There's another issue with running an EV for many people which was created by Tony Blair's Government in the early 2000's, and that is the restriction on parking spaces for new build homes.
In order to reduce the number of vehicles on our roads due to environmental concerns, that administration decided to limit parking on new-build developments built from 2004 onwards to 1.6 spaces per household.
The reasoning was: if the plebian classes had nowhere to park, we'd all give up our cars and use the integrated network of public transport to satisfy our travel needs. Ha ha ha ha ha. Stop it, I'll wet me'self.
That's fine if your idea of public transport is a chauffuer driven Jag on call 24-7 at the taxpayers' expense (I'm looking at you, John Prescott), but it's less convenient if you live in a rural part of the country and work early, late and night shifts in a Hospital or Police Station twelve miles away from your house, which was the position for my wife and I and many of our countryside dwelling neighbours.
LIke many rural Towns and villages, we have no bus services at all and, although we have a railway station, the trains don't run if you start or finish your shift during unsocial hours, which is common.
We live in a house on a medium sized housing estate which was built between 2002 and 2005. We're lucky, our house was completed in September 2003 before the parking restriction was applied and every house in our street, ranging from two-bed semis to four bed detached, has at least two off-road parking spaces and most have a garage. We have six spaces - a double garage takes two and our double width drive can comfortably accommodate four more.
That means we could all plug at least two EV's into an outside wall socket for an overnight charge without having to trail the leads across public rights of way.
For many of us, then, an EV might make sense once the price comes down. If your daily commute is only 40 to 60 miles round trip and you can charge up at home, you don't need a charger en-route or at your workplace, you just top up when you get home and everything is rosy.
100 metres further into the estate, however, the houses were constructed under the new regulations, so 1.6 spaces per household on average. The issue is that the developer carried on building the same styles of property as in our phase, so there are lots more four and five bed houses with four or more parking spaces. That means for each one of those, at least two properties couldn't have a space, and there are indeed rows and rows of terraced houses with no off-street parking at all. The result is that every inch of the pavement through most of the estate has cars and vans parked on it on both sides of the road (which is very narrow by design as a 'traffic calming' measure). This makes it extremely hazardous for pedestrians and vehicles alike to navigate through the jam of parked vehicles and looks extremely unsightly.
How the hell are all those vehicles going to get charged up at home if they have to trail a lead across the pavement? How many law suits will be launched for injuries caused by trips and falls over the cables? How many times will people get up in the morning and find that their cable has been unplugged by mischievous young scallywags, or serruptitiously plugged into someone else's EV overnight leaving insufficient range in their car to get to work?
Is the future is electric? Not round here it isn't.
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