Electric dreams? Utopia or dystopia – Herald Scotland

LAST week's announcement that new petrol and diesel cars will be banned in the UK by 2040 might have come as a surprise to many car enthusiasts but do fan boys dream of electric cars? And is an electric future really all it's cracked up to be? We look at the pros and cons for the future of motoring.

So you've swapped your old gas guzzler for an environmentally friendly electric car: you can give yourself a gold star for your ethical choices, right? Not so fast. Last year Amnesty International raised concerns that leading electric car makers General Motors (GM), Renault-Nissan and Tesla had failed to disclose the steps they are taking to ensure that cobalt mined by child labourers as young as seven in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is not used in their batteries. "Electric cars may not be as clean as you would think," says Mark Dummett, researcher at Amnesty International. "Customers need to be aware that their green cars could be linked to the misery of child labourers in the Democratic Republic of Congo." Analysts are also expecting a 100-fold increase in the production of lithium, the key component of electric car batteries, much of which comes from South America, particularly Chile and Bolivia places not known for their sparkling record on workers' rights.

Silence: golden or deadly?

This brave new world of motoring is virtually silent. No combustion engine means that typical engine noise is substituted for the benign hum of the electric motor. According to Which Car: "It makes for an eerily quiet, but ultimately relaxing, drive."

But Rodney Kumar, of road safety charity IAM Roadsmart, says it might also mean that we have to rethink road safety. As he points out, we're used to listening as well as looking; a key safety message that doesn't hold when it comes to the electric car. "People need to be aware that they won't hear what they can see," he says. "We might need to bring road safety back into schools too so that children are able to learn how to react."

Robo-mobile

In the next 20 years cars are likely to become autonomous, indeed Tesla's Elon Musk says all his cars come equipped with the hardware needed to drive themselves. "Wouldnt it be handy if your electric car could drive itself to a near charging station while you slept, and returned ready for the next morning?" said a member of the Which Car team. "The technology were already glimpsing today, most famously from Tesla, may make that possible in the future, but naturally were a long way from that becoming publicly available."

Electric buses are likely to go the same way, especially as low-emission zones become more widespread. Meanwhile Volkswagens research group this month announced that it was working on a "mobile charging robot prototype" why get out of the car to connect it to the charger when the machines can do it for you?

Grid lock or renewable revolution?

The experts are agreed that if half of the UK's cars went electric tomorrow, the National Grid would not cope. But it's claimed there are solutions. According to Michael Rieley of Scottish Renewables, renewable energy has a part to play and Scotland has the wind and wave power to be an important part of that solution. Ian Crowther of the AA agrees. "There needs to be investment in carbon-neutral power generation," he says, claiming just half a dozen solar panels could potentially charge your car for free.

Range rovers

So far most electric cars don't have the range that most drivers are looking for. Though the Nissan Leaf, first launched in 2010 has a range of between 70-100 miles, most mass-market electric cars have slightly more, while Renault's recently launched Zoe again fully electric has a range of 250km and cars such as Teslas electric vehicles can run for 334 miles.

Though it doesn't yet compete with the 400-500 miles a petrol or diesel car would run before having to fill up, that is set to change, according to Chris Lilly, content manager of Next Green Car. "In the last 18 months we've seen the range of electric cars increase by about 50 per cent and I would expect that rise to continue," he says. For those who can't handle so-called "range anxiety" there's always the hybrid car, allowing petrol to take over when the charge runs low.

Volvo has recently announced that all their cars will be electric or hybrid from 2019 and, according to Which Cars, pure electric cars will be ubiquitous within the next decade.

Charging solutions

Currently charging is not exactly quick and easy; on a home plug socket it can take all day or night, while standard council chargers allow access for two to three hours, which should allow you to get home. As Kumar of IAM Roadsmart points out, if each car takes three hours at a charging point, just eight cars in one 24-hour period could use it. "We'd need to move pretty fast on improving the infrastructure if we were going to avoid logjams," he says. But Lilly claims that faster charging is well within our sights, with super-charge points already capable of charging car battery within the hour and ultra-fast chargers now being rolled out elsewhere in Europe. It's only a matter of time before petrol stations start installing them too, he argues.

He admits that for those without off-street parking, home charging is tricky. Cables leading across pavements pose "a health and safety nightmare", he adds. But some London lampposts have already had charge points installed and "induction" charging is being trialled, which means you simply have to park over a charge point set in the road and the car charges using the same technology as your electric toothbrush.

The AA is already planning to include charging points on its app and route planners, though it points out other maps such as the ZapMap also exist: just put in your destination and the car decides how much charge is left and identifies chargers en-route.

Cost considerations

In terms of upfront costs, electric cars are still generally more expensive than conventional ones though Telsa's latest Model 3, at 26,650, is pitched as an "affordable", mass-market family vehicle. Renault and Nissan are also getting around the costs by offering deals where buyers lease the battery. For example, the UKs best-selling electric, the Nissan Leaf, is 16,680 with the battery on lease for a monthly fee, rising to 21,680 if you buy the battery outright.

The electric version of the Golf, the e-Golf, will cost you 32,190 to buy (or 27,690 after the government grant for plug-in vehicles is applied) that's 9k more than the petrol version.

They are, however, very cheap to run. Travelling 100 miles in an electric car will cost 3-4 depending on energy tariffs, compared with 15 in a petrol car and grants of 75 per cent of the cost of a home charger are available. Also, since April this year, only zero-emission vehicles like electric are exempt from paying car tax.

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Electric dreams? Utopia or dystopia - Herald Scotland