Electric dreams

EVEN for true believers, the BMW i3 is a difficult car to own. Where would you charge it?

The BMW i3 is a nice car, but Australia lacks the charging stations for it.

I LIVE in a part of Sydney where dedicated bicycle lanes are everywhere (one goes directly past my house). There is a car share vehicle parked across the street (which hardly ever gets used). I could walk to the CBD (if I really wanted to).

However, I don't own a bicycle, I'm not a member of the car share system and I could count the number of times I have walked to the CBD on one hand. In theory I could live without a car, but in reality I choose not to. Public transport in my part of Sydney means buses that are almost always full by the time they get to where I live on the route. I don't ride a bike because I don't want to take my life into my hands when the bike lane ends and the traffic begins. I also choose to own a car because I also own a dog and NSW being something of a nanny state means that dogs are not allowed on public transport or in taxis (odd considering every Sydney taxi I get into seems to smell as if an animal lives in it) or share cars.

I drive my car about 5000km a year, which is well below the average. At the same time I'm acutely aware that (a) owning a car that is driven so little is a luxury when you factor in fuel, insurance and maintenance costs and (b) owning a car that is driven so little gives me a significant carbon footprint. Considering all of this, I think I am the perfect candidate for an electric car. Putting the cost aside - electric cars are more expensive to buy than petrol-fuelled ones - the main drawback of an electric vehicle is not really an issue for me. They might only get up to 160km per charge and it can take up to eight hours to recharge, but I would be hard pressed to do that many kilometres in a week, let alone a single day.

I'm the perfect candidate for an electric vehicle but I can't buy one because there is simply nowhere for me to charge it. I recently test drove BMW's i3 electric vehicle in Amsterdam and returned to Australia a true believer, determined to buy one. Then it dawned on me ... where would I charge it? If you park on the street, as most people in inner-city Sydney do, then you would need a public charging station near your house or your place of business. The nearest one to me is three suburbs away. If I moved to an apartment building with a carpark, then I would need to convince the body corporate to install an electric outlet in my dedicated parking spot, if I have one. So the dream of owning an electric vehicle will need to remain just that until I move to the suburbs with a house and a garage, which ironically would mean the amount of driving I do would increase and then I would develop what owners of electric vehicles refer to as "range anxiety".

Despite the problems with owning an electric vehicle in Australia, we've included it in our trends for 2014 as we think this is the year that people will look on the technology as inevitable even if the uptake of it is slow. The cars are here and they work just fine; all we need now is the infrastructure to charge them. We started doing our year ahead trends list four years ago and sometimes we've got it wrong and sometimes we've been a bit early with things. We hope you find something in the list to inspire you. If you have any trend predictions you want to share, then by all means send us a message on our Facebook page.