The grid will never handle everyone driving electric.

It is the most common objection to electric cars. It is also, on the numbers, simply wrong - and the size of the error is worth seeing.

If every passenger car in Europe eventually went electric, total electricity demand would rise by roughly 9%.

Not 90%. Around nine.

The chart below shows why. Even as EV electricity demand climbs for thirty years, it never becomes more than a modest slice of total European power generation - a system that is already growing faster than that for data centres, heat pumps and air conditioning.

The reason is efficiency, and it is the part the objection misses entirely. An electric motor turns about 85-90% of its energy into motion. A combustion engine wastes roughly 70% of the fuel's energy as heat. So replacing fuel with electricity does not move the same energy from a pump to a plug - it replaces a wasteful process with an efficient one. Europe ends up moving the same cars on far less total energy.

We spent this week following the slow red line of the transition - the stock that changes slowly, the fuel that lingers. This is the other side of the honest picture.

The transition is slower than the hype suggests. And it is nowhere near the catastrophe the sceptics claim. Both things are true, and holding both is the only way to plan sensibly.

The grid is not the reason electric cars will struggle. We should stop pretending it is - and look at the real constraints instead: where the chargers go, and who can reach them.