IN his letter, Councillor Andy Brown explains that he saved £2,500 on fuel while driving his electric car 10,000 miles last year (Electric car gains not just about planet, Craven Herald letters, October 24).

However, if we are to make a fair comparison between the costs of an electric car and one that uses petrol, there are several other factors must be included.Insurance for electric cars is very expensive. You may expect to pay about twice as much as you would car with a petrol engine. Electric cars are much more costly to purchase than cars with internal combustion engines.

The cheapest electric car, the Fiat 500, costs £30,000. This is £10,000 more than the corresponding model with a petrol engine. But it gets worse, the depreciation for electric cars is disastrous. Currently, the depreciation over three years is just under 70 per cent which is about double that for a conventional car.

If you pay £30,000 for a new car, after three years you would expect to get £20,000 for a car that runs on petrol but only £10,000 if it is an electric car. If you are unfortunate enough to have a battery failure, it will cost you at least £10,000 to replace. If you need to use a rapid charger away from home, you may have to pay as much as 22p per mile.

It follows that if you decide to choose an electric car, it will be an expensive option. In addition, it is also important to understand that electric cars are about one third heavier than petrol cars. If numbers increase substantially, multi-storey car parks will be in danger of collapsing and will have to be strengthened structurally.

Furthermore, electric cars can ignite spontaneously and have been responsible for many catastrophic fires in car parks and on ships. Finally, how is all the electricity to be generated to provide fuel for these cars, since we struggle to meet the existing demand?

It is no surprise that as these facts become generally available, demand for electric cars is plummeting. Significantly, many who have purchased an electric car in the past are now reverting to conventional vehicles. On balance, when we look at the big picture, the prospects for electric cars seem to be rather bleak.

Verner Wheelock Glusburn