I took one electric car and one electric motorcycle for a ride
for seven days in the city of Singapore.
Fun fact: it goes really fast. More fun facts: it goes very, very, very fast.
It's at 12 percent right now and the remaining time is almost 7 hours.
There’re more than 10 million electric vehicles in the world.
That’s pretty impressive, considering that if you rewound back a decade,
you'd find a grand total of 0.
But before the world can fully make the switch to electric, sufficient infrastructure
has to be in place first, especially in cities crammed with high rise apartments.
Governments all around the world have been encouraging that with policies and incentives,
but where are we on that journey?
And can a city dweller like me adapt?
Here’s what I learned.
If you drive electric, you’ll still have to contend with all of the pitfalls of city driving,
and the charging question.
Like: where would I charge it? How fast or slow will charging be?
And with rising electrical prices, how much will a full charge cost?
So, I’m here to trade my private transport in for brand-new electric vehicles for the week,
just to see what are the pain points and the plus points.
Five years ago, there were only 12 pure electric cars driving on Singapore roads.
And by August 2021, there were more than 1,800 electric cars,
with about 11% of them being Teslas.
And that’s just in a small city-state.
In 2021, 6.75 million EVs were sold globally.
That’s double 2020’s figures.
Tesla leads the market, with the most all-electric car sales by far in 2021,
followed by the Volkswagen group, BYD, GM and the Stellantis group,
which has brands such as Jeep, Chrysler and Alfa Romeo in its stable.
Now back to driving.
After being on the road for a while, I decided to give my car its first charge during lunch.
But I had to find a charging point first.
Thankfully, there were several apps to help me with that.
They said that there’s charging lots here, just trying to find them.
So, there’s two kinds of charging points. This is the normal kind,
I believe, and this is the fast charger.
Is it far enough? It doesn’t look like it’s far enough.
I think I need to turn the car.
Because the charging cable wasn’t long enough, so I have to go head in first.
Okay, take two.
Right now, it’s actually full. So, we’re gonna see if it makes any difference.
We have to add our credit card to the app first.
Oh, fantastic. So, in the time that we took the car to our first charge, we went down 3%.
It says that it will take 4 minutes.
It’s been 10 minutes plus and it has only charged 4%. Not a full charge.
So, I think what we’re gonna do is we’re going to stop right now. We don’t need a full charge.
Hyundai promised a mileage of up to 484 kilometers with a full charge for its Kona Electric model.
So I put it to the test.
It’s been a very, very fun ride, very smooth.
Basically, like any other car, just that we’re not visiting petrol stations anymore.
We’re using our mobile apps to locate the nearest
charging point and we’re going to be heading there right now.
Because it’s less than 60km to go and I don’t want to risk going on an empty battery.
Oh, it’s just right in front! Fantastic.
And I’m gonna learn from my mistake, I’m gonna go head in.
This is a slow charger, so I’m gonna plug it in and see how long it would take.
The battery level does say that it’s very low right now.
Let’s see how take it will take.
So, using a slow charger, it’s at 12% right now and the remaining time is almost 7 hours.
It’s charging, but slowly and surely.
I think it’s a little bit too slow, even with this service being free,
so what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna juice it up to maybe 15% or 20% and then we’re gonna
find a fast charger to see how long it would take because I’m not sitting here for 7 hours.
I’m very, highly, aware that I have very little juice
in my car now, so we are going to find a fast charger as soon as we can.
I feel like I’m an expert already.
48 minutes! Which is a big improvement.
We’re gonna go grab some coffee and come back in about an hour.
It’s at 84% charge. Within the 45 minutes it took for me to grab some coffee.
And there’s 16 minutes to go to a 100% charge, so I think that’s pretty good.
We’re gonna stop charging here and then we're gonna see how much it costs.
And it’s only $15.36.
Singapore’s a country of only 2,000 charging points.
The city-state aims for all vehicles to make a switch to clean energy by 2040,
but there’s more than 950,000 vehicles, on the road today including cars, motorcycles, buses and taxis.
So how is that going to be possible?
There are currently about 1.4 million public and
private parking lots in Singapore, spread over 12,000 car parks.
Building a wider EV infrastructure in such a densely packed place has its challenges too.
Within the next decade, the country aims to have 60,000 EV charging points across the island,
of which 40,000 are in public car parks and the remainder in private premises.
There is a range of innovative products out there.
Peter Mock is the Managing Director
of the International Council on Clean Transportation in Europe.
For example, you have those lampposts where you can plug in your electric car and charge it.
It doesn’t take up lots of space, it’s relatively cheap and can be rolled out throughout the city.
You have a lot of supermarkets nowadays in Europe that allow you to recharge while
you’re shopping in the supermarket. They have charging infrastructure in their parking lots.
And I think that’s a very intelligent way, because you’re using space that is there anyway,
and you involve the private businesses that can build up the infrastructure.
What we want to do is to look at electric vehicles, and that’s not just cars, right?
I’ve ridden for more than 13 years, longer than I’ve driven.
So, I’m here to pick up an electric motorcycle from Italian manufacturer Energica, trade in my
Triumph for a couple weeks, and see if it would compel this biker to make a switch.
We wanted something that was on two wheels,
and in the market, there are a lot in China, the ones with the swappable batteries and whatnot.
And we looked around and the best bike possible to bring onto the market
would be something really high-end. Energica would be that one.
Tell us about this one.
This is the Energica EsseEsse 9+.
The base model for this has an 80-kilowatt motor with a 21.5-kilowatt battery.
But the performance on this, if we go just based on specs alone, is 0-100(km/h) in 2.8 seconds.
Wow, that’s really fast. And I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity to test that out.
