Mythbusting the world of EVs: do you have to charge your electric car every night?

MYTH: YOU HAVE TO CHARGE YOUR ELECTRIC CAR EVERY NIGHT

This myth pops up often when talk turns to public infrastructure, and also the capacity of the grid. People do the following pointless calculation. “All cars are electric” x “all cars plug in at 7pm every night” x 7kW = “catastrophic grid armageddon meltdown”.

But let’s stand back. The average UK annual mileage is 7,000. EVs drive further, probably because they’re on average newer, so let’s say 8,000. You’ll probably charge about every 200 miles to be safe. That’s 40 charges a year. You might do four of them as rapid motorway charges on holiday. So that leaves 36 overnight charges (or over-day if you’re plugging in at work).

Which is once every 10 days.

What if you have the shortest range electric car: a Honda e or something with a 100-mile range? Depleting that daily and charging nightly would give you 36,500 miles a year. Now I put it to you your honour that were you driving 36,500 miles a year, a Honda e might not be the wisest choice of car.

And by the way, back to the grid. Even if combustion car sales were to stop tomorrow and all new car sales were electric, we’d still find ourselves in 2030 with less than a third of the cars on the road being electric. So the grid has plenty of time to adjust. And we will need fewer public AC sockets than you think (albeit more than we have at the moment).