Going electric: a solution to range anxiety?

It turns out that a switch to electric vehicles may be the best way to avoid range anxiety in your car.

The current fuel panic gripping the UK highlights a wider truth about human behaviour, and the reality of range anxiety - it also highlights the fragility of the fossil fuel infrastructure we rely on, and the new, much more resilient alternative of electric cars.

We can see the UK public’s sudden lurch to panic buying of oil-based fuels - petrol and diesel - as a kind of mass range-anxiety driven by perceived scarcity that doesn’t stand up to straightforward number crunching. A logical response to concerns (real or imagined) about there being limited fuel is to quickly go and buy some. If everyone does this at the same time, however, panic-buying follows  - and genuine shortages then occur. 

How much fuel does a UK car driver really need on a daily or weekly basis - if it is not a lot, why panic?

The answer is in the chart below developed by New Automotive from analysing the actual miles driven per week by UK drivers from our extensive database - in this case pre-COVID in 2019 as a baseline. 

Source - NewAutoMotive Database

The average UK motorist drove about 120 miles per week in 2019, or 17 miles a day pre-pandemic - it’s likely to be quite a bit lower now due to home-working - say 100 miles per week. Now, if we then note that the average UK petrol or diesel car - let’s say a VW Golf - has a range of between 400-500 miles on a single tank - that means there is enough fuel to cover 4-5 weeks of driving. 

Even if tanks on average start half-full that is still 2-3 weeks of fuel before any refills are needed.

Despite this, we see queues and aggressive behaviour at petrol stations even though there is likely to be lots of fuel for everyone -  if we all just kept to normal buying patterns. Right now that is a big if. 

This is an example of the underlying fragility of any fossil fuel transport energy system coming into play. 

In the UK there are about 8,000 petrol stations, most crowded around large urban cities and towns and increasingly centralised in major sites such as supermarkets, prone to traffic jams. Let’s assume the average petrol station has 10 pumps - that’s 80,000 petrol pumps in the UK - to service over 30 million cars on the road. That works out at each pump having to service 400 cars - this is do-able under normal conditions: a couple of visits per car per month for about 15 minutes each or, 30 minutes a month.

But, fossil-fuel retailing is a low-margin business and has little room for error eg for excess idle pumps or lots of fuel storage: suddenly create spikes in demand for refuelling due to panic, and those 400 cars per pump turn up at once, not spread out over weeks and months, and suddenly lines of angry motorists emerge almost instantaneously. 

This is why we see black and white stock photographs from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and so on with petrol pump queues and the self-same pictures today on social media - because we still rely on this fragile fossil fuel system of transport energy - imported fuels, and concentrated supply in a limited range of public places such as cramped petrol stations and crowded supermarkets. 

For conventional fossil fuel cars, range anxiety is not just about how far a car can go on one tank, but whether or not the tank has anything in it all. Sticking to fossil fuels perpetuates the risks of future shortages and panic - beyond range anxiety and toward - can you actually drive at all ?

Electric Cars  - A Different World

Contrast the world of the electric car. 

For sure the actual range of an electric VW Golf equivalent eg the VW ID.3 is lower than its petrol equivalent - at about 250-350 miles versus 400+  miles - but it is getting closer and closer by the month due to battery technology improvements. 

This is hardly the point given the reality today. As we have shown, with an average weekly mileage of 100-120 miles a single charge for an electric car will typically last 2-3 weeks. 

More importantly now, most electric vehicles, cars plus other electric options such as vans and buses (EVs) are charged in the comfort of home or a dedicated commercial site, by-passing today’s Middle-East and local fore-court dramas - even when fully reliant on public chargers the current and targeted ratio of electric cars to charge-points is 10 to 1 not the 400 to 1 of the fossil-fuel equivalents. 

Today there are about 300,000 battery EVs on  UK roads, serviced by over 44,000 public charging connectors - and thousands more sited in people's homes. This dramatic difference in ratios is possible because electricity is a clean, efficient fuel that travels through wires and into plugs that can be situated almost anywhere. The long-term EVs-to-charge-point target of 10:1 is possible because electric cars are fed by electricity via a clean and widespread grid touching every home in the UK and plenty of dedicated charging sites on top. 

The options for safe, efficient “re-fuelling” or charging are ultimately limitless - from three-pin or fast-charging specialist plugs at home, to car parks, lamp-posts, specialist charge centres and already wireless options being commercialised. 

The future of car refuelling is therefore personal and distributed - not public and concentrated.

This is also a better business and resilience model for the future: as London’s buses and Royal Mail vans for example move to EVs, then the impact on public and public service transport reduces. This is why the UK government is correct to call for ICE bans and ZEV mandates and low emissions zones: it is not just better for public health and the environment - which it is - but smarter for businesses and public services to be less reliant on fragile fossil fuel systems. 

Electricity as a transport fuel - by the way - is far far cheaper - often by over 75% lower than petrol fuel costs - see our calculator here.  Even with rises in electricity prices, the difference in cost, let alone security and convenience, is dramatic. 

Side-note: we have pointed out all the benefits here without even mentioning the fact EVs don’t emit CO2 and other pollutants into Britain’s streets, roads and highways.

Charging infrastructure still needs to increase to meet new EV demands, but it is being built out at rapid rates as the UK starts to shift its transport energy needs to the grid, and away from relying on HGVs carrying payloads of petrol to over-crowded petrol stations. It is therefore not surprising that searches on google for buying EVs is up over X% according to Autotrader and other analysts. 

For sure,  in edge cases of wanting to suddenly travel 400 miles in a single day - 25 times the average if you recall our chart -  an EV means you have to work out where to charge up en-route: but even in a petrol car this concern will start to now play far higher in your calculations - this week especially - but in the future too. If it happened this week to petrol, why not next ? 

The reality is that most car drivers should not worry about day to day movement - their fuel stock will keep them going for weeks. That said - the arrival of electricity to transport as an alternative fuel provider is a massive boost to UK drivers, and UK citizens more widely - better public transport, more resilient public services. 

The shift to EVs not only overcomes personal range anxiety - it offers many more options to avoid the wider risks of ongoing fossil-fuel outages and it is cheaper, more efficient and cleaner too.

EVs it turns out are the way to overcome range anxiety, not be exposed to it.