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Transportation United Kingdom

More Than 500,000 Full Electric Cars Sold So Far This Year In Europe (theguardian.com) 314

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Carmakers have sold more than 500,000 battery electric cars in Europe during 2020, a milestone in the automotive industry's move away from fossil fuels. Sales of all plug-in cars, including hybrids, have surpassed 1m during the year in the UK and the largest 17 European markets, according to data collated by Schmidt Automotive Research. During the whole of last year only 354,000 battery electric sales were recorded across the region.

In the UK, the sale of new cars that run solely on petrol or diesel will be banned in 2030 -- although new hybrids will be legal until 2035. Other countries including France and Norway have also introduced plans to ban new internal combustion engines over varying timeframes. However, the car industry still faces a steep uphill journey away from fossil fuels. Total UK and European new car sales in the year to October were 13.3m, the vast majority of which had petrol and diesel engines, which are expected to be more profitable than battery cars until about 2024.

British consumers bought more than 75,000 electric cars in the year to October, well over double the sales in the previous year, plus another 50,000 plug-in hybrids, but the UK market share of battery electric cars was still only 5.5%. Data for the whole of November will be published on Friday. None of the 10 most popular cars in the UK in 2020 have been electric, although some are available as hybrid or plug-in hybrid models, such as the Mercedes A-Class.

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More Than 500,000 Full Electric Cars Sold So Far This Year In Europe

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  • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:41PM (#60792484)

    And how many empty ones?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      We don't know yet, the buyers haven't finished charging them.

    • All cars are empty when they sell it. The brochure clearly says, "occupants not included".
  • by sunami88 ( 1074925 ) on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:52PM (#60792524)
    So far this year? It's December.
  • Norway leads Europe in electric vehicle sales, in absolute numbers, and by an order of magnitude in domestic market share.
    All made possible by government subsidies and personal wealth, both funded by oil exports, and guilt from that.
    Like Alfred Nobel funding his peace prize from the family weapons factory and dynamite.

    Hopefully, soon, fleet buyers and ordinary people will be able to buy these cars without subsidy. A carbon tax could help.

    • carbon taxes are a subsidy.

      500,000 electric cars out of 313 million, essentially zero electric cars in Europe. What a farce. People will buy them when they're good enough.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        carbon taxes are a subsidy.

        Letting people emit carbon without paying for the damage (externalities [wikipedia.org]) is effectively a subsidy.
        One way or another, we subsidise most transport and energy.

      • The installed base is not so important. More interestingly itâ(TM)s 500K battery-only and 1M+ incl plug in hybrids on 13.3M new cars in 2020. Which shows an important incumbent trend, also because currently battery powered cars are usually still among the expensive cars on the market. I think that next year the % may well double.
      • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        People talk about carbon taxes as if subsidies are something they don't support, yet their gas prices are largely a function of the fact that the fossil fuel industry takes the biggest slice of subsidies on the planet:

        https://www.imf.org/en/Publica... [imf.org]

        And is largely given a free pass from having to pay for the massive costs involved in reducing the damage they cause.

  • by wyattstorch516 ( 2624273 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:10AM (#60792746)
    Not everybody has a place to plug it in. What if you live in an apartment? Odds are the lot/garage/street location where you park your car doesn't have a recharging station. They talk about building recharging stations but how long is that going to take in order to move the majority of cars to electric?

    The problem is most acute in cites which incidentally are the best places to drive an electric car.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In countries with high levels of EV adoption car parks are wired up for EV charging. Every space has at least a 3kW charge point, often 7kW shared between a 2-3 bays.

      Streets get posts all along them, RFID based, charged back to your home electricity bill.

    • by Mouldy ( 1322581 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:13AM (#60793060)
      The city I live in is pretty much exclusively on-street parking. Practically nobody has private parking. The local government's solution to provide plenty of charging locations is to convert street lights.

      This works very well because;
      - Street lights are everywhere
      - Street lights are next to the road, where anyone can park to charge
      - Street lights & their supporting electrical infrastructure generally has a lot of spare capacity for the demands of high-power electrical devices. This might seem unexpected, but it pretty much comes down to; the electrical infrastructure was built to support old-fashioned inefficient light fittings that have since been replaced, leaving some head room in the underlying infrastructure. The LED replacements use around 35% less energy - that's energy that can be used to charge cars instead without needing to upgrade the entire electrical infrastructure.

      They're still rolling it out, most streets only have a handful of charging locations so far - but given most the city is still using petrol/diesel at the moment, that seems reasonable.
      • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:23AM (#60793082) Homepage

        The city I live in (London) has no on-street parking - it's illegal.

        Almost everybody has private or allocated parking.

        There are eight street lights in my road, and approximately 50+ cars.

