Why the electric car will turn out to be a boon for the over-55s
I NOTE with interest W Thomson’s letter (August 23) on the over-55s and electric vehicles (EVs). I am 69 and we have a Renault Zoe. We have a charger in the drive provided free of charge. Our last charge cost an off-peak expenditure of around £3 and yielded a range of 191 miles and this occurred as we slumbered peacefully in our bed. No more trawling for filling stations for us.
Over-55s like us should be attracted to EVs as we generally find we do less long journeys than prior to retirement, although the above range will take us, if we desire, from Laurencekirk to well south of Glasgow or north of Inverness. Besides which, my bladder tends to be the range I have most interest in nowadays.
A quick trawl of the excellent ChargeMaster app informs me that Aberdeen has 27 charge points, Dundee 35, Dunfermline 13, Falkirk 9, Glasgow 89 and Edinburgh 67. The vast majority of these are free to use and available 24 hours a day. I suspect that for some of these places charging points now outnumber filling stations, which are closing down at a steady rate. In addition we are registered with PlugShare, this app guides us to private homes who are willing to lend their charger (and no doubt loo) to fellow EV drivers.
We live in Laurencekirk; there is no filling station within a 10-mile radius but who cares, we charge either at home or at the council chargers at the bottom of the road. They are also free.
In order to balance demand it is proposed to use the batteries of idle EVs to give as well as receive. I am all for that as it will shave the demand peaks and troughs. Plus of course, advances in solar panels and home battery storage systems mean I may well be completely selfsufficient before I pop my clogs.
Futurists speculate with authority that there will be no industrial power stations in the future. As with brewing, it will be micro, with the aforementioned solar arrays and home battery systems (as sold by Ikea, Tesla and others) replacing them. EV batteries also have a life beyond propulsion and are increasingly used to even out grids when they are no longer in vehicles.
Our last petrol car cost about 13p a mile to fuel, the Zoe less than three, plus we pay zero road tax. Servicing is also vastly less expensive as an EV has fewer than 100 moving parts compared to the thousands in an internal combustion vehicle.
I trust this will allay some of the fears and burst a few misconceptions about electric cars. And I haven’t even mentioned the health benefits to pedestrians.
Ian M Forrest,
Garvock Road, Laurencekirk.