‘Your car may not be the most efficient tool for your new, lower-mileage life’

What far better event than now – Christmas 2020 – to reflect on transport designs through the troubled year just absent, in advance of planning our probably travel demands in 2021 and over and above?

I used to sense practically affronted when signs nosily requested me, a free of charge man in a free of charge nation: “is your journey truly vital?” But instances alter, and it is now a valid problem. Justifiable good reasons for travel for the foreseeable consist of driving for emergency purposes, or for charity, household, foodstuff, mates, overall health, or perform and schooling that just cannot be completed at home. Really substantially every thing else isn’t truly vital now, is it?

Most of us are acquiring and executing substantially more online travelling much less to progressively redundant offices and department retailers lastly admitting that heading for airports and their extended-time period car or truck parks is as substantially pleasurable as visiting the dentist for a root canal remedy. With these and other truths in mind, do you require to travel the 10,000 or so miles you have traditionally driven per year? Unlikely. Is that recent vehicle of yours the most ideal and productive instrument for your new, reduced-mileage existence? Doubt it. Time to press your transport reset button? If you are nearly anything like me, you will – and sense far far better for it.  

Consistently performing from home as an alternative of shelling out two hours a working day driving to and from what used to be the common location of perform usually means that you are clawing back again around 40 hours of commuting time a month. This is equivalent to 12 comprehensive (but unpaid) performing months a year. An extra bonus is preserving on gas, parking, additionally don-and-tear charges on your vehicle, as perfectly as you! 

But when following using your car or truck – created for fast, prolonged drives, now a runabout for gradual, shorter excursions to takeaways, supermarkets or coffee stores – request yourself if it is superfluous to necessities. Bravely consider a Citroen Ami quadricycle as an alternative, whilst a more realistic compromise may be an economical (but not affordable ‘n’ awful) Skoda Octavia – the Automobile Specific Car or truck of the Calendar year, and the very best car or truck I have driven in the very last 12 months.

Worry not: profits of new petrol and diesel vehicles aren’t being declared illegal for nine several years. That hopefully leaves time to system your finances around a pure-EV Britain from 2030. It’ll be different from the unleaded and derv-dominated GB of today. If you by now – or soon will – reside in a property with a chargepoint and driveway for an EV, congrats you are superior to go. But spare a assumed for millions of fellow citizens in flats or homes without having electrified parking spots, garages, driveways or gardens that can double as destinations to park and demand. These drivers ought to depend on more expensive, much less practical charging stations on garage forecourts, in grocery store car or truck parks, or on exposed, unpredictable streets. 

We can only hope that the entrepreneurs in the ‘new automotive energy’ marketplace, tasked with offering chargepoints predominantly for drivers not able to install them at home, get their act collectively and boost their hitherto questionable levels of purchaser fulfillment. Britain simply cannot, and ought to not, have a general public charging procedure that’s as filthy, hopeless, and vandalised as our general public phone network, which crashed, burned, and efficiently died. 

Come across out if a plug-in hybrid vehicle is correct for you…