I won’t be buying an EV anytime soon. I care deeply about the current state of the environment, and I am greatly frustrated by the way things are going, but I have come to the conclusion that most things that are happening in the name of Climate Change on any sort of an industrial scale are mostly greenwashing, and EVs are no exception.

For me the numbers simply do not add up which ever way I look at them.

I currently drive a nearly 10 year old small petrol car with a long term average of over 56mpg (that would be a UK gallon), giving me around 530 mile range on a single tank of petrol. In the winter this drops a bit, to about 53mpg, which still means 500 miles out of a tank. Compare that to my neighbour’s EV of a similar size that manages just 120 miles on a charge in the summer, and pathetic 80 miles during the winter.

That simply would not do. I do enough long journeys through the less populated areas of Scotland each the year to require that my car has a real range of at least 350 miles on single refuelling at any time of the year; if I was to drive an EV that would have to be true for at least a decade, I don’t believe in replacing cars every few years. And there simply are no small EVs like that.

Which brings me to the elephant in the EV greenwashing sales room: the trumpeted CO2 benefits from driving an EV are on a like for like basis, that is an EV might result in 40% fewer CO2 emissions than a comparably-sized ICE vehicle over its lifetime. But if I were to replace my 88bhp small ICE vehicle with 250bhp EV, the CO2 cost of my driving would actually increase — my small ICE car is a better choice than a Tesla when it comes to CO2 emissions just on the nominal figures.

I say nominal figures, because it gets worse. The putative 40% saving is based on assuming the standard vehicle life span 200,000km, and no EV battery will last that amount of time (the manufacturer guarantees are for 1/2 of that). Battery is where most of the EV CO2 footprint is, so replacing it blows the figures out of the water. Add to that the high environmental and human costs of the batteries, and the fact that battery recycling is basically non-existent, and it’s impossible not to conclude that EVs solve nothing at all. (The real problem is the car itself, there are too many of them, and we drive too much.)

But surely, running an EV is much cheaper than running an ICE car, and that should be enough of an incentive? No, not really. The math only works for large cars and/or people who do big annual mileage. If, like me, you drive a small car at the average UK annual mileage, the savings just aren’t there. I have done the math around my own costs of running the car, and come to the conclusion that at present prices of EVs I’d not recoup the extra purchase cost over the life time of the vehicle.

But the prices of second hand EVs dropping, you say. That is true. But given the current state of the battery technology, buying a second hand EV that is more than a year or two old is a fairly foolish thing to do, requiring a big degree of blind trust in the manufacturers’ claims about the life span of their new technologies. And trust is the one thing the car industry, old or new, doesn’t merit.

There is also the whole ‘Car as a Service’ model that comes with EVs, the impossible vendor lock-in; your battery capacity remotely reduced by the vendor at a whim, that sort of a thing. I have no time for the ‘as a Service’ model in general, but totally when it concerns the car.

And so, if I were to replace my small ICE car today, it would be with another small ICE car (and probably a diesel). But I am not planning to, I don’t believe in replacing things for no good reason, and the one thing about simple ICE cars is, they are reparable, and I have a really decent local mechanic.