Electric vehicles could hit mass market in five years

Charger company tells Energy UK delegates “it will hit us before we know it”

The electricity network could face a mass rollout of electric vehicles within five years, an Energy UK seminar heard last week.

Natalia Silverstone of charger company POD Point told the meeting, organised by Energy UK to mark the launch of a raft of recommendations to manage the impact of EVs, that they could be price competitive with petrol and diesel cars and vans as soon as the early 2020s.

She said: “The mass market will hit when we get to price parity, which will be the early 2020s with the way battery costs are dropping.”

Once they match internal combustion vehicle prices, she predicted that consumers ‘won’t think twice’ about buying EVs. “It will hit us before we know it,” she said.

The rollout of EVs, which currently only account for less than five per cent of total car sales in the UK, has sparked fears that the grid will be unable to cope with the peaks in demand when vehicles are being charged.

An official at the government’s low emissions vehicles unit told the seminar that the regulations governing the next generation of EV charging points, which are designed to help manage demand on the grid from EVs, are ‘likely’ to be in place in just over two years’ time.

Nick Brooks, of the Department for Transport’s Office for Low Emissions Vehicles, outlined a timetable for the implementation of the rules that will govern smart charging points at the seminar.

He said that the government expects to receive Royal Assent for Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill, next autumn. The bill was announced in July’s Queen’s Speech but has yet to have its first Parliamentary reading.

Brooks said: “Once we have those powers, we can get down to the fine details on how those measures can be implemented in secondary legislation, which would take a year normally so we would have regulations on smart charging points in autumn 2019.”

Silverstone also told the event that the focus of the EV infrastructure rollout would have to be on the home, where she said 90 per cent of vehicle charging took place. 

“Public infrastructure is important as part of the eco-system so you can do a top up. We need a lot more charging infrastructure but a big percentage of that will be private homes rather than public infrastructure.”

Silverstone said the key was to roll out smart technology so that EV users could replicate charge their vehicles as if they were at home when travelling.

But she poured cold water on hopes that lamp post points will be the ‘ultimate solution’ for charging in urban areas.

London mayor Sadiq Khan’s recently published environment strategy championed a rollout of lamp post charging points as a good fix for flat dwellers who would have problems hooking up their EV to a domestic charger run off their home main electricity supply.