going to save about a grand on
motoring costs by going electric. £750 on fuel and about £150 on the
service. Oh and there are tax implications too IIRC. Whether the battery
depreciation will match IC car depreciation is a moot point, but at
least with a battery car a second hand model probably is fixable with
just one thing - a reconditioned battery - rather then the zillion
little things that can go badly wrong with an IC car.

Given that the only inherent mechanical difference between a battery
electric car and an IC car is the removal of the nice reliable engine and
gearbox and replacement with an electric motor and battery pack, you'll
find that the "zillion little things that can go badly wrong" (which,
these days, are mainly in the multiplexed electronics and safety systems)
are still there in exactly the same form. Very few cars are scrapped
because of terminal engine or transmission wear.

OTOH, there was an example of one of the few recent "realistic" battery
electric production vehicles on fleaBay a year or two back - a Berlingo
electric van. Only about 4-5yo, and low mileage, an equivalent diesel van
would have been worth several thousand pounds, probably about 40% of the
value of a new one.

The electric didn't sell, at a very low opening price of a couple of
hundred quid, despite having been considerably more expensive new. Why?
Because it "only" needed a new battery pack - the parts for which were/
are available, but cost around twice the price of a NEW diesel Berlingo.
I have no doubt that it was eventually broken for the many bits common
with the diesel.