The UK faces a challenge to prepare for a new automotive revolution, with electric vehicles set to overtake petrol ones from 2040.

When the automotive revolution kicked off at the beginning of the 20th century, the dominant technology wasn’t petrol – it was electric.

The cars were slow, with a top speed of around 20mph, but – unlike petrol – they didn’t smell, they didn’t need gears and they didn’t need starting with a hand crank.

For pottering around the city, they were unbeatable.

However, by the 1920s, they were in decline. Petrol became much cheaper and the road network expanded, meaning the limited range of electric cars became a problem.

The combustion engine took over – a lead it wouldn’t relinquish until today.

Two companies, aided by governments around the world, have pushed the revival in electric: Toyota and Tesla.

The Toyota Prius made hybrid vehicles mainstream. Then Tesla terrified traditional automakers by fully embracing electric.

The breakthrough was batteries. As smartphones became more popular, the lithium-ion technology they use kept on improving. That could be applied to vehicles too.

Today, all manufacturers are competing to squeeze as much juice as possible from the battery.

The price of buying an electric vehicle will be the same as a petrol one from next year, according to analysts at UBS, and by 2024, one in three cars sold in Europe will be electric.

Morgan Stanley estimates electric car sales will overtake petrol globally by 2040 – meaning the UK Government’s ban on the sale of petrol and diesel isn’t as drastic as they’d like you to think.

But governments worldwide have been crucial to electric’s growth.

California provided nearly $5bn (£3.8bn) in grants to Tesla while, across Europe, electric car sales have been driven by subsidies. When Denmark scrapped them in 2016, sales fell by 60%.

The European Union is also imposing tougher emissions standards from 2019.

Read more: Sky News

From how to charge them to whether they are really better for the environment

How will I charge an electric car?

The first generation of electric-car buyers have been people with homes where it is easy to plug one in.

“The vast majority of Nissan Leaf customers are [families with] 2.4 children, mums and dads, with off-street parking,”

said Gareth Dunsmore of Nissan Europe.

“Tomorrow that won’t be the case.”

Dunsmore envisages charging points becoming ubiquitous at workplaces, and at shopping centres, railway stations, hotels and cinemas. For longer journeys, rapid chargers that can recharge a car’s battery in 30 minutes will increasingly proliferate across motorway service stations and at conventional refuelling stations.

For drivers living on terraced streets, the answers are not so simple but solutions are beginning to emerge. For example, Kensington and Chelsea council is running a trial with a UK energy company and German firm to add charging sockets to street lamps.

I’m worried about the battery running out – should I be?

Most mass market electric cars today have a range of 100-150 miles before the battery runs flat. Some of the top-end cars, such as Tesla’s electric sports cars, can run for 334 miles before needing a plug socket.

While that may not sound much compared to the 400-500 miles or more that a petrol or diesel car can manage before refilling, most car journeys in the UK would easily be accomplished in an electric car. Half of journeys are one to five miles; 38% are for five to 25 miles and only 2% are for 50 miles and more.

Of course, some people will need to go much further – and that’s where plug-in hybrids come in, using a petrol engine to run an electric motor after the battery runs out.
Improving battery technology is expected to extend even pure electric cars’ ranges to about 400 miles within a decade.

Are they cheaper?

Londoners in an electric car can already enter the congestion charge zone for free. If the government’s anti-pollution drive leads to more towns and cities imposing an air quality zone, that could lead to more tolls, from which electric cars are likely to be exempt.

Read more: The Guardian

Londoners are much more enthusiastic about moving to electric cars than the rest of Britain, according to new research from Baringa Partners.

The majority of those in the capital (77 per cent) believe that pure electric cars will replace their petrol/diesel counterparts as the preferred type of car in the UK, while nationwide 68 per cent of people feel the same.

There is still work to be done to convince drivers of electric vehicles’ mainstream capabilities though, as while considerably more London residents were likely to consider an electric car next time they get a car, that was still just over a third at 36 per cent.

The national average was 18 per cent, while the lowest interest was in the East of England where 10 per cent of people said they would consider an electric car as their next vehicle.

As for what the concerns were regarding electric cars, 37 per cent of Londoners pointed to difficulties installing a home charger while 62 per cent expressed range anxiety, worrying they would not be able to travel far enough on a single charge.

Baringa surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,005 UK adults.

Oliver Rix, partner at Baringa, said this was good news for “the critical problem” of air qualities in cities.

He said:

These findings are hugely encouraging as they run counter to the prevailing wisdom that urban areas will be reluctant to embrace electric cars. It’s clear the capital is a ripe market for electric car manufacturers, with Londoners more optimistic about how long it will take for electric vehicles to become the car of choice than most industry predictions.

Just under a third of those in the capital said they thought electric cars offered better overall value for money than petrol and diesel cars, while a fifth of London residents said they felt electric cars were more stylish than traditional options, compared to the national average of eight per cent.

Source: City A.M

Intelligent use of vehicle to grid (V2G) technology can improve the battery life of electric vehicles according to a new study from the University of Warwick, potentially disproving a key criticism levelled at the technology.

Working with the Energy and Electrical Systems group of the university’s research division WMG and Jaguar Land Rover, Dr Kotub Uddin analysed advanced lithium ion batteries used in commercially available EVs over a two year period.

This allowed him to create what is thought to be one of the most accurate battery degradation models existing in the public domain to predict battery capacity and power fade over time, under various ageing acceleration factors including temperature, state of charge, current and depth of discharge.

Using this model, Dr Uddin developed a ‘smart grid’ algorithm to calculate how much energy a vehicle requires to carry out daily journeys, and how much energy can be taken from its battery without negatively affecting it, or even improving its longevity.
This algorithm was then applied to WMG’s International Digital Laboratory to see if energy from EVs parked on the University of Warwick campus could power the multi-use building.

The study concluded that the number of EVs parked on the campus (around 2.1% of cars, in line with the UK market share of EVs) could spare the energy to power this building. In doing so, capacity fade in participant EV batteries would be reduced by up to 9.1%, and power fade by up to 12.1% over a year.

Dr Uddin said:

“These findings reinforce the attractiveness of V2G technologies to automotive original equipment manufacturers; not only is V2G an effective solution for grid support – and subsequently a tidy revenue stream – but we have shown that there is a real possibility of extending the lifetime of traction batteries in tandem.

“The results are also appealing to policy makers interested in grid decarbonisation.”

Until now a general consensus had been in place that the increased cycles imposed on a battery by V2G would lead to more rapid degradation. However, the new study suggests that this process is more complex than thought and that in fact, it can be exploited to improve a battery’s lifetime.

Read more: Clean Energy News