 In some far east countries like this, specifically in China and India, the air quality is absolutely terrible. The fumes are not just from the vehicles by the way, it's often because they have industries within the city. But something we can do in the UK is try to reduce our air pollution in the big cities. But there's no doubt about it. Cars are an essential part of our lifestyle. And whilst driving through cities like this may be nice, now what we're doing really, there's no doubt, is polluting. People have to breathe in what our car puts out. And we would really like to escape that. So imagine a city with all electric vehicles, EVs, even trucks. It would be much quieter and non-polluting. And really this must be the aim. But how practical is it? How sensible is it? And one thing is certain, you cannot trust governments to put in sensible policies. And this is what this episode is about. We will first explode some myths to do with electric cars. The biggest problem people have is called range anxiety. Will they get to where they want to go? Will the battery run out? Well, just to tell you, these days with lead companies, and there is really one company way ahead of the rest called Tesla, they're offering ranges of 350 miles or so, and some of them almost 400 miles. And they're being extended. However, range as defined here does not mean you can drive that far. It's just a standard test where you can compare the models. When it comes to the actual range you're going to get, let's just put a few factors in here. Your only source of energy is the battery. So when you turn the windscreen wipers on, you drain the battery more. On a cold day, if you've got your windscreen wipers on and your heater on, then that really drains the battery faster. Or in the summer where they're conditioning on, that drains the battery faster. So the actual range you're going to get may be only half, or even in extreme cases, less than half of the declared range here. And that has to be factored in, especially in the UK. You will often see figures like this. People travel less than one mile, 24% of journeys less than one mile. People travel one to two miles, 18% of journeys, and people travel 10 to 25 miles, some 12% of journeys. But all those short journeys normally would require a return trip. So for a start, we can double the distances. So it's very easy to mislead with statistics. However, we can agree that the vast majority of journeys like shopping are short distances and they're perfectly suited to electric vehicles. So what car range do we need for, say, short journeys like this? And so to leave residual and be safe, we need a car with, say, a claimed range under the standard definition of, say, 130 miles to do those journeys. And that is assuming that your car is fully charged when you leave the house. Now, if you make two or three trips in a day, that is not the case. If you don't fully charge it overnight, that is not the case. If you just come back from a long trip and then need to go on a short journey, that is not the case. So whilst a 130 mile range car would cover most of your journeys, that is really not the point. The real point is you still need a car that'll do long distance journeys as well. Otherwise, you'd have one car for short journeys and one car for long journeys. Pretty expensive thing to do to leave one car laying about a lot of the time for long journeys. The public and our needs actually demand versatility. There are, of course, all-electric cars like the Tesla Model 3 long range. I can do 348 miles as the standard distance. And so you'd be pretty safe in normal conditions of getting well over 200 miles out of it on a trip. Now, there are three significant issues we have to deal with. The first is charging. The next is the power grid. And thirdly, our batteries. We'll discuss charging first. Whilst I have no connection whatsoever with Tesla, I am going to use them throughout this video because they are way ahead of the competition at the moment. And so look into the future. Let's hope everyone else reaches their standard. As regards charging points on the road, they're distributed all over the UK and the car itself will tell you where they are and how much time you've got and so on to get there. Charging can be quite fast. And if you've got the all-electric sort of top models with the range of 300 and odd miles, that may be saying you're doing 250. Then as long as you're charging overnight or something, you're fine. But at charging points on the road, on the superchargers, you can actually fill up most of your battery inside 30 minutes and the car will even tell you when it's full on your phone so you can sit and have a coffee. Hence it's already possible to plan 500 mile trips because you know where the charging points are and they're very rapidly charging and that network will just grow. That is not the real issue with charging. The real issue is when you charge at home because your normal routine will be to arrive home from work and plug in the charger and charge overnight. Now you can't just use an ordinary 13 amp plug because it is simply too slow at charging. The car would never be charged by morning. So you've got to use something like a 7, a 13 or a 22 kilowatt charger. And what happens if you've got two cars? The typical cost of a charging point at home, it depends on the capacity, can be anything from about 700 pounds to about 2000 pounds. But there are millions of homes. They'll not be able to have any charger fitted because the power supply cannot take it without changing the distribution board and so on. Then of course there are the problems of flats and terraced houses. There are so many millions of homes that simply cannot have a charger installed. And you can't really think of putting a charger just outside your house on the pavement because there are many issues with that as well besides the incredible cost. I've even heard on thinking politicians say well you can go to your local garage which will now be a charging centre. So old honey, you have to take the car from your house and park it overnight in a garage. How big would that garage have to be? It would have to be maybe 20, 30, 40 times bigger than the current garage. And don't say well you can call into a fast charge on the way home because on the way home everyone will be doing that and there will be huge queues down each road for every garage and a half an hour's wait at the best when you get there. It does not make sense. So now we come to the second point which is the power grid. Basically there isn't enough generating power there to supply all this extra electricity so we'd have to build a lot more capacity into the system and that capacity which would have to be baseload is not being built. And now there's another problem. Even if you build a generating capacity the distribution system as it stands wouldn't cope. A typical example just take a housing estate and the capacity of the