What’s the comparison between this bike and a conventional CC bike?
No comparison. Plain and simple.
Let’s open up the bike.
Here is your DC and AC charger.
So, I can charge anywhere that I can charge an electric car.
That’s correct.
So we have a charger in the office, and that’s where we charge it.
If you’re not working for 30 minutes, like a normal person would work for about 6-7 hours.
You get off work and it’s fully charged.
People like myself, people who are trying out electric vehicles, who’s only used to the norm
and trying to change the mindset, and I think that’s one of the harder parts about trying to get
people to switch over, right?
Number one when we talk about EVs, it’s always range anxiety.
Energica has got one of the highest ranges.
On eco mode, it goes about 380 kilometers on real world mileage.
That’s really more than enough for a week.
And it’s perfect because in a city like Singapore, right,
you’re not always on the highways. You’re in traffic, stop go, stop go.
Every time it stops, there’s actually a current of 126 amperes going back into the battery.
The second one is the lifespan of the battery.
They like to liken it to a handphone, my handphone after three years, my battery’s dead.
But for an EV car or bike, as long as you keep the battery within a healthy range of 20-80%,
they’ll last you 10 years or more.
Once you change the whole mindset about that, right,
you’ll realize that electric cars and bikes are really the way to go.
The global motorcycle market generated sales of around $109 billion in 2021.
And motorbikes and scooters
remain the primary means of transport in countries like Vietnam and India.
I took a ride down to Scorpio Electric, the first electric motorcycle brand launched from Singapore,
where founder Melvin Goh introduces to me the X1, a premium electric scooter.
We have a range of 200km. So, I think that’s a good range for city riding.
Top speed is 105km/hour.
There is a charging port here, which you can charge from any car charger.
What were the things that you saw could be improved in the market?
The connectivity. It’s something that is a must for the future.
So, we have a lot of functions on the app.
We tell you where you can locate the charging locations,
the battery condition, everything is both on the phone and the app.
Scorpio, as a company, you are a start-up.
What has been the biggest challenge, breaking into the electric motorcycle market?
We are short of talent.
So, it’s a question of the government, the people, enterprises, companies, encouraging electric and
it will happen eventually, very quickly.
The X1 wasn’t available yet for a demo ride,
but the Scorpio team allowed me to test ride an earlier prototype.
It’s a lot of fun, great ride!
And I was treated to the power of the electric scooter,
with one of the guys doing a quick burn-out!
After days of heavy usage on the Energica, it was time for a juice-up.
It’s charging right now, the lights will light up, the dashboard lights up.
It’s at 39% now. So, this electric bike, as long as I’ve had it, I’ve
brought it through the wringer, I’ve ridden in the rain, I’ve ridden more than 150km.
And it’s only at 39%, now 40%. When I got it,
it was almost 95%, so that’s pretty good for a week’s worth of riding.
So, it says there’s 16 minutes left for a full
charge, that's pretty good, that’s not even enough for a coffee.
From 40% to 80% charge, it’s about $3.44.
The electric bike is definitely heavier, but not necessarily harder to ride.
And well, look, I’m a true-blue city girl, and I think if I’ve
ridden on enough electric motorcycles and scooters,
and found the right one for me, the right height, the right size, I might make the switch.
Back in the Kona, I decided to do a last charge. And I ran into another problem.
I know from own experience also, in urban areas,
you’ll find the charging spot and then it’s either broken sometimes or it’s occupied
by another vehicle, sometimes even by a combustion engine vehicle illegally parking there.
Mine? I just need to charge, like maybe half an hour.
In my case, it was “too many cars, too little chargers.”
OK never mind, that one is done, I will go over there.
This is one of the issues when you have
reliance on public chargers, you have to wait in line or queue
up because sometimes when you go to a charging point, you realize someone is already using it.
After 20 minutes of charging, my fee was just $5.19.
In 2021, the European Commission made headlines,
after it presented the world’s first tangible plan to target carbon neutrality.
It included a de facto ban on producing new diesel and gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
But how will it be implemented? Peter explained.
Every new car in Europe has to be electric.
For this in Europe, we basically have at three different layers, we have important regulations.
At the European level, highest level, we have an EU-wide standard for new cars.
The good news is that the manufacturers, which in the past, sometimes
tended to oppose these kinds of restrictions or plans, they are pretty much all on board.
Then at the national level, we have subsidies, we have tax benefits for electric vehicles.
And for example, in France, we have a very interesting system, the bonus model system
it’s called, where those vehicles that have low emissions, electric vehicles, they get a bonus,
and that bonus is financed by those vehicles with high emissions.
And then at the lowest level, at the regional level, you have a lot of different
incentives in place and measures in place.
We have many cities throughout Europe that have announced that you cannot go with a combustion
engine vehicle into that city anymore from 2025 onwards, for example in Bergen and Oslo.
And these targets are very important symbolic measures because that, I think,
changes the mindset of consumers and they know that if I buy my next car,
it has to be electric, otherwise I cannot get in the city anymore.
It’s been a very fun week.
Those three challenges that I predicted for myself, even with the very few charging
points in Singapore, the infrastructure is there, to build up and add on to.
My advice to any city in the world, really, would be, to get to know your fleet,
and measure the real emissions of those vehicles driving on the road,
think about implementing these low or zero-emission zones.
But then, of course, if citizens buy more and more electric cars,
you as a city also have the responsibility to provide the necessary infrastructure,
and then following up step by step in increasing the density of charging infrastructure and making
sure that it’s accessible and functioning, of course, for the entire population.
And one thing’s for sure: In two decades or even less, the landscape of road transport
will look completely different, as an electric future is probably here to stay.