It’s laughable for eco zealots to blame Rowan Atkinson for low take-up. It’s just not rational for most to buy one.

The great electric car revolution is stalling, and the net-zero panjandrums are desperate to find somebody to blame. It must be the fault of fake news, they intimate, or disinformation campaigns, or of nit-picking journalists and their gullible readers, or because Elon Musk has embraced Right-wing ideas: what other possible reasons could there be for consumers refusing to do their duty?

Electric vehicles’ (EVs) share of the UK market has remained stuck at 16 per cent for two years, and 10 out of 11 private buyers are still opting for combustion engines. But instead of seeking to understand the real reasons why even the environmentally conscious continue to patronise petrol-powered cars, green activists are resorting to deranged conspiracy theories. The Telegraph has the story.

Some – speaking to a House of Lords committee – even singled out a nuanced article by Rowan Atkinson for having harmed their cause: the actor disclosed that he felt “duped” by electric vehicles, and questioned the claims made by advocates. There is nothing zealots loath more than an apostate.

I wish it were true that a single opinion article could alter the purchasing decisions of millions, but the reality is more prosaic. Consumers are rational, and they aren’t buying electric cars because it doesn’t yet make sense. EVs are prohibitively expensive, their range too short and there aren’t enough charging points: newspaper reports and personal finance desks have done the public a great service by pointing all of this out in great detail. 

he blunt truth is that EVs, for now, remain a niche product aimed at affluent consumers with narrow requirements, and are not yet ready for mass adoption. To claim otherwise is a monstrous deception, an attempt at hoodwinking and impoverishing many middle-class motorists. 

Top-down attempts by elitist Tory and Labour politicians to deny this reality and to phase out the combustion engine too quickly will cause intolerable hardship, collapse the grid and trigger a political revolution. Even Sunak’s 80 per cent EV target for new cars by 2030 is too strict, and Labour’s 100 per cent ban on pure petrol cars in five years and 10 months’ time is unfathomably stupid.

None of this makes me an opponent of EVs. I am a fan of private cars, and of mass private mobility. I want to build more roads, not fewer; I want car ownership to rise, not drop. In practice, in the UK and most of Europe at least, the only way this will be possible – and the anti-car fanatics and Left-wing urbanists who hold such sway over both parties defeated – is if the environmental cost of motoring can be significantly reduced. 

Like Atkinson, I find EVs to be “wonderful mechanisms”, and I’m more optimistic than he is about the environmental benefits of the latest models and battery technology. I strongly suspect that the carbon footprint of construction and disposal will fall further over time. I like EVs’ modern interfaces, the lack of noise, the astonishing acceleration, the absence of stinky exhaust fumes, the decentralised charging and even the feeling of sitting in a giant iPhone. 

But while zero-emission vehicles are the future – including possibly those powered by hydrogen – we are very much still in the present, and it makes no financial sense for most people to buy one today. The cheapest petrol-powered Kia costs £13,600, is small but drives well; entry-level electric cars cost some £26,000 and have terrible range. You need to spend at least £30,000 to get a decent electric car, and Teslas start at £40,000. 

Read the full story here.