A relative has an EV. The range on his is around 300 miles depending on the weight of his right foot - he uses it for his work, and he does around 25,000 mile per annum. His only comment about the availability of charging points is that he now plans a little bit more than he used to. Would he go back to fossil fuel? Not any time soon.

The number of charging points is going up as the number of petrol stations falls. In years to come it will be a case of those using petrol / diesel will be the ones having to do the planning of where to refuel.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

One of the big selling points of electric vehicles is that they cost so little to run ( once you have bought one).
So assuming you have just spent £20,000- £100,000 on your brand new eco friendly vehicle, what will you do with it?
Will you leave it parked in your garage, drive, street being charged up or will you use it.
If it is actually cheaper to drive your electric vehicle than use public transport, a bus, a train, you will choose to drive your electric vehicle.
End result being that people who previously used public transport to commute work will instead switch to using their electric vehicles. After all it is cheaper and oh so kinder to the planet than gas burners.
So towns and cities will become more congested with electric vehicles.
Right now electric vehicles do not seem to have to pay fees to drive in city centers. If in 5-10 years when the traffic jams are entirely made up of electric vehicles what will governments and councils do? Either raise the price of car charging points or start charging electric vehicles to drive in town and cities.
And what if everyone was to buy an electric vehicle.
Charging will be fine if you have your own garage or drive to park and charge your vehicle. But the vast majority don't have these. So will we see long extension cables dangling from high rise flats so as to charge your vehicle, or disputes between neighbours as to who has use of the limited charging points in the street.
Oh yes, electric vehicles are portrayed as so cool, trendy and will save the earth in the TV adverts, but so much needs to be resolved before they are the answer to pollution and congestion.

Indeed, there needs to be changes to the way that people interact with each other. The pandemic has demonstrated that there is less need to have face to face every time and that Zoom / Teams can replace some of the face to face - but not everything can be done that way.

Personally, I suspect that there will be a continued and accelerating (pun intended) shift towards car sharing in cities - this means that the pressure on the roads may be reduced, recharging the batteries is done more easily as the car share parking spaces will have dedicated charging points. In cities the major criteria for choosing a particular mode of transport are convenience, price, journey time etc - this still means that public transport will be the primary way people move around many cities as there is little point sitting in a car, whether owned or shared, in a traffic jam. So is the rise of the electric car the end of public transport - I very much doubt it.

I have a strange feeling that there will not be too many wires dangling from blocks of flats. People arguing about charging points - most likely, in the same way that some people want to push into queues, park badly taking up two spaces etc

Lets face it, fossil fuels are on their way out and as yet the only contenders for the crown are electric and hydrogen - but we have two crowns - one for petrol and one for diesel so is it really an either or situation?

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

A change in lifestyle is going to be needed if people are going to survive in relative comfort.

The last I read Seville is proposing an end to any internal combustion vehicles in the city center by 2030 - that's the sort of thing that needs to be done everywhere, combined with superblocks etc, both to improve quality of life and coax people into changing their ways. Certainly my preference would be to use park-and-ride schemes for visiting cities when I have to (or rent a little electric scooter or something)

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

There is now a requirement for all vehicles going into certain French cities to have a vignette related to the emissions of the vehicle. Failing to have the vignette can lead to a fine many times the cost of the vignette (which costs less than £10 including postage).

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/law-change-for-uk-drivers-in-french-cities/

They can be sourced before going to France from the French government web site here - https://www.certificat-air.gouv.fr/. It is recommended that you use the government site to avoid rip off fees from third party websites - you have to give the same information and they are unlikely to be any quicker and possibly slower.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

I can see that being the form of the future, at least in prosperous countries. But before it can work it'll need two things: (1) extensive investment in widespread charging infrastructure, and (2) extensive investment in a good public transport network.

Levels of vehicle ownership in London, for example, are low, due to the limited usefulness of private transport and the cost and space needed to own a vehicle. Public transport is well developed and for most people is the easiest way to get around. So EV-only city centres are certainly viable. The barriers to making it happen are in the hands of the authorities. Are they willing to spend the money to develop the charging and public transport networks to replace the ICE vehicles they ban?

