I read Jasper Jolly’s article on the cost of electric cars (Higher price of electric cars a concern for more than half of UK consumers, 4 September) and he reiterated in passing what everyone always says about the need for a vast infrastructure of electric charging points across the land before owners will take up the electric car option. However, I keep wondering whether this is the right way of thinking.
Another approach would be for electric car manufacturers to design their cars in such a way that they can run on standardised batteries that owners could then simply swap out when they are close to running down and replace them with fully charged batteries from “battery garages”. This would eliminate the range anxiety of electric car owners as they would never be far away from a garage and would not need to hang around for a car to recharge while on a journey. Will this ever be technically feasible? No idea. But it might be better than having millions of individual recharging points all over the place, and it could repurpose existing garages as battery swap-over points.
Barry Norris
Swansea
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