The motoring industry is at a tipping point. In March, British motorists bought more electric cars than they did throughout the entirety of 2019. At this rate, electric cars are set to become the most popular type by 2025. This will come ahead of a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, which will bite in 2030.
To get to a future where everyone’s driving electric, however, certain technical obstacles will need to be overcome. Among these is the availability of reliable charging infrastructure. We’ll need to have fewer petrol and diesel filling stations, and more rapid-charging points. This will help to eliminate the so-called ‘range anxiety’ which has dissuaded so many would-be electric motorists from making the switch.
To address this problem, the government has announced a plan to increase the number of charging points tenfold before 2030 gets here. This will mean 300,000 public charging points. For comparison, there are less than 10,000 traditional filling stations in the UK today.
This new investment weighs in at around £1.6 billion altogether. £500m of this is earmarked for the construction of reliable public charge-points. There’s also a ‘rapid charging fund’ which is there to create 6,000 rapid charging stations on British motorways before 2035. Charging on motorways is particularly important – as there’s less time available to wait around for slow charging facilities to top the battery up.
These developments come on the back of complaints by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which last month called publicly for investment in charging infrastructure.
Of course, the electric vehicle isn’t a panacea for our climate-related woes. By necessity, EVs involve the production of a very large lithium-ion battery, the production of which involves the extraction of costly rare-earth minerals. They’re very energy intensive to create – which dampens some of the enthusiasm around the technology.
With that said, the technology is improving constantly. Over the last decade, prices of these batteries have fallen by around 85%. It’s this reduction that’s made the electric car viable for the first time. This reduction is widely anticipated to continue into the 2020s, which is why governments are pushing so hard to make a change – they can see that the tipping point is coming. The development of the lithium-ion battery has been so transformative, in fact, that the inventors of the technology were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize in 2019.
Beyond the next decade, we might see further development in the niche. With wind and solar providing only intermittent renewable power, the development of new and better energy storage solutions has never been more important. Updating our transport networks is just a part of the required solution.
