SWITCHED ON
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Charged Up: Electric Vehicles and the 2035 Question
Multiple governments have committed to banning new petrol and diesel car sales by 2035. The technology is ready. Almost everything else is not.
The internal combustion engine had a hundred and thirty years to build its infrastructure. The charging network has nine. The car is ready. The world it needs to operate in is considerably less so.
Yesterday we talked about satellite internet and the digital divide — Starlink's genuine operational achievements, the 2.6 billion people still without reliable connectivity, the affordability gap that technology alone cannot close, and what we are doing to the orbital environment in the process of trying to fix things from space. Today we are back on the ground, on the road, and squarely in the middle of one of the most consequential infrastructure transitions of the twenty-first century. Electric vehicles. The 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales that the UK, the European Union, and several other jurisdictions have committed to. What the technology can and cannot do. What the supply chain looks like when you pull on it. And whether the timeline being demanded of an industry that took a century to build its current infrastructure is realistic, desirable, or simply the only option given the alternative.
Let's start with what is actually working, because the story is not all problems.
01 — What EVs Have Actually Achieved
The electric vehicle of 2026 is not the golf cart with pretensions that EV sceptics spent a decade mocking. The best current battery electric vehicles offer ranges exceeding 500 kilometres on a single charge, acceleration figures that embarrass sports cars costing five times as much, maintenance costs substantially lower than equivalent internal combustion vehicles, and a driving experience that a significant majority of people who switch to them describe as superior to what they left behind. The technology, at the vehicle level, has matured substantially and continues to improve.
Global EV sales have grown dramatically. In 2023, electric vehicles accounted for roughly 18 percent of all new car sales globally — a figure that would have seemed implausibly optimistic to most analysts a decade earlier. China dominates both production and adoption, accounting for the majority of global EV sales and manufacturing most of the world's EV batteries. The European market has grown strongly. The US market has grown more unevenly, with adoption concentrated in specific states and demographics. The overall trajectory — more models, more manufacturers, falling prices, rising sales — is real and sustained.
The question is no longer whether electric vehicles work. They demonstrably do. The question is whether the surrounding ecosystem — charging, grid, batteries, supply chains, affordability — can be built fast enough to support a mandatory transition by 2035.
Battery costs, the single largest component of EV cost, have fallen by roughly ninety percent over the past fifteen years following a learning curve that has tracked, and in some periods exceeded, optimistic projections. The price parity point — at which an electric vehicle costs the same to buy as an equivalent petrol vehicle without subsidies — has been reached in some segments and is approaching in others. It has not been reached uniformly, and the used EV market, which is where most people actually buy cars, remains more complicated than the new car market narrative suggests.
02 — The Charging Infrastructure Problem
Range anxiety — the fear of running out of charge before reaching a charging point — is frequently dismissed by EV advocates as a solved problem. For drivers who charge primarily at home, on a regular commute, with predictable distances, it largely is. For drivers without off-street parking, for long-distance journeys, for rural areas with sparse charging networks, and for the majority of the global population who do not live in the circumstances that make home charging straightforward, it is not solved at all.
The public fast-charging network in most countries remains inadequate relative to the scale of transition being demanded. In the UK, which has one of the more developed networks in Europe, the ratio of public charge points to electric vehicles has been falling as vehicle adoption outpaces infrastructure deployment. Reliability is a persistent issue — surveys consistently find that a significant proportion of public chargers are out of service at any given time, a problem that does not exist with petrol stations in the same way because a broken pump is immediately visible and repaired quickly, whereas a broken charger may sit non-functional for days or weeks without the same urgency of response.
The apartment and terraced housing problem is structural and underappreciated. A significant proportion of urban households in most countries do not have access to off-street parking where they could install a home charger. These households depend entirely on public charging infrastructure. The economics of public charging — high capital cost, variable utilisation, electricity price volatility — make it commercially challenging to deploy at the density required. Solutions exist: on-street charging points, lamp-post chargers, destination charging at supermarkets and workplaces. None of them are being deployed at the pace needed to support a 2035 transition for the full range of the car-owning population.
03 — The Battery Supply Chain
A lithium-ion battery cell requires lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and graphite, among other materials. The geographic concentration of these resources is stark and carries significant geopolitical and ethical implications that the clean energy transition narrative often glosses over.
