I AM an admirer of Iain Macwhirter, but he is wrong when he says there is "a lack of charging points across Scotland" ("The burning issue has to be the need to abandon coal", The Herald, April 17).
I quote from Insider.co.uk: "New research finds there are 743 publicly-funded chargepoints north of the Border – one for every 7,127 people. The ratio in Wales is 98,806 people per chargepoint, for London it is 17,682 and for Northern Ireland it is 9,789. Only the north-east of England had a better ratio with 3,931 people per chargepoint."
Also, unlike the rest of the UK, it is still free to use a public charger in Scotland.
My wife and I both have electric vehicles (EVs) and had chargers installed free of charge at home, so although we avail ourselves of the public system, most of our charging is done there, where one of the best benefits of electric vehicles is that they can be set to be warm and fully defrosted (or cooled by air conditioning) using mains power, not the battery. The luxury of stepping into a defrosted and warm car on a cold winter's morning has to be experienced to fully appreciate.
Finally, there are apps that allow reciprocal use of private home chargers if you cannot make it to a public one. Despite having been registered on two of these sites since 2015 we have not had one booking, so I can only conclude that EV drivers are able to complete their journeys without recourse to this emergency measure.
Naturally we think more public chargers would be helpful, especially as EV use accelerates. But don't internal combustion engine drivers wish for more filling stations?
And remember, when I am stopped in traffic my car uses no fuel, and when I brake the electric motors regenerate electricity and recharge the battery.
Ian M Forrest,
Dalveen, Garvock Road, Laurencekirk.
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