IT was after pulling into the third service station on an increasingly stressful hunt for power this weekend that I decided owning an electric vehicle right now was a BAD IDEA.
I mean, they’re nice and everything. They mostly have super-sleek space-age designs with more onboard tech than Elon Musk’s man cave.
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And the sprinty Volkswagen I was testing for our Motors pages was like a rocket — 0-60mph in just over five seconds but with all the noise of a gentle gust of wind on a summer’s day.
Yet despite all this, EVs also have one massive problem, which comes as standard on all models.
Unless the bloody thing is charged, you’re screwed and will just end up as the coolest-looking loser on the hard shoulder.
But Britain’s EV infrastructure is a joke.
On a trip up the M1, I was left with the tightest sphincter in Christendom as I discovered that charger after charger was either occupied, broken or . . . non- existent.
Even when you do find a charger that’s working, some are 90p per kWh and more, which works out more expensive than petrol.
It got so bad, my fancy satnav refused to guide me to my destination without including an “essential charging stop” — that would have taken me longer to get to than my actual destination.
If “Britain’s first full-length motorway”, the M1, cannot cope with the existing number of EVs on the road, what hope do we have of convincing everyone to switch to them?
So it is no wonder the car manufacturers are livid about the mandates on them to ensure EV car sales make up 22 per cent of their sales, and ten per cent for vans.
They have now blown a gasket and insisted the targets — for which they receive a huge £15,000 fine for every vehicle outside the mandates — should be relaxed in order to reflect actual sales.
In the past year, 18.1 per cent of all new car sales were electric.
While sales are up, people just aren’t buying enough EVs to fulfil the mandates, even with massive discounts of up to a third in recent months.
Citroen slashed £15,000 off the price of one of its DS3 models last month. Why not? It would only have to pay that if it didn’t sell enough of them.
No wonder that the boss of Citroen’s parent company Stellantis, Carlos Tavares, has slammed the mandate as “terrible”.
The firm is now “strategically reviewing” its UK operations.
I can’t imagine that it will be the only one.
And it will only get worse as the targets get more demanding, year after year.
It becomes 28 per cent of car sales next year and by 2030 it will be 80 per cent, five years shy of the 2035 target for banning all petrol and diesel sales.
Of course, EV charging points are being added every year. As of last month, there were nearly 109,000 connectors in 36,000 locations.
Yet it is a far cry from the amount needed to adequately cater for the already 1.3million fully electric vehicles that are on the road.
Missed weddings
And the majority of these are slow-charge, which can take up to 36 hours.
Compare that to the minute spent filling a tank of petrol or diesel.
The Government is ploughing £1billion into getting more rapid chargers, that give you up to 100 miles’ worth of power in under half an hour, but it is already missing its targets.
Unveiling its strategy, it declared: “We will ensure every motorway service area has at least six rapid chargers by the end of 2023, with some having more than 12.”
But by the target date, less than half — 46 of 119 — had six or more high-powered chargers, according to RAC data.
The Department for Transport also admitted that four per cent of motorway service stations had NO charging facilities.
Analysts say that the Government’s bid to have 300,000 public chargers by 2030 looks very unrealistic unless the number of charging points being rolled out DOUBLES.
Meanwhile, punters with EVs will continue to share horror stories about being caught short, missing weddings and funerals, and generally losing the will to live, as they fail to find a charger.
If the Government — hell bent on its green targets — genuinely does want to get cars that are po- wered by fossil fuels taken off the roads, then it must make sure it hits its own targets before it fines other people for missing theirs.
Fare play not what it was in Jim’s day
IT is nice to see the revamped Bullseye aiming high with its wishlist of celebrity contestants.
Peter Kay would make a super-smashing-great non-darts player and no doubt channel the avuncular vibes of the show’s former host, and his fellow Lancastrian, the late Jim Bowen.
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But I fear ITV’s budget is already being stretched elsewhere.
In Jim’s day, if you didn’t win anything, you’d at least be given your “bus fare home”.
Now that Labour has whacked up fares by a whopping 50 per cent, there may be nothing left for Kay’s legendary pay demands.
Stop gravy train
BRITAIN’S trains may not run on time but one thing does run like clockwork – union demands for strike action.
Pulling into Avarice Central this week is a threat by conductors on the TransPennine Express, one of Britain’s tardiest train services, to down tools over plans to introduce more handheld ticket scanners.
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Conductors claim this will see them reduced to just scanning e-tickets rather than flogging fares on board. It matters to them because they earn SIX PER CENT in commission from every ticket they shift.
Yes, you read that right. Conductors already earning £31,000 are given more cash for selling tickets for trains they are paid to police ticket sales on.
Pug-faced RMT boss Mick Lynch is outraged and wants his members to get a “new technology payment”.
With a Labour government in power, I’m sure he’ll get some more largesse from his pals.
But the fact remains, new technology will help fix our decrepit railways.
Paying never-ending ransoms to stuck-in-the-past unions will not.
Gray area
WHILE we’re on the subject of greed, how sick are you of hearing about Sue Gray?
There was a time when none of us had heard of her. But now she seems to hog the headlines.
After being jettisoned as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Suebiquitous, as she must henceforth be known, was offered a job as regions envoy.
I’m not quite sure what that role entailed but I think it had something to do with not being anywhere near a Downing Street workforce that seems to now detest her.
Anyway, the salary she wanted was more than the PM’s £172,000 a year.
Thankfully, she has been blocked from the job.
But what exactly are the apparently amazing skills of the woman who double-crossed one PM (Boris Johnson) then got sacked by another?
Answers on a postcard.
A reyt royal riddle
EY up, ’as thou ’eard about Richard III?
Apparently, ’e ’ad a reyt Yorkshire accent.
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OK, I’ll stop now.
But according to vocal coach Yvonne Morley-Chisholm, the 15th-century monarch did sound like a Yorkshireman.
She’s spent a decade looking into how the man who hailed from Northamptonshire might have spoken.
Now, she may be correct. But I feel sure that’s about as God’s Own Country as he ever got.
Let’s not forget his famous cry: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”
And no true Yorkshireman would ever be that generous.
Store gore
DALE VINCE, the former New Age traveller who now fills Labour’s coffers with cash (and their heads with wacky eco ideas) has come up with a new zinger.
He reckons cigarette- style health horror warnings should be slapped on bacon.
Kale-chomping Dale says because the porcine treat has been linked to cancer, stupid consumers should be presented with the “truth” about what it will do to you.
OK, but where does it end, Dale?
So many foodstuffs have been found to have some link to cancer – from dairy products causing prostate disease to salted fish giving you stomach cancer.
If we applied the same logic to all potentially carcinogenic nasties, the Tesco aisles would start looking like a scene from Hellraiser.
WOKE mayhem #378.
I spotted a new record shop in Camden, North London last week.
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Raven Records is a proud heavy-metal store – and more power to it in an age when streaming Spotify and iTunes rules the soundwaves.
But what’s this? An “alcohol-free bar”?
Lemmy will be turning in his grave.