Lithium production is dominated by Australia, Chile, and Argentina, with China controlling the majority of refining capacity. Cobalt — used in many current battery chemistries, though manufacturers are actively working to reduce or eliminate its use — comes predominantly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mining has been extensively documented to involve child labour and severe environmental damage. Nickel production is concentrated in Indonesia and Russia. China dominates the manufacturing of battery cells, cathode materials, and anodes to a degree that creates supply chain dependencies that Western governments are actively but slowly working to address.
The mining required to produce batteries for a fully electrified global vehicle fleet at current battery chemistry is substantial. It requires opening new mines, in new locations, through permitting processes that take years and face significant community and environmental opposition. The irony of a clean energy transition that requires a significant expansion of extractive industry is not lost on critics, and it is not an irony that can be wished away. Battery recycling — recovering lithium, cobalt, and nickel from end-of-life batteries — is a partial answer that the industry is investing in seriously, but the recycling infrastructure lags behind the production ramp by years, and the economics of recycling depend on battery volumes that have not yet materialised at scale.
Replacing fossil fuel dependency with mineral dependency is not the same problem. But it is still a dependency, and it has its own geopolitical vulnerabilities, its own ethical complications, and its own environmental costs that deserve honest accounting.
04 — The Grid Question, Again
Regular readers of this series — both of you — will recall that Episode 10 on climate technology made the point that the bottleneck in the energy transition is not the cost of renewable generation but the speed at which grid infrastructure can be built. Electric vehicles make this point more concrete and more urgent.
A household that adds an electric vehicle to its energy consumption increases its electricity demand by roughly thirty to fifty percent. A street where every household has an EV and charges it in the early evening — when people arrive home from work, which is also when grid demand from other sources peaks — creates load patterns that existing residential distribution infrastructure was not designed to handle. Smart charging — systems that shift EV charging to off-peak hours — is a real and deployable solution. It requires smart chargers, smart tariffs, and consumer willingness to accept that their car will charge at 2am rather than 7pm, which is a behavioural and trust ask that is not trivial at scale.
The electricity that charges an EV comes from the grid, and the grid in most countries still generates a meaningful proportion of its power from fossil fuels. An EV charged on a coal-heavy grid produces lifecycle emissions that are lower than a petrol car but higher than the clean-energy scenario that justifies the transition. The environmental case for EVs depends on the grid decarbonising in parallel with vehicle electrification. These two transitions need to happen simultaneously. They are both slow. The interaction between them is not always acknowledged in the headline EV adoption figures.
05 — The 2035 Deadline — Real, Retreating, or Both?
The UK announced a 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel car sales, then pushed it back to 2035. The European Union confirmed its 2035 ban, then opened a carve-out for synthetic fuel vehicles under industry pressure. The US has pursued a patchwork of state-level mandates and federal incentive programs rather than a national ban. The political durability of these commitments has proven to be inversely proportional to the proximity of their deadlines — targets set for 2035 feel manageable in 2022 and considerably more alarming in 2032.
The automotive industry has committed billions to EV transition and retooled factories, but has also lobbied actively for deadline extensions, technology neutrality provisions, and the preservation of hybrid vehicle options beyond 2035. Several manufacturers have quietly slowed EV investment in response to softer-than-projected consumer demand in some markets and the persistent challenge of making mass-market EVs profitable without subsidies. The transition is happening. Its pace and completeness are more contested than the headline policy commitments suggest.
What is not seriously contested is the direction. The internal combustion engine's days as the default powertrain for new passenger vehicles are numbered. The number is somewhere between nine and twenty-five years depending on which market you are in and which manufacturer you ask. The technology exists. The economics are converging. The infrastructure, the supply chains, the grid, and the political will are the variables that will determine whether the transition happens on the timeline the climate requires or the considerably longer timeline the market would otherwise produce.
Tomorrow we are going somewhere that sits at the intersection of almost every topic this series has covered so far — artificial intelligence regulation. Who is trying to govern AI, what the major regulatory frameworks actually say, where they agree, where they catastrophically disagree, and whether any of it is moving fast enough to matter. See you then.
Switched On is a daily technology series covering AI, social media, data privacy, and the digital forces reshaping modern life — with no corporate spin, no false comfort, and absolutely no mercy for buzzwords.