        The entire row of street lights do not have the backend power capacity to supply even one electric car. You're tallking complete retro-fit of every streetlight, times by about 10. Imagine the roadworks, upheaval, substation upgrade, etc. necessary to support that.

        My suburb of 100,000 people (if you're British, you'll have heard of it) has precisely 12 charging spaces in the entire town. Three are in a library or government building that closes overnight. Half are just a simple 13A wall plug (slow-charge). Some of the rest are private spaces for company employees.

        There is a LONG, LONG road to go before anyone gets close to having the infrastructure for everyone to have an electric car.

        P.S. I live in an apartment (flat!). The allocated private parking spaces are in darkness because the land owner ran no utility power and so refuses to provide even a single 5W LED lamp to stop you falling over in the dark when you go between your car and flat. And you think he's going to stump up for dozens of car chargers in the private spaces?

        P.P.S. it's illegal for me to trail a cable out of my flat to charge my theoretical electric car, as it crosses a public pavement and would dangle down across someone's front garden, window and the only entrance/exit to their property.

        • London is addressing the problem of power distribution:

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/... [bbc.co.uk]

          As other have mentioned, street light conversion is an option if supported by this infrastructure going into place.

          In the future, driveways and street parking with access to charging will influence house and rental prices. I'd want somewhere with decent internet access, preferably a home working office, and somewhere to charge my car. If I lived (now) without the latter, or the scope for it, I'd be considering moving b

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If everyone has private or allocated parking then it seems pretty straight forward to get those spots wired up.

          Remember when Cable & Wireless installed cable TV back in the day? Had the pavements up, cables to every house in the street. Well you can get cables out to the side of the road as well. There's lots of trunking there already, upgrades are possible.

          It's all perfectly doable and a worthwhile investment since the infrastructure will be good for many decades.

          Landlords will either install charging

      • the LED replacements use around 35% less energy
        No. The do not use 35% less.
        They use less than 35% of the original energy. Actually: something around 7%.

    • Indeed. People just won't learn from history. This is exactly the same problem that prevented the adoption of electric lighting. How many houses had access to electricity? For anyone with two functioning brain cells, it should have been an obvious non-starter, but some people just need to fail to see the problem.
    • by shilly ( 142940 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:48AM (#60793132)

      Only one quarter of the UK's cars are parked on the street. Dedicated bollards and lamp-post chargers are being installed and the cost is under £5k because it's 3 or 7kW, not more. And obviously chargers are also being installed in shop car parks, work car parks, etc etc too. Electricity is ubiquitous. It will take years to build the infrastructure, but it will take years to move to 80+% adoption, so it's fine.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      What if you live in an apartment?

      You apply to the local government to have a charging spot put in your street. I don't understand is this not a thing in America? Are your governments that backwards that you can't get charging infrastructure installed with ease?

    • by bazorg ( 911295 )

      Not everybody has a place to plug it in. What if you live in an apartment?

      I don't see this as a hurdle for adopting low emission vehicles. I see this as the fundamental reason why some people will have battery powered electrical vehicles and some will have hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles.

      For a long time in Europe the diesel powered cars have coexisted with petrol and liquefied gas powered cars, which have completely different optimal use profiles and efficiency. The same can happen with non-ICE options.

      Also it will not be the first time that the guy who owns a big house and h

  • I love the way UK and Europe is already separated in the figures despite the EU != Europe as a definition and the UK is still in the EU until the end of the year.

    Funny every map I have of Europe shows the UK as part of it and it will still be there in 2021. Even Russia and that's never been part of the EU.

    • could be that its only us that drives on the correct side of the road in Europe :)
    • by Mouldy ( 1322581 )
      The UK is not in the EU & hasn't been since 31 Jan 2020.
      It is not listed by the EU as a member: https://europa.eu/european-uni... [europa.eu]
      And it is not listed by the UK as a member: https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea [www.gov.uk]

      The UK + EU relationship right now is in a transition period where the UK is not part of the EU but is still bound by some EU laws/standards/conventions. In Jan 2021, that agreement will end and be replaced by whatever the politicians are currently arguing over.

      You're correct to say that the EU !
  • My worst nightmare is having to stop at a place in the middle of nowhere where they know you are captive for at least 30 minutes to charge; maybe more once you are done waiting. They will see it as another opportunity to sell you overpriced shitty food at the "they have no choice" price level. I can see the line up of crappy magazine racks and tourist traps, with nowhere really comfortable to go unless you are buying something.
    • I'm not saying that won't happen, but if it does, then another charging station will open up the street which is different.

      In the USA I can foresee charging stations being added to rest areas. And hopefully, more rest areas being created...

    • That's your worst nightmare? Really? Because you have a shitty imagination.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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