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As beneficial as the move towards electromobility is, it will not contribute to calming the juridical Czech society under the current conditions.
Rather the opposite. Owners of overpriced single-family homes will further distance themselves from owners of similarly overpriced single-family homes stacked horizontally on top of each other.
In short: It is much easier to charge your Tesla in a family house than in an apartment on the fifth floor of a block of flats.
This is not an insignificant problem. Archiwebwhich deals with architecture and housing, states that approximately three million people live in prefab houses in the Czech Republic in the long term.
“According to statistics, there are 4.37 million apartments in the Czech Republic, of which 3.83 million are permanently inhabited. Of these inhabited apartments, 2.16 million are in apartment buildings. More than half of them are in prefab houses,” experts write.
When it comes to electromobility, however, it’s not just about prefabs. These are all apartment buildings that together form cities. About decorative art nouveau palaces and functional colonnades of tenements and apartment buildings.
The language of numbers: In the Czech Republic long term 46.7 percent of the population lives in a family home. More precisely, 36.6 percent in detached houses and 10.1 percent in semi-detached houses. 52.8 percent of Czechs live in apartments.
The multitude of garages in cities somewhere behind the slums of residential areas is not worth talking about.
Therefore, more than half of the population of the Czech Republic, even if they have the money for it, because prices of electric cars are gradually decreasing, he cannot buy an electric car. Charging a Volvo EV with an extension cord from the third floor of the grandest apartment building is inconvenient and dangerous.
I didn’t choose Volvo by chance. Car now she announced, that it produced the last diesel-powered car. For the time being, gasoline models are still being produced in the Swedish Torslanda factory. However, from 2030 all Volvos will be electric.
The curve steeping to the stars, which has recently accompanied the news about sales of electric cars, needs to be grounded. They are true, so what. But they start from scratch. That’s why they look so impressive.
In fact, there are approximately 25,000 electric cars in the Czech Republic. At the same time, we have more than six and a half million passenger vehicles.
Charging stations we have plus or minus five thousand. Classic pumps approximately eight thousand. But there are on average six to eight habitats for each one. So we are approaching 60,000 places where a driver can top up the energy of a car powered by an internal combustion engine.
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Chargers grow by units of pieces in new ones parking garages. Here and there at shopping centers. Practically not at all in housing estates and ordinary city streets.
Unfortunately, Covid, Putin’s war and price hikes have caused so much damage that we cannot afford to further classify society into a consciously electric part and a fossil-burning part.
It is terrible to say this, but despite the progressing climate change, the effect of which we are also feeling here, the Czech Republic must be temporarily myopic. And for the reasons mentioned above, slow down the introduction of electromobility. For example, by delaying the planned bans on the entry of classic cars into the centers of large cities. Until the charging infrastructure can be spread really massively throughout the state.
If this doesn’t happen and the pressure to “exterminate” older cars increases, society will become even more divided. The oppressed, and thus insulted, gripped majority will then not agree at all on far more important climate measures. Which could be a real bummer.
We are not alone
Electromobility is hampered elsewhere as well.
In February, Mercedes-Benz lowered its forecast for sales of cars with this technology. It now expects battery-powered vehicles to remain at less than half of sales for longer than expected.
Audi announced at the end of last year that it will limit the introduction of electric cars.
Global car rental company Hertz Global Holding will sell a third of its US electric car fleet due to high repair costs and weak demand. The funds obtained from the sale of 20,000 electric cars are invested in cars powered by an internal combustion engine.
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