Electric cars are all around us, and it is time for us to see how they will go in this ultra-modern era. While a lot of progress has been made, the infrastructure throughout much of Europe still leaves a lot to be desired.
A team of engineers from the National Grid went on a 565-mile round-trip from Wokingham to Teesside to test the facilities for electric cars and see how these cars reacted in the pressure.
The goal for the journey was to check the vehicle charging network across the UK and assess the speed, accessibility, and ease-of-handling during the whole journey.
The whole journey had 9 hours of driving and over 4 hours of charging, which goes to show that the infrastructure is still developing.
“We don’t know yet . . . what people really want to do in terms of charging,” Richard McMahon, from the Warwick university, told the BP conference.
“The [current] charging infrastructure, you can make it work . . . but if we want this to really take off we need big charging infrastructure,” said Dustin Benton, policy director at the Green Alliance, a think-tank.
“People talk about connecting these ultra fast chargers at strategic locations and various destination points [but] they potentially put a lot of local strain into the [electricity] distribution system and what we need to do is to start putting investment into that distribution system to allow it to cope with that,” mentioned Keith Anderson, who is the chief executive of Scottish Power, which owns electricity networks in parts of Scotland, Wales and north-west England.
“We’re an industry built over 120 years of internal combustion, and shifting to a technology that’s not relatively new but is a fundamental turning point for the industry,” he further added.
Electric cars have still got a long way to go, and the current progress is not satisfactory by any means.