Our company car is 8 yrs old this month. We purchased it 2nd hand just over 5 years ago. It’s a Nissan Leaf. All electric. We purchased it in the days when people used to say ‘we haven’t got the infrastructure’ or ‘where are we going to get all the energy from?’ Or ‘They don’t have the range’. I let the wife conduct the research, just so she could build up her range anxiety until we saw an affordable great little car on sale from Stebbings on Hardwick Narrows.
Since we have had the car, we have never used a public charge point, of which there are 6 times as many as there are petrol pumps in the UK and growing by around 200 a week on top of the hundreds of home chargers installed daily. No, we just use the ‘granny charger’ which is basically a three pin plug charger, like your mobile phone. It uses about half the energy a kettle uses and stays on for an hour here and hour there to keep us topped up. Go out, come home, plug in. That’s all there is to it and for over 5 yrs, that’s my knowledge of electric cars. Oh, you need to put washer fluid in for the windscreen and air in the tyres every now and then, but that’s it. And at present, zero road tax.
Only downside is that you don’t get to pop into your regular mechanic as much because there is much less to go wrong.
My first ‘company’ electric vehicle was an Electric Bike. A nice big sturdy silver one with a heavy battery. As a Home Beat Officer in the Met Police who patrolled the housing estates of South East London for nearly a decade on a pushbike. The E-Bike was a game changer when PC Holland got his bike I can tell you. That was in 1998!
I was still working in London when we relocated to Norfolk 18 years ago and it always made me smile, walking home from the Station at Watlington and over the river where I’d see 3 or 4 of these electric bikes like my old Police one, lined up outside The Cock pub in Magdalen. I’d drop in for a pint on the way home and it turns out there’s a bloke in our village who has been re-cycling electric bikes for people for a few years, just two doors down from us! He takes what others don’t need and upgrades them to good working order and has set up an E-Bike shop from his shed. And he’s been doing this for close to 20 years!
Electric vehicles aren’t new. Batteries have always been with us but for some strange reason the rabid right wing national press likes to inflame, dis-inform and confuse people on facts and reality. You’d think the oil lobby was writing headlines sometimes looking at the claptrap we read.
Mind you, seeing all the queues at the petrol pumps last autumn did make me think about getting an old fashioned petrol car, I thought there must be a fire sale, giving it away such was the queue. But no, apparently we needed to shift several million gallons before it’s shelf life ran out as we had just introduced a new fuel with low pollutants. Or was that just a coincidence?
I did have a look around a car showroom recently, when getting the MOT sorted and spoke to the sales person.
I said I’d buy a new Diesel there and then if they can answer these questions and provide a better car than our 8 year old all electric Leaf.
If I purchased a new diesel car, does it come with it’s own refinery and pumping station that also powers my house? If not, when will this be available? Can I automatically set my diesel car to fill up overnight and on occasions free of charge whilst I sleep? I understand your cars have ‘gears’. When will they have a button that allows forward motion, instant response and zero gear changes like automatic and manual cars? Which diesel car has zero emissions? I understand that the UK does not have the oil reserves required to continue burning fuel as we do in cars, so need to go to war in the Middle East to secure the energy required. When will this end?
I couldn’t get the answers I needed to switch so we’ll stick with our trusty all electric, 8 yr old, Nissan Leaf. And with the savings I make from not using petrol or diesel, i can put toward a 2nd hand e-bike from my Neighbour, and freewheel around West Norfolk spending the money i would have spent at a fuel station, in farm shops and local butchers, using the cleanest and greenest transport available.
The future is not much different from the past when you think about it. For hundreds of years until the motor car arrived, our villages were awash with what we call today, cottage industries, where every household had a trade or role to play in the local community. Cars killed that and then i hear people talk about solar energy and electric bikes like it’s new or recently discovered, so it’s ironic that in just two sheds in Magdalen, here in West Norfolk, there is both a 20 yr old e-bike repair and re-sale service as well as our own solar energy business now entering it’s 14th yr!
Please download the App, ZAPMAP for a map of public charge points.