Opinion: The fuel shortage shows why range anxiety matters

The industry says petrol station queues will die down, but could this be a taste of our all-electric future?

Well, you would be laughing if you had a Tesla Model 3 right now, wouldn’t you? Or even a first-generation Nissan Leaf. Hell, even a Reva G-Wiz might turn faces green (and not for the usual reasons) as you tootle merrily down an otherwise-deserted high street. 

Yes, perhaps for the first time since we realised the car of the future was to be all-electric, EVs have (albeit briefly, for now) gained the upper hand in a bitterly fought fight with their combustion-fuelled forebears over which is the more usable day-to-day. Indeed, who could have argued over the past few days that they felt more confident of their ability to top up at a fuel station than they would finding an available – or functioning – fast charger?

Word from on high suggests the queues at the pumps will die down and the tanks will be topped up again as soon as panic-buyers stop panicking, but the whole mess has done well to highlight an issue that some of internal combustion’s most ardent apologists might have yet to acknowledge: fossil fuel is finite. And yes, the front pages of the nationals today are devoted largely to whether or not there is actually a shortage or not (surely the very phenomenon of a commodity not being available for general purchase constitutes a shortage?), but the overarching concept – too many engines, not enough juice – is one that we’ve been warned about for many years. 

Some of us will be in the fortunate position of having an alternative transport solution on hand while the situation sorts itself out, but for ambulance drivers, key workers, delivery personnel and even the hauliers we rely on to deliver the fuel itself, the inability to do that most mundane of tasks – filling up with petrol or diesel – is all but crippling. And for those unlucky individuals, it’s a nasty taste of things to come if the government fails to make good on its bold promises for Britain’s EV infrastructure.

Early EV adopters will be very familiar with the concept of range anxiety – the fear of being left stranded by an exhausted battery – and how it’s exacerbated by the inadequacy of our shamefully still-nascent charging network. But careful planning can by and large assuage those concerns, so long as you’re lucky enough to arrive at a free and functioning charger. 

Here, by contrast, we see a situation where the ability to top up has been taken categorically out of the motorist’s hands. Local Facebook groups are awash with pleas for up-to-date information on nearby petrol availability, supermarket staff are doubling up as traffic managers and essential journeys risk being cancelled or heavily delayed lest the vehicle grind to a halt before its intended destination. The whole thing will sound very familiar if you’ve tried to run an EV without a reliable charging station nearby or a home charger solution.

I breathed a sigh of relief last week as I bade goodbye to a particularly short-legged electric car that I had been using, only to find three days later that its petrol-fuelled replacement was all but unusable as the fuel gauge was reading red and I didn’t have nine hours to spend queuing at my local BP forecourt. The tables will turn back, of course, but hopefully this brief period of chaos will endure in collective memory long enough to inform how we shape the next generation of motoring. 

In a few years, this will all seem hopelessly old-fashioned when we look back, because people will be able – ideally – to charge their cars closer to home, thereby taking some of the panic out of the equation. Plus, the nature of electricity supply means it's not so vulnerable to human factors, such as a shortage of HGV drivers. Electricity supply can still be massively impacted by external factors, of course, but it doesn't bear thinking about how this situation might have played out if each car needed at least half an hour at the pump, only half the pumps were working and each charging station were 40 minutes away from the next - which is essentially what our current public EV charging network looks like. 

A diversification of the vehicle parc will help (at some point in the next decade, perhaps, we might see a near-equal split between ICE cars, plug-in hybrids, battery-electric cars and hydrogen FCEVs) to reduce over-dependence on one fuel source, but pushing the motoring masses into alternatively fuelled cars before the infrastructure is there to support them risks a repeat of exactly this situation. As we well know, not everyone can charge at home and not everyone lives near a charging station (let alone a hydrogen filling station), so is it any wonder that uptake of such vehicles hasn't been quicker? The risk of being left stranded – as so many are today – is too great for some to contemplate. 

Maybe for some fuel-burners, this will be a pivotal moment that attracts them towards the relative safety of an electric powertrain, but there will no doubt be those who still shudder at the prospect of being confined to the house by an inability to charge. But if nothing else comes of this situation, and by this time next week it has been pushed out of the news agenda by the next economy-battering crisis, at least it will have made some ICE car users consider the alternatives, however fleetingly.