Readers have their say on the financial and environmental cost of banning petrol and diesel vehicles

He said the decision to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles is likely to impose huge costs on drivers for environmental benefits that are far from certain, considering the vast amount of energy used in the manufacturing process of electric vehicles.

Here's what YEP readers said:

Mark Hill said: "Banning petrol and diesel is a step in the right direction. Going fully electric with cars will in time be a good thing but before all this happens we need the charging infrastructure to be better then it is right now."

Jaimes Lewis Moran said: "It’d be helpful if more people emailed and petitioned their local supermarkets to install the charging points. They just need to know there’s demand that’s all. There’s plenty of money to do so."

Chris Alexander said: "The national grid panic every year about blackouts. I’d love to see all your charging points distributed up and down the country, willy nilly."

Dave Brucey Monaghan said: "Work vans and lorries? I for one own a guzzling transit and can’t see how small businesses can all of a sudden wake up one morning and go; ok, today’s the day, I will go buy a £25, 000, electric van. All for saving the planet but it’s not as simple as just straight banning diesel."

Click here to see the original letterJohn Boyd said: "It will just be another nail in the coffin for city centres as a place to shop. The next posting will be ...how do we attract people into the city/town centres? I’ve stopped going into Leeds because it’s a nightmare to park and get to the places I have to get to."

Danielle Huma said: "Well that will be me off the road. I don’t have electric car money and I believe many people will stop shopping in shops because they won’t be able to get about. Will be a shame."

Bill Fidler said: "We couldn’t possibly create the amount of electricity required to charge the amount of vehicles that would need to be on the road. We would have to build a lot more power stations and solar farms which would create more pollution than it would stop."

Hamish Morgan added: "There’s an interesting point in that the idea of having a new car on a regular basis is better for the environment, but if you look at the energy cost of running an old car over a million miles the energy/environmental cost to build and maintain is better than any electric vehicle. This is due to the cost of producing the batteries and disposing of them (making large batteries is a very energy inefficient process - far more so than a petrol engine). To dispose of and replace the batteries is very environmentally expensive. The only plus point is a cleaner air quality.

"The only reason a lot of cars don’t run to this distance is that cars are scrapped before the end of the mechanical life. If you look at small commercial vehicles, it is not unusual to see them run to half a million miles and more. The running gear in vans or pickups is the same found in normal cars so there is no reason for cars not to run to similar mileages...my own car has run to 300,000 miles so far. It’s just that most cars are used for too short a period to fully warm the engine up and maintenance is not kept up properly. We think of what it costs money wise rather than what it costs environmentally to keep a car running."