An essay on mobility, property, and the politics of the green transition · April 2026
There is a peculiar kind of equality built into the petrol station. You pull up, you pump, you pay. The price on the sign is the same for the surgeon and the delivery driver, for the homeowner and the tenant, for the person who lives on a cul-de-sac and the person who lives in a tower block. Fuel, for most of the twentieth century, was one of the few commodities where your cost of access was structurally identical to everyone else’s.
We didn’t think of it as egalitarian, because we didn’t think of it at all. It was just the pump. Now watch what happens as we replace it.
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Consider two colleagues at the same school in Amsterdam. Same salary. Same commute. They buy identical electric cars in the same month. Mara owns a small house with a driveway twenty minutes outside the city. She charges overnight on a home tariff at roughly €0.27 per kilowatt-hour. Lena rents a flat in the city. No parking space. No driveway. She charges at the nearest public fast charger, which runs at around €0.70 per kilowatt-hour.
Same employer. Same car. Same city. Determined by almost nothing except where each of them sleeps at night. Neither of them chose this. Neither did anyone in government.
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The electric vehicle transition has a secret. It barely features in the glossy government announcements about net zero targets, or in the car adverts showing silent saloons gliding through empty mountain roads. The secret is this: the cost of charging your electric vehicle depends, more than almost anything else, not on which car you drive or how far you go, but on whether you own a home with a private parking space.
Own a home with a parking space and you charge overnight on a cheap domestic tariff. In the Netherlands, the €0.27 per kilowatt-hour is purely the energy cost. The grid connection fee is fixed regardless of whether you own an EV. For a typical commute, that comes to roughly €40 a month. Rent a flat with no allocated space and you charge at a public rapid charger, where the same commute costs between €100 and €160 a month. Not a different car. Not a longer drive. Just a different postcode.
Same car. Same journey. Three times the cost. Determined by little more than your housing status.
This is not a temporary glitch in new infrastructure. It is a structural feature of how electrification is unfolding. And it deserves a word sharper than “inequality.” The word I keep reaching for is re-feudalisation.
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Feudalism, at its core, was a system where your life outcomes were determined by your relationship to land. What you could grow, what you owed, how freely you could move. All of it flowed from whether you held property and what kind. The great liberation of modernity was, in part, the story of decoupling life outcomes from land ownership. Education, healthcare, transport. These were progressively made available on terms that did not require you to own property first.
The petrol car was part of that story. Whatever its considerable sins, climate, air quality, urban destruction, the internal combustion engine and the filling station network genuinely democratised personal mobility in a way that horses and railways never quite managed. You did not need to own land to get around. You needed a car and access to fuel, both available on broadly equal terms to anyone who could afford a vehicle.
The EV transition, as currently designed, reverses this. It reattaches the cost of mobility to access to private parking. In dense urban areas, whether you own or rent, the absence of a dedicated parking space is the real barrier. And that is where the majority of Europe’s population lives. An apartment owner in Amsterdam with no allocated parking space faces exactly the same charging economics as the tenant next door. The dividing line is not ownership. It is the parking space.
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Before the counter-argument arrives, and it will, let me acknowledge its strongest form. Petrol’s apparent egalitarianism was never quite as flat as it looked. Rural drivers always paid more in total. The poor disproportionately drove older, thirstier cars. Uniform unit pricing masked very unequal total costs. If you are going to romanticise the petrol station, romanticise it honestly.
The strongest technical rebuttal is that public charging prices are high now because utilisation is low. As networks mature, prices will fall. That’s true as far as it goes. But even at full utilisation, shared infrastructure will always carry overhead that home charging avoids: grid connection fees, hardware amortisation, service margins. The gap won’t close. It’s structural.
These caveats are real. But they don’t dissolve the problem; they reframe it. The question isn’t whether petrol was perfectly equal. It wasn’t. The question is whether the EV transition is making the structure of mobility costs more tied to wealth and property than it was before. And right now, with public charging at two to three times the cost of home charging, the answer is clearly yes.
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What makes this moment particularly sharp is something that the equity researchers haven’t quite named yet. The EV transition has accidentally merged two inequalities into one.
Housing inequality and transport inequality have always existed in parallel. Poor people lived in worse neighbourhoods and drove older cars. Two separate problems with some overlap. What the EV transition does is make housing inequality and transport inequality the same inequality. Your parking situation, an artifact of your property status, now directly determines your energy costs, your running costs, and therefore your ability to afford the mandated future.
This compounding is new. And it runs deeper than the charging cost alone. The next wave of EV economics brings something called Vehicle-to-Grid. In the Netherlands it is already operational: homeowners with compatible cars and smart chargers can earn money by feeding power back to the grid during peak hours. Utrecht has been running a commercial scheme since 2024. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems estimated in 2024 that this could save European grids €22 billion annually by 2040. But Vehicle-to-Grid requires a home charger, a compatible car, and a parking space. The financial upside accrues almost entirely to those who already have the cheapest charging. The renter pays more to charge. The homeowner gets paid to park.
Banning petrol cars is not only transport policy. It is housing policy. We just haven’t noticed yet.
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The direction of travel makes this worse, not better. Amsterdam is already planning at 0.7 cars per household and declining. The city is removing parking spaces, not adding them. Across the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK, the share of young people holding driving licences has fallen in every cohort since the 1990s. The political logic is sound, dense cities function better with fewer cars, but the energy logic has not kept pace. If urban density increases while private parking shrinks, the population dependent on expensive public charging grows, not shrinks. The structural disadvantage deepens precisely where people are most concentrated.
And when the 2035 EU ban on new ICE sales takes full effect, the petrol option will not vanish overnight. But it will become a relic, increasingly expensive to maintain and insure. For Lena, that means the only affordable mobility option will be the one she cannot access cheaply. The market for public charging, dominated by a handful of private networks with significant pricing power, becomes the price of urban mobility for tens of millions of people who have no driveway and no alternative.
A toll road with a green logo.
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The Dutch model points toward the answer. The Netherlands did not leave cycling to the market. It built the fietspad as a public good, regulated, universal, and priced to ensure access. The EV charging network is the new fietspad. If governments treat it instead as a commercial opportunity, buildable by private networks, priceable at whatever the market will bear, the re-feudalisation is not a side effect of the transition. It is the design. And we will not be building a green future. We will be building a green toll road.
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Mara and Lena are still colleagues. They still earn the same. They still drive the same car. But their energy futures have already diverged. Mara charges cheaply, and as Vehicle-to-Grid rolls out, her car will soon earn money while it sits in the driveway. Lena pays three times more per kilometre and will go on paying it. Not because of any choice she made. Because of where she lives.
When the petrol option finally closes, Lena will discover what the transition planners have not yet fully worked out. The price she pays to get to work will be set not by the cost of electricity, nor by the efficiency of her car. It will be set by the accident of whether her landlord owns a parking space.
The pump never asked who owned the land beneath it. The plug already knows.