RichardW wrote: 12 Dec 2019, 12:41
Easy tiger
Genuine question, not a dig! I was a bit off in the calc somewhere, but not by 2 - you omitted the VAT on road fuels (still trying to work out exactly where the value added part of the fuel duty is....).
Don't worry, I didn't think it was a dig.
It's just I've done these calculations before and knew the numbers were a fair bit out and I had actual real life miles/kWh figures to contribute to the discussion. I didn't omit VAT, all prices I quoted are VAT inclusive.
You bring up a good point though that residential electricity is only 5% VAT vs 20% for petrol and Diesel... as I'm not originally from here I don't know what the historical reasons for that are and whether that's likely to change in future ?
I see that some businesses are charged 20% VAT on electricity - I wonder if that applies to public charging providers and might explain some of the additional cost of public charging ?
At some point, tax on use of EVs is going to come in (or a rise in Income Tax or VAT, but we know how popular that is
) - early adopters are likely to overlook the difficulties (change in habit?) because of the savings, but how much do you think Joe Public will need to adopt them? Or maybe they will just introduce road pricing for both EV and ICE, and maintain the tax on road fuels to maintain the differential and price ICE off the road?
I've said it before, but I think the only feasible way of introducing "fuel" taxing for EV's to replace the current tax on Diesel and Petrol sales is going to be road user charges, where you pay separately for mileage done, with a rate that is based on the class of vehicle. (Car, truck etc)
If you try to raise VAT on residential electricity from 5% to 20% that is going to penalise people who don't own EV's or even drive at all, (thus turning public opinion against EV's) and 20% tax on the electricity used to charge is still far less tax per car-mile than what the government gets from Petrol/Diesel now anyway and wouldn't cover the shortfall.
Trying to add a separate EV charging only tax on Electricity is not feasible because it would be so easily defeated. To implement such a tax either every EV itself would have to "phone home" to the power company or government to report how many kWh it has consumed charging, (with no EV's currently supporting such a feature and manufacturers probably reluctant to add it) or the EVSE (wall charger) at the house would need to do so. At the moment there is no legislation forcing installation of "smart" chargers at home, and my one is not smart in any way. (You do now have to install a smart charger to get the OLEV grant though)
Besides, so long as EV's can be charged via a "granny charger" (portable EVSE which plugs into a regular 3 pin plug) that would be a loophole which avoids using a smart charger, and that charging would then go un-taxed. So I can't see it as a workable solution.
Road user charges for passenger cars is already a thing in some countries, so it's not a stretch to implement it. Diesel in New Zealand is sold without any road user tax included (and is thus far cheaper than petrol) but you then have to pay road user chargers per 1000km for any Diesel car, including passenger cars at least 6 monthly from memory. Unless the odometer reading on the car is falsified this can't easily be defeated, and once a car is old enough for MOT checks the mileage is recorded anyway.
So I think that's the way it's going to end up having to go for EV's, and we may also at some point see road user tax removed from petrol and diesel pump prices and road user charges implemented for all cars. That would have the benefit of eliminating the existence of "red diesel", and also solve any ambiguity that might exist for hybrid cars that do some of their miles on fossil fuels and some on electricity...
As for early adopters overlooking the limitations of EV's in the name of cost savings and others maybe not willing to do that if tax is added on, that kind of reasoning is based on the assumption that cost saving is the only reason someone might prefer to drive an EV, and that problems like range, battery life and up front cost won't be addressed and iterated on in the future until they are no longer an issue. It focuses on the negatives without adequately considering the positives, not the least of which include not poisoning everyone else's kids during the school run....
There are many other reasons than lower per mile cost to prefer to drive an EV, (certainly for the daily commute) including the smooth, quiet, hassle free driving experience itself, as well as knowing that there are a whole host of high maintenance items that don't exist in an EV that are going to break down and need replacing.
I've owned and maintained old cars all my life but at some point it can start to become a chore and I'd just like my main "get me to work and back" car to work without frequent repairs and maintenance.
When comparing ICE and BEV today its easy to get too hung up on comparing what is available today, instead of thinking about what the situation is going to be in the near future. The trajectory for BEV's is clear - prices will go down with increased volumes and improved manufacturing, batteries will get cheaper, bigger (in kWh capacity) and more compact, charging speeds will go up dramatically, longevity and reliability of batteries will improve to the point where they outlast the rest of the car and are no longer a concern, rapid charging infrastructure will grow to the point where it can adequately cope with large numbers of BEV's etc...
The question becomes not is an EV viable for the average punter today, (for many people, no not yet) but how soon will it be viable, and how much longer after that does it go from viable to the "no-brainer" choice. So when is your jumping on point, and that will vary depending on your circumstances.
There are so many examples in the past of new technology that was initially too expensive, unreliable etc which was mocked but eventually took over the world. A great example is the humble transistor.
Invented in 1947 but not commercially manufactured in any useful numbers until the early 60's due to the extreme difficulties and costs in manufacturing them in quantity. Yield rates were extremely low and the transistors you could buy in the 60's were very expensive, (much more expensive than valves) quite unreliable, could only operate at very low voltages and powers, had high distortion and many other limitations, but they had one big advantage - they were small and power efficient and had the potential to be shrunk further and have more than one put on the same chip, later leading to the invention of the integrated circuit.
Something that was initially totally unable to compete with valves in all other performance metrics was progressively refined over several decades until they started to take off in the 70's. Today transistorised circuitry is so many orders of magnitude denser and more capable than valves that they left behind in the dust that it boggles the mind, with transistors now measured in the nanometers with billions of them on a single chip the size of a finger nail. All the technology we have today in the form of computers and modern electronics have the invention of the transistor to thank for their existence, and you can genuinely say the transistor revolutionised and created the modern world.
That small plucky invention that struggled for so long to get off the ground in the beginning due to the huge challenges in developing the manufacturing processes for it that could get cost down and volume and reliability up. Today nobody even remembers valves with the last thermonic valve in common use being the venerable CRT tube in now obsolete CRT TV's, with use of other valves in consumer equipment disappearing in the 70's.
Never underestimate what can be achieved by progressive refinement and optimisation - EV's are too expensive to buy new today, don't have enough range, don't charge fast enough etc but every year that is improving and the inflexion point is coming sooner than we think.
