One of the many fronts in the war against cars is the war against parking lots. Parking lots, we are told, take up too much space, and encourage driving rather than taking public transport, bicycling along deserted cycle lanes, or, for those happily enjoying their exciting 15-minute cities, walking.

So some of those fighting against the wicked automobile will be perversely delighted by this piece of news from the U.K., via the Daily Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn:

According to a new report from the consultants Arup, our car parks may need to become a lot more spacious because of the risk of fires. Simply put: parking spaces will have to be bigger, or cars will have to be parked further apart, because of the danger of electric battery fires spreading out of control.

And more space is likely to mean higher prices (and probably fewer parking places). Are we going to have to completely revamp the nation’s car park estate to make the transition to electric? Will councils and others make car parks bigger to compensate for larger spaces, or more likely will parking become even harder to find than it is now?

That’s a question that answers itself.

There’s one thing that should be emphasized. Electric Vehicles (EVs) are not more likely to catch fire than internal combustion engine cars, but when they (or more accurately their batteries) do, the fire is much more difficult to put out.

Back to Lynn:

The charging network is proving harder to build than anyone predicted – and taking far longer. And that’s before reckoning with the need to power it; we will need to generate a lot more electricity to power all the EVs expected to be on the road over the next few years. That will have to be paid for.

Harder than anyone predicted? Say it ain’t so. It’s almost as if central planners are fallible. It’s almost as if this particular evolution of the motor vehicle should have been left to develop naturally.

Lynn:

The cost of insurance, meanwhile, is soaring because batteries can easily be damaged…

Our roads are increasingly pitted with potholes, which may be, in part, because EVs are so much heavier than conventional vehicles, so we will need a huge programme of repairs or surface strengthening to keep them navigable. Many bridges may have to be reinforced to make sure they can carry all the extra weight once all of the vehicles crossing are powered by heavy batteries.

It shouldn’t be like this. With the most successful technologies, the more widely they are adopted, and the more we figure out the different ways they can be used, the costs involved steadily go down.

The mobile phone has become a lot cheaper, and a lot more powerful, over the last 20 years. So, too, have household electricals such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners. The petrol car got cheaper and better for decades after it became the standard way of getting around. The electric car is not like that. The more we learn about it, and the more widely it is adopted, the more expensive it appears to become.

Almost everyone agrees that we need to reduce carbon emissions from transport. That doesn’t mean we need EVs. Manufacturers such as Toyota are still betting heavily on hydrogen as a potential fuel. In Germany there is still huge investment going into synthetic green fuels.

And hybrids and ever-more-efficient conventional cars could be part of the solution too, given the chance, but climate policy’s central planners seem set on denying them that possibility for reasons better explained by their interest in controlling people than any concern for the climate. It’s doubtful how “clean” (so far as greenhouse gas emissions are concerned) EVs really are after taking into account the GHG emitted in the course of their production and the source of the electricity that powers them.

Then there’s the small matter of the child labor involved in the “artisanal” mining of the cobalt needed in the EV supply chain.

It’s worth clicking on the link to the Daily Telegraph story on that Arup report.

A few highlights:

Car park spaces should become wider and burning electric cars dunked in baths of water, under proposed government guidelines to prevent battery fires spreading out of control.

Ministers have been told that battery-powered vehicles pose a medley of risks in indoor car parks, which could render 1960s-era fire safety laws dangerously out of date.

Areas of concern addressed in a government-commissioned report included explosions of flammable vapour clouds emitted by electric vehicle batteries, as well as jets of fire and toxic water run-off from firefighting.

The report, from consultancy Arup, which makes a series of recommendations for changes to fire safety rules, said that there was a “high degree of uncertainty” about data on the fire risks of electric cars and that it is “not yet understood” whether their batteries become more of a fire hazard with age…

Solutions presented in the report included increased space between parked cars as well as greater distance between indoor car parks to manage the risk of fire spreading between cars and buildings.

It said indoor and multi-story car parks should adopt larger parking bays to help firefighters reach burning vehicles, with one example in the report proposing a 90cm to 1.2 metre gap between vehicles…

The report, published in July, goes on to detail how water used to put out burning electric cars is contaminated by toxic chemicals in lithium-ion batteries and can pose a “significant ecological impact” in some areas.

It suggested that in these locations that water used to tackle blazes would need to be contained and treated at a plant before being released into sewage.

On top of this, it warned that around 13pc of electric vehicle fires reignite, sometimes hours later and multiple times, adding the fires were harder to extinguish than those of petrol or diesel cars.

Another risk identified by the report is flammable vapour clouds emitted by batteries during a chemical reaction known as “thermal runaway”, when a battery overheats, which are said to potentially result in flash fires, explosions and flaming jets.

While petrol and diesel vehicle fires typically took five minutes to extinguish, electric vehicle fires can take as much as 49 minutes to put out, it said.

And yet people who question the forced switch into EVs are accused of being opposed to technological progress . . .