Nope. As I said, I'm still waiting for you to name somewhere that's only accessible by a gas car, and not by boat / plane / skimobile, etc.

Not if they can't afford them, and using Ubers or taxis for every single journey they need to make outside their house would be wildly expensive

You're all ready to point out the high costs you think drivers face in switching to EVs, yet here you are, blithely telling people too poor to afford a car that they should pay for taxis and Ubers and suck up shitty infrastructure and car-centric urban design that makes it impossible for them to walk or cycle anywhere or take public transit.

No, they don’t have an option if they cannot afford a car, or have a disability that means they can’t drive a car, or if they are too elderly to drive a car, etc.

And I’d be terribly interested to know which Canadian settlements are accessible only by ICE vehicle, not by snowmobile, plane, boat or train. Cos I can’t find details of any. But I wait for your clarification with bated breath.

You didn't understand the analogy. People are forced to take *cars* as a result of terrible urban planning and infrastructure, when they want to be able to take bikes or walk or get a bus. Bikes and walking are frequently physically impossible, much too dangerous, or legally banned, and buses don't run to everywhere someone wants to go, not even close. The analogy holds, it's your failure to understand it that's the issue.

EVs will continue to improve rapidly, but it's going to be incremental, and if you buy on finance, as more than *80%* of new cars are in the UK, you are insulated from an unexpected drop in value of an existing EV. You really are a catastrophiser.

Wow, you actually are going to ignore the exchange about London. I guess you’re not better than that after all.

There is absolutely no way that the Canadian Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of movement includes the right to be able to travel by a specific mode of transport. Otherwise cyclists and pedestrians would have been able to sue cities for shitty cycling and pedestrian infrastructure many years ago, not to mention lawsuits about terrible public transit.

The point about waiting a decade is that within another decade, tech will have moved on massively and today’s problems are going to be much less of an issue. A decade ago, I couldn’t travel more than 90 miles without needing to charge, now I can travel 330. In another decade, I reckon it’ll be 500 or 600 miles. And charging infrastructure, solar, storage, mini wind turbines, ASHPs, GSHPs etc will all also improve, making provision of charging in remote places much easier and cheaper than today. We are at the start of a huge build-out and the world is going to be dramatically different in the future.

Really? You're just going to ignore the exchange about visiting London? C'mon, you can be better than that.

As for high speed chargers in the middle of nowhere -- not sure how that gets solved for the Canadian hinterlands. I'm fine for that problem to be solved much later on, and for Canadians who drive these routes to hold on to their gas vehicle for another decade or so. I mean, the estimates are that no more than 2000 vehicles a year travel the James Bay road, 90k a year on the Dalton highway, 10k a year on the Dempster highway, and probably substantially fewer than 2000 for the Trans Taiga. These are tiny numbers, and 80:20 dictates that we focus on the hundreds of millions of people who drive ICE cars in and around cities and in temperate or hot climates first. For example, more than 100k vehicles use the A1 in the UK every *day*. Those are the vehicles that need to become EVs asap. They contribute way more to climate change because there are so many more of them, and electrification is much simpler for vehicles using the A1 than those remote Canadian roads.

Definitely will be dramatically better in a decade.
Not sure I agree about smokers.
Rates have fallen each year for years -- 2014, it was 18.1%, by 2020 it was down to 14%, and by 2023 it was down to 11.9%. That's one of the lowest rates for a developed country.

You're so aggro, you're mistaking something genuine for an argument. I didn't say "come to London to look at chargers"! I said "if you ever come to London", ie for work or pleasure, not for a charger review! And then I offered to take you round, which would include showing you chargers. Sheesh, man, I was being friendly!

No, I wasn't suggesting people wait an hour on a highway in the middle of nowhere -- that's exactly where you need rapid chargers, obviously. You need slow chargers at destinations, as I spelled out.

I will say that London's streets are notably less smelly as EV adoption has increased. It's not just the cars - it's the buses as well. The streets are also much quieter. The future beckons.

People challenge government decisions all the time in the courts, and lobby their elected representatives for change, and write to the newspapers, and make blogs and post on socials etc. It's not a perfect system by any means -- we are human after all -- but there's mechanisms for seeking to change the law and they succeed quite frequently. And it's not like these laws that the EU have brought in are obviously pro-consumer at the expense of Apple; there's plenty of pro-consumer organisations who don't like them very much. The EU has a decidedly mixed track record on tech regulation -- for example, GDPR has worked well for consumers, for the most part, but basically everyone recognises that cookie notices have caused pointless friction for little consumer benefit. So blithely assuming that the enemy of your enemy is your friend will not always work out in your interests, when the other parties are Apple and the EC.

Yes, onerous to Apple, and creating costs and friction for consumers of their products. Obviously to Apple. Obviously Apple is going to act in what it thinks is in its interests. It's not obliged to just put up with it, it's entitled to challenge.

How is it possible for you to have been arguing about EVs for so many years, and still not understand basic things like "fast chargers are not just a straightforward replacement for slow chargers"??

We use slow chargers when we're not in a hurry to charge, which is most of the time, because cars are parked, most of the time. I have a slow charger at my house. If I go to a hotel, I need the car to be charged by morning, so I just need a slow charger. If I visit a town for a day, I just need a slow charger where I park my car. The only time I need a fast charger is when I am doing a road trip and want to stp for food and a charge.

Your concerns about the capitalist system's ability to provide all the chargers that are needed are unwarranted: the charging network is going where it's needed, and governments are actively shaping where chargers are going in for public policy aims, both as purchasers (eg local authorities buying and deploying lamp post chargers) and as regulators (eg requiring all motorway service stations to have at least six rapid chargers, requiring them to take contactless payments, etc).

As for fear of obsolescence, that's exactly why I've always got my cars on a PCP deal, and focused on TCO for the period of ownership (3 or 4 years), so that I can take advantage of rapidly improving tech. And it's paid off: my EVs went from 90 to 180 to 230 to 330 miles of range from 2015 to 2018 to 2020 to 2024. A decade of positive experiences. If you ever come to London, ping me and I'll take you on a drive around and you can see why I think they're great for tens of millions of people around the world (but not yet for you).

It’s completely reasonable that companies can challenge regulations in the courts, especially when those regulations are novel and onerous, as here.

Or they could, ya kinow, challenge legal decisions in the courts, which is what they're doing. They don't have to take their ball and go off in a huff just yet.

It's the future, so evidence is kinda hard to come by, what with the future not having happened yet. But I have pointed out the evidence we have about today and all points before today, which is that it hasn't so far, and have explained that this is meaningful because the charger network continues to outpace the EV network in growth, meaning that there was more competition last year for charger capacity than there is this year, and even more two years ago, and so on, and there will be less competition in the future, for the same reason.