Electric Vehicles: Pricing the Poor out of Personal Transport.

First, let me state where I'm coming from om this blog. I've driven cars since 1991. Since that time I've never paid more that £2500 for a car. I've always bought used and the prices have ranged from £175 for a Little Red Fiat Uno back in the early naughties to £2500 for my current Lexus RX300 4x4 luxo-barge.

The wife recently made noises about wanting a car of her own, and I started looking at cheap small cars for her. Given that tons and cities around the country are looking to ban diesel and eventually petrol carts, I started looking and elderly Hybrids like the 1st gen. Toyota Prius. It seems the Prius is holding it's value well, no doubt buoyed by scarcity and the demand in London for use within the ULEZ.

Elderly, high mileage Prius'are fetching well over a grand, even cars with worn out batteries, because even though it spends most of it's time on the petrol engine, it's still a hybrid right? So Hybrids were out. In the end with nothing environmentally acceptable, I went for a £300 quid Hyundai Getz. Not a bad little car as it turns out. Reminds me of the Uno, but even at 1.3L  a little more gutless that the 999cc Uno. I assume because of the safety gubbins installed in the car and the automatic gearbox sapping the power.

But the price of used Prius' got me thinking about the prices and availability of cheap electric cars when all the internal combustion cars die off.

As a start, lets look at my "Typical" shitbox car: over 100K miles, over 10 years old.

Now, transferring that to electric cars, first off the mileage isn't that much of an issue because I'm sure the powertrain will be capable of doing that sort of mileage.

The thing that would worry me is like the Prius, the battery. Unlike the Prius with it's petrol engine, an EV is totally reliant on the battery and batteries have a finite number of charge cycles and have a lifespan limited by previous usage.

There are plenty of Nissan leafs out there with knackered batteries already, because Nissan designed the battery without any temperature management. I'm not sure I want an EV with a sub-50 mile range.

So straight away there is a dillemma. I could buy an EV that no-one will touch with a sub-optimal battery, but that would cost more than a grand to replace. So straight away we're well over the grand or two that I'd pay for a IC-engined snotter.

I could go for a EV that has a lease battery. But then I'm paying endless payments to the manufacturer in order to guarantee range. Unlike a comparable ICE car.

It strikes me that anyone with my car buying power is going to struggle to get into EVs. Either buying a car that needs a 5 grand battery, or hopefully a recon battery for half that. Maybe the aftermarket will eventually cut in with cheap Chinese batteries :-)

Or I buy a car with a lease battery and pay endless payments and hope the manufacturer continues to support that model of EV 15, 20 or 25 years into the future. With their previous track record, I have the feeling that EVs are going to expire not due to the car wearing out, but the reluctance of manufacturers to keep supplying batteries.

I think the era of cheap personal transport is coming to an end. It's a shame that progress yet again excludes the poor.

Yes they can get buses and trains, but in the past 50 years we've had the option to use them or the car. In future I think car ownership for the poor won't be an option.

And that, to me is not progress.