Recently, Mercedes announced the B-Class electric car. It can be recharged via a household power outlet (240 V/40 A) in less than 2 hours, with enough range for 60 miles (100 km). It should be available in the USA early 2014 with European market’s release shortly thereafter. It has remote monitoring and smartphone inputs. However, electric car skeptics still ask “what if the travel distance is long and there are no electric charging points nearby”.

Following that, another news hitting headlines is that York is to become the first city in the United Kingdom with a network of pay-as-you-go charging points for electric cars. There already are 12 charging points across the city. Unfortunately there is no easy location finder for those and those are mainly in private hotel car parks. The new electric fueling stations will be installed in number of car parks and ‘park and ride’ sites which will be accessible to all.

While electric car is perhaps the way for the green future, lack on charging facilities remains a key problem. With less number of electric cars, perhaps its not viable as well.

City of York Council’s solution is to introduce a pay-as-you-go scheme which will allow users to pay with their mobile phone or a text message. This is similar to York’s existing setup for parking ticket payments in council-owned car parks.

In the future, council also hopes that, they’ll be able to offer users a way to track their usage remotely and find the nearest available charging points. Obvious solution will be creating a mobile app.

Half an hour of charging can take the electric car about 30-miles.

“Decarbonising transport is crucial to meeting the UK’s climate change CO2 reduction target,” Cllr Dave Merrett, City of York Council’s Cabinet Member for Transport, Planning and Sustainability said.

“Electric cars only cost about two pence per mile to run and create no harmful emissions, so by bringing charging points to the city we are giving the people of York the potential to save money and travel more sustainably.”

Similar facility in other city, Source London, requires an annual fee of €100 to use of 900-plus charging points in the city.
York is such a historically significant, beautiful city that the news has genuinely pleased me. I hope other lovely cities in England like Bath, Oxford, Cambridge take inspiration from this great initiative.