power cables go into that housing estate. If everyone's converting their petrol basically or diesel into electric power and having charging points then the actual supply to the housing estate is insufficient and so we'd have to update all the transformers, update all the distribution system. The costs are enormous and besides this by the way we'd be digging up an awful lot of your drives to put in these extra power cables. The cost of all this is huge. In all the planned cost of doing away with gas and going over to green energy in Britain is measured in the hundreds of billions of pounds and now to look at electric vehicle batteries. The batteries for the all electric cars are simply huge and heavy. They're the biggest cost of the car and they deteriorate at around about 2% per year so after five years you've lost 10% of your range and this is going to affect the second hand value as time goes on. However companies like Tesla are working on a million mile battery so maybe this will be overcome but the moment it is a significant cost of owning an electric car. But hold on. We would need to expand the world's battery production by over a thousand times. The shortages that are already occurring are just the tip of the iceberg. Nickel, an essential ingredient, takes five to seven years to open up a mine and we already have a nickel shortage. Many raw materials are going to be in short supply and their price is going to rise. This is going to be the controlling factor for the car industry getting hold of a battery. And of course the huge disposal problems down the road of these batteries are going to be tremendous. So the government's number one target here is to reduce CO2 emissions. So let's see does it meet that target. Research from Imperial College London showed that an electric car with a claimed range of over 200 piles never pays back its CO2 in its lifetime and of course these days the range is much higher than that and the battery is much more powerful. There is no chance of electric cars ever repaying their CO2 footprint. Yet in some blind zealous fashion the government just carry on with the target whilst the actual implementation of it is doing the exact opposite. So I'm afraid the government's number one target of reducing CO2 well it doesn't even hit the board. It actually increases CO2. And besides the huge disposal problems at the end of life of these batteries which have not been solved as yet the batteries themselves emit a tremendous amount of CO2. The demand on the limited resources for batteries is going to simply increase the price over time and already electric vehicles are around about 50-60% more than the average vehicle. So far I've spent about 10 minutes of your time explaining all the problems with electric vehicles. So now let's look at the solutions. Let's look in a positive manner and see how they can be used to meet our objectives. And as we start at the programme with air pollution let's see how electric vehicles can help us in those cities to reduce that air pollution dramatically. The solution is to produce hybrid cars so that they charge their own batteries when they're normally used using petrol or diesel. But when they enter a city they switch over to electric. That is the way forward. That is the way to reduce pollution in cities. It gets over the charging problem at home on all the huge costs associated with it. It gets over having to produce an awful lot of extra power generation and huge amounts of extra distribution costs and disruption. It overcomes everything and it gives us clean air. Such a vehicle could do all the short journeys to shops etc. electrically. And you could easily charge it at home using your normal 13 amp socket. It's a simple solution. It's a practical solution. And it works. And make no mistake, even this solution would squeeze the world's resources tremendously and may not be possible. It still leaves the door open for fully electric cars at the top end but not for the mass market. That is the path forward. So what has the UK government done? It actually banned them and only allowed fully electric cars in the future with all those problems. Basically the government policy is extremely expensive and it does away with the average ability of the normal family in the UK to afford a car. That is what it will do. It will restrict your mobility and restrict your movement and it won't even achieve its main objective. It will not work and for the reasons I've outlined in the first 10 minutes of this video it will fail. But in failing it will destroy a car industry. In failing it will actually leave us with more polluted cities and in failing the good part is it will actually produce more CO2 which I of course and by now you should know want more of. In our target dream city we began with we only showed you cars and light vehicles. Now as soon as you start to scale up electric vehicles you start hitting with a big problem because the battery weight increases as a proportion of the weight of the whole vehicle so as whereas you can get away with it with light cars and small vans as you've even scaled up to a truck the amount of charging time needed per day starts at sort of 12 hours and so becoming a real commercial problem unless you have dedicated vehicles just for the city that travel relatively slowly. A 500 mile range truck actually would lose about 30% of its load capacity because of the battery. It would cost £180,000 for the battery and take 12 hours to charge therefore removing the truck from the road for a considerable amount of time. It's about the limit of commerciality I would think. To scale bigger than that just becomes un-economic. Now taking planes for example an Airbus 320 has 266 megawatt hours of fuel energy. The battery to hold that amount of energy would be 19 times more than the maximum takeoff weight of the aircraft and assuming you could charge at say 18 times faster than a Tesla supercharger it would take 88 days to charge the battery for a new flight so you can only use it once every three months or so but then of course the poor plane couldn't take off. So now let's go even bigger and go to a container ship the battery to run such a ship would weigh a million tonnes and be 5.6 times the weight of the ship and would take some two years to charge. In this short simple video on electric vehicles I have tried to give you some feel about the boundaries that exist the limitations of electricity in transport. Of course government after government in the UK get this wrong we're told that diesel's good for us and then we're told it's not and when we're told it's not they penalise us for it it's the same happening again the electrification of vehicles above all what I'm keen on is reducing pollution and in particular with transport we do this to make a pragmatic simple approach to the problem but instead of that we have governments that follow doctrines that don't even achieve their own objectives.