Dodgy Research On Electric Cars
(4 May 2011)
One of the few pleasures left to me in my declining years is the avoidance of polls designed to ascertain the opinion of the general public. I have no interest in the opinion of the general public. I am a member of the general public myself, and my opinion, I am assured by many colleagues and readers, ain't worth diddly squat. It seems fair to assume that this applies to the rest of the public as well (though not to publicans, whose wisdom is the stuff of legend).
That said, it's always amusing to read the report of a poll in which the public seems to know more about the subject than the pollsters do. I refer in particular to recent research into public perceptions of electric cars (or EVs as the swinging hipsters like to call them), the results whereof I shall now share with you.
First of all, it is asserted that "nearly half of Brits" - meaning the Brits questioned on the matter, or just under a thousand people rather than about thirty million - "nearly half of Brits said the expense of an EV would be a barrier to purchase, estimating the average cost to be over £16,000 when in fact prices start from just £8000".
Am I wrong in thinking that the Brits are being criticised for failing to answer a question they weren't asked? You can't get people to tell you what they think an average number is and then laugh at them because they didn't tell you the lowest number.
Imagine that someone asks you to give the average of the distances between London and Manchester, London and Penzance, and London and St Albans. You look at them strangely, wondering why anyone should want to know this, but they seem friendly and not obviously dangerous, so you do the research and in due course tell them that the answer is 170 miles.
At this point, they gather their friends around them, point at you, and cry, "Wrong! The distance from London to St Albans is 25 miles! LOL! Epic fail!" A hurtful and embarrassing, I think you'll agree, situation.
In any case, £8000 doesn't buy anything that I would consider to be an electric car at all. A slow, ugly, battery-powered shopping trolley of deeply questionable safety, yes. A car, no. In between muttering darkly about sexual harrassment legislation, my glamorous young assistant has revealed that the average price of a "proper" electric car built by a manufacturer anyone has ever heard of is just over £29,000. With the UK Government's electric vehicle grant, call that £24,000. So the Brits who estimated "the average cost to be over £16,000" were somewhat understating the case.
The big selling point of electric cars is that while they may be eye-wateringly expensive to buy, they are thigh-slappingly cheap to run. But how cheap exactly? "Respondents believed a car would cost around £15 and take seven hours to charge, when in reality the cost is around £2, and an 80% charge can be achieved in just forty minutes, with the right connection."
Stop me if I'm boring you with accuracy here, but although the respondents were off the mark with their £15 estimate, a full charge costs £2 only at night time, not during the day, and seven hours is if anything a low estimate if the battery is flat when you start. The key phrase in the last part of the sentence is "with the right connection" - yes, you can spruce up the battery quite rapidly, though not completely, in less than an hour, but the "right connection" is not one you're likely to have at home.
Finally, "a staggering 60% of Brits thought a fully charged EV could only travel 100 miles or less, but new battery technology means the actual figure will soon be 300". The Brits win this one. A present-day EV is very unlikely to beat 100 miles on a single charge, and only then in ideal conditions (such as not using the headlights, wipers or air-conditioning, driving slowly, and choosing roads which mostly go downhill). Exactly what this "new battery technology" is, and how "soon" it will multiply the average range of electric cars by three, I would be very interested to hear.
But I don't want to hear it until someone can explain it properly, and I suspect that won't be for a long while to come. In the meantime, I resolve never again to read an opinion poll of any sort, and 100% of everyone who expressed a preference (in other words, me) agrees.