It does seem that Government and Local Authorities first action is to charge or fine motorists for driving the 'wrong vehicles' in city centers.
They fail or are very slow in introducing charging points for electrical vehicles.
I live west of London and I did a quick search for electric charging points within 5 miles of me, there are less than 20. This includes much of Heathrow airport, which has vast car parks, but very few charging points.
The others are either at petrol stations or in car parks at large supermarket, very few are on the street or operated by the local council.
London does have more charging points, but no way enough for even the existing electric vehicles.
So either they very rapidly install these or there will be a lot of electric vehicles with flat batteries.
And what happens in 5-10 years time, when all vehicles are electric? Will the chargers be cheap to use or will they gradually become more expensive as the demand for them increases?
And where will this electricity come from? Solar and wind power are fine, but you will still need the back up of gas, coal and nuclear power plants for those days when it is overcast, cloudy and no wind.
Solar power plans and wind farms take up vast areas and don't always produce enough electricity. No one wants a gas, coal or nuclear power plant near to them, so looks like the lights will go out and batteries will go flat, unless someone has a cunning plan.....

There's generally very good public transport in Spanish cities (most people don't need a car to live), so I'm guessing that people who do need a car but can't afford an electric one will have to park outside the center and use public transport to get to it, at least for the time being ... or they'll have to use ride shares or car subscription services.

TBH it'd be nice if cities had less cars in general, even electric ones. The superblocks in Barna are excellent examples of how nice it is when there's less traffic in general!

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

There are a number of renewable sources of electricity. Some are weather dependant - solar and wind - but others are in development that will provide the base load - these include tidal and geothermal. Tidal is totally predictable. Geothermal is perhaps the most exciting as that can be used practically anywhere. The cars that are attached to charging points can act as reservoirs for power for the grid so that surplus electricity can be stored easily and at little additional cost - obviously this has to be done to allow the vehicle to be used later so can't drain off all the power.

There are also plans and designs for far smaller nuclear reactors and there is a consortium to finish the development and to productionise the end result.

Will the lights go out? Unlikely. Will continued use of fossil fuels make the planet's climate unacceptably hot? Undoubtedly. For those that don't believe that we are making a pigs ear of the climate consider this - during the palaeozoic mass extinction the rate of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere by the planet was around 0.6 trillion tonnes per year - currently we are emitting around 8 trillion tonnes per year - 1330% more per year - now think about what the event was called the Palaeozoic MASS extinction. Do we really want to have that happen in our or our childrens lifetimes?

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

No matter how small a nuclear power plant is, no one will want one near them. Planning will take years, then many, many years of public consultation, legal objections, court appeals, government inquiries, more appeals etc.
Then even if the go ahead is given it will take 5, 10, 15 years or more to build.
As to tidal, yes all very good, very predictable and would provide lots of reliable energy. Downside is it would destroy many tidal estuaries, tidal ecosystems, a loss of valuable habitat for birds and other animals. Not exactly being kind to the planet..

Your comment and your questions implicate that we will have the same traffic senario as now but through using electrified verhicles.

That won`t work because sustainable traffic needs differents characteristics to function. Sustainable traffic has to be sustainable by ecological sense and it has to be socially fair and economical successful. Otherwise it will miss the power of assertiveness.

The traffic of future must be less space intense and it must include much more collective/public transport opportunities. This should be the base care for traffic in urban zones which will be complemented for the last individual miles by Sharing-Mobility and by electric vehicles.

We will never solute the climate problem and the problem of exhaustible raw materials if don`t change our behavior in the way how we do traffic in the future. To electrify all kind of vehicles and to use them in the same way as we do it now with fossile fuel powered verhicles will not work as solution for existing problems.

I know this is something which you maybe don`t want to hear in forum where people who mostly avoid public transport systems in their travels and use highly self-sufficient vehicles to explore everything everywhere.

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Would, be those tidal estuaries that will be eradicated by sea level rise, ecosystems destroyed by global warming? Also the tide is not stopped, just harnessed so the damage will be limited. One of the places with greatest potential is the Menai Straits as the speed of the flow of water is phenomenal.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

On the other hand I do like to go to places that aren’t just another desert that used to be a very nice place to visit / live so perhaps changing our behaviours may be a good thing. Not that there is anything wrong with deserts, it is just that I think there are about the right number now without creating anymore.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

I do agree that there are many areas which would be ideal for tidal power, yes the Menai Straits. But on plan or proposal is for the Bristol Channel, somewhere near the Seven Bridge. That whole streach of river is mudflats, tidal estuaries, reed beds. It simply wouldn't function if the tide was slowed down or stopped.

Ever slightly off topic.
Recently I saw a TV advert for an electric SUV, 4x4, I think it might have been a Volvo.
Anyway the advert showed shots of the SUV driving into the wilderness, splashing though streams, fording rivers, negotiating boulders and dirt tracks ( without it seems getting very dirty).
The final shot was of the SUV parked in a clearing, on top of a mountain, miles from anywhere, no signs of civilization or even a electricity pilon, yet there in the middle of nowhere was a electric vehicle charging point!!!!
So it seems you can go to the ends of the earth and still find a charging point to take you home.
It made me chuckle.....