Scotland on Sunday Letters: More home charge points will encourage EV take-up

I have been driving an EV for four years and have taken one as far away as the south west of Ireland but I don’t make a lot of use of public charging points.

While agreeing with the Lib Dems that more of these public chargers are needed (Scotland on Sunday, 22 May), I would suggest that the real emphasis needs to be on enabling EV owners to recharge at home or at work. Ideally we should only be using public charging stations while on longer journeys.

My current vehicle has a range of about 275 miles, which means that I can do round trips of more than 200 miles without resort to a top up and the hanging about that is normally involved. Many public facilities offer high powered, fast chargers and their frequent use will significantly reduce battery life and capacity so it is best to minimise their use even if the electricity is being given away free. EVs won’t help the planet if their batteries only last seven or eight years and the car has to be scrapped.

It is easy to enable charging at homes with off-street driveways and parking. The big challenge is to find a way to do this for people living in high rise buildings and terraces etc. Drivers need to be able to come home, plug in the vehicle to a readily available machine and leave it to charge slowly overnight without needing to come out later and move the car so that somebody else can use the charge point.

Public charging points can mean a lot of hanging around (Picture: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty)

This is going to take a lot of imagination and ingenuity but it has to happen.

Ronald Cameron, Fort William, Highland

Safeguard women

I enjoyed Hannah Brown’s article about feminist town planning to make Glasgow safer for women (Scotland on Sunday, 29 May). I am one of the 67 per cent of women who feels unsafe on buses due to previous sexual assaults so a feminist lens on public spaces could only improve matters.

Another urgent consideration is women’s safe access to healthcare. In recent weeks the anti-abortion protesters who target Glasgow’s hospitals and clinics have become emboldened. They are appearing in greater numbers and becoming louder and more confrontational. The Scottish Government must act quickly to implement 150m protest-free buffer zones to ensure women can access healthcare safely.

Gemma Clark, Paisley, Renfrewshire

Spectacular failure

The Scottish Government has nationalised ScotRail and with this comes a lack of drivers. The promise from our First Minister that this will be temporary does not fill me with hope.

This government has made so many promises – like providing a laptop for every school child, free travel on the buses and a Curriculum for Excellence. Then there are the millions spent on ferries that are not seaworthy.

Everything this Government touches fails. How long must we put up with this incompetence? Can the SNP not admit they have failed in a spectacular way, spoiling everything it touches and costing the nation a large fortune which is thrown down the drain?

All for the sake of the push to independence which, is like Tennyson's brook. It goes on and on and on...

Valerie Stewart, Calderwood, East Kilbride

Oil to the good

Good news that Cambo field development looks set to proceed, as the war in Ukraine is likely to go on for a long time and we need every drop of oil and gas.

Dennis Forbes Grattan, Bucksburn, Aberdeen

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