The National Grid is warning us that if you are charging your electric car at home with a high-speed charger you won’t be able to boil an electric kettle at the same time, because it could blow your fuse box.
They add that you could get round this if you use a standard charger — but then it could take 19 hours to charge your car fully.
Meanwhile, if you’re thinking of driving an all-electric car from London to Edinburgh, even if you make it to a service station with high-speed chargers, you might still have to stop three or four times for an hour-long charge on the way, plus of course almost certainly endure waiting for a charging point to be free.
It is hard to know which is the maddest of the ‘green’ schemes the Government has embarked on in its drive to eliminate fossil fuels. But its mania for electric cars is surely racing to the top of the list.
Some 12 million people own diesel cars in Britain. They were bribed with tax breaks to buy them under the Blair government which insisted they were greener because they produced less carbon dioxide than petrol vehicles.
Now, those same 12 million are reeling from being told that, far from diesels being more ‘planet friendly’, they are so polluting that they could be contributing to 12,000 or more premature deaths a year. Whacking new taxes and charges to discourage their use are certain to be introduced
Worse than this diesel fiasco, the Government said last month that after 2040 the sale of diesel and petrol cars will be banned, and that the only cars we will be able to buy will be all-electric.
Despite the day-long blizzard of supportive propaganda we were treated to by the BBC when our Environment Secretary Michael Gove first sprang this on us, there are many practical reasons why all- electric cars have not so far caught on in Britain.
They still make up only 0.3 per cent of the 31.7 million cars on our roads, even though hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been used to bribe motorists to buy them, leading to discounts of up to £5,000 per vehicle.
It is not just the thought of being unable to boil a kettle while waiting all those hours for a car battery to charge that’s putting people off.
There is also a massive national shortage of charging points. If all cars were electric-only, we would need an additional 400,000 public charging points, at a cost of £30 billion, for all the drivers who would need to ‘refuel’ on journeys away from home