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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Environment

Chargers are key to the electric vehicle transition

An electric car plugged into a rapid battery recharging point on a street in central London.
‘Ease of use will greatly increase the attraction of electric cars.’ Photograph: Alamy

Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Starmer has discovered a tricky truth about the electric vehicles transition: there’s no gain without pain, 29 November) doesn’t address the key point in the analysis of car companies’ difficulties in selling enough electric vehicles (EVs). There is a lack of demand that is only partly due to the higher prices. More importantly, it is due to a failure to install the necessary infrastructure to enable mass charging.

A minority of car owners live in houses where home charging is possible. For the rest, to make EVs a possibility, never mind attractive, there need to be a huge number of charging points to accommodate millions of people. I live in a city with a very high density of tenement and other flats; at the moment there are virtually no charging points easily accessible for flat owners. In such areas, where it is not possible to install a charger in your home, it is simply not possible to run an EV.

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