The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The electric car is a dream for townies only
The ecofriendly runabout is easy to flog to a trendy urbanite – less so to a country bumpkin faced with rain-lashed rural roads and long distances
Tests on the range of electric cars by magazine have shown that the eternal question posed by the nippers in the back seat – “Daddy, when will we get there?” – should now be changed to, “Daddy, will we get there?” To which the answer seems to be a definitive, “No darling, I’m afraid we won’t.”
Electric car after electric car, be it Lexus, VW or Volvo, displayed range distances (that is, were driven round a track until they literally conked out) that were a third less than their makers claimed.
And it’s another marketing disaster to beset a product that appears to be all dream-like talk and little practical upside. Governments want to brainwash us into converting to them.
The electric car promises a great deal. Zero emissions, energy efficiency, low fuel costs, tax incentives to purchase and very little, if any, noise pollution. Add this to the original dream of the car – freedom – and the attraction is tantalising. And this is particularly so if you’re a country dweller, like me. For the electric car seems designed for someone like me, a family like mine. We take trains for long distances, the kids go for free, they can run up and down aisles, we can enjoy the countryside rushing past together and play games and read.
Travelling solo on a direct train ride from Taunton to Edinburgh offers over seven hours of blissful uninterrupted writing. (My wife would train it to Paxos to avoid airports and sleazy jets if it were practical.) And so we use the car to nip around West Somerset for typical round-trips of around 30 miles. Folk like us use the car for the school run, for shopping trips, to see friends, to drag a horse trailer to the meet and to drive to A&E when our bodies turn to mould because of the incessant rain and damp. We are surely the vision of the future electric-car-owning family.
However, we learnt a harsh and costly lesson when the turbo on our old Range Rover seized up. Apparently because such cars need frequent long drives to keep them clean and free of oomska, and thus it was rendered a write-off.
So we won’t worry if the actual range of a Volkswagen ID.7 Pro is 254 (versus the claim of 383) or the mileage of a Lexus UX 300e is 170, while the promise is 273 – as determined by the latest What Car? magazine test. We’ve no intention of going that far in a car.
Yet in my patch, I can think of almost no one who owns such a vehicle, and I have never seen one in the local town. Although there are plenty of charging points in West Somerset. They are easy to spot because that’s where you find the gaps in the local car parks. They’re reserved for the electric car-owning elite. Which doesn’t exist.
Very few Somerset drivers seem to have one. Except for the trendy London types who swarm around Bruton at the weekends. They’ve got them, of course. Because they’re metropolitan numpties. They have them for the same reason as residents of London SW3 own the cars they lent their name to: Chelsea Tractors.
They’re cool and trendy and they wear their eco-values on the sleeves of their mud-less Schoffels. But, knowing the limitations of electric cars, they still purchase them, sit stationary in traffic for a two-mile school run or office commute, but mainly don’t use them at all and simply pay vast amounts for a parking permit. And then they throw all their shooting gear and dog into them and drive to Aberdeenshire. Which they can’t get to on a single charge, so they end up bunking for the night at a service station at Scotch Corner because, at their friend’s posh gaff in Northumberland, there isn’t a charging point.
An all-electric future is an easy sell to the urbanite because they’re not blighted by the cold slap in the face of reality that we face day-in, day-out. The weather doesn’t matter in a city, your trainers won’t get soiled if you step out of the house, the roads to school don’t get blocked by snow-drifts or floods, and if the power goes down at home you can just spill out of the house and fall into the pub opposite.
Yet the electric car salesmen seem to have given up or ignored us. They don’t parade their vehicles in the town square, or knock on our doors, or put leaflets in our letter boxes or take out ads in the Western Daily Press. But perhaps that’s because they know we just simply can’t afford them. The average cost of a new electric car is £50,000. The average cost of a new, non-electric multi-purpose vehicle is £28,000.
I’ve read that cold weather sucks the life out of the batteries, rendering them near-dead if you try to defrost a windscreen on a cold morning. And only the most powerful and eyewateringly expensive ones can tow a trailer. Then there are the simple miseries that go with an electric car.
When you get home in the countryside, you switch off the ignition and then all belt from the car to the house (that’s October to April, without exception). It’s bad enough dragging the bins out and down the hill to the main road at night, but the idea of grappling with cables as the Exmoor rain hoses one down brings a tear to my eye at the very thought.
I would go electric but the transition is a bumpy and expensive road that could ruin me long before the seas boil up and consume us. Before long our sole-surviving car, the Tiguan, will give up the ghost. Then we’ll be scratching round, not for an electric car and an additional monthly payment plan, but an old banger that can get us to Taunton and back.
And it’ll fit right into all my other normal, but doubtless shameful, accoutrements: an oil-fired boiler, always-on electric Aga, diesel-powered space blower for the supper club tent, gas hob and oven in the adjoining kitchen. Not to mention the fossil-fuel power stations that keep our lights on and the diesel fuelled GWR trains that get me out of West Somerset and back to the joyful fantasy land that is London.