QOTW: Do you own an electric car?

[Saracen999]

Those that will 'never' get an EV. I can remember the same statements when the smoking ban was introduced. Something along the lines of "They'll never stop me smoking wherever i want" etc.
I suspect the same will happen to fossil fuel transport. When they are eventually forced to queueing up to share the few gas pumps that are left on the forecourts, amidst the dirty looks and sniggers, as they pay a fortune to keep their dinosaurs going.
In 30 years there will hardly be a gasoline driven car to be seen.

Not sure who you mean by "never get" but judging by that 30-year criteria, it may refer to my last post. If so, you haven't read what I said carefully. I *want* an EV .... provided it meets my needs, as outlined earlier. And, provided it meets the financiam aspects. Currently, none do. As for 30 years, I'm pretty indiffernt to what's happening then because the odds of me still driving anything are minimal if I'm lucky.

Also, I'll give you three .... no, you'll only need one .... guess about how much I care about 'dirty looks and sniggers". If you shared my fashion sense, you-d know I have to be utterly immune to caring what others think.

[SkywalkerLuke]

Unfortunately I don't. I wouldn't mind but there is still such a premium attached to them right now.. Lets all safe the planet people :-)

[AndyN33]

Whilst I am interested in the possibilities provided by alternative fuel vehicles, for me right now they are just too expensive and impracticle for my use case.
What I find most worrying about an only electric car future though seems to have been completely missed by most peopel here. Currently the National Grid has to plan ahead to be able to balance loads for lots of people putting a kettle on at the same time (at half time for a World CUp game for example). How is the grid going to cope with everyone getting home from work and putting all of the cars on to charge at the same time? Especially if we consider that it is currently only possible for a few houses in a street to have a charging point installed due to the infrastructure not being up to standard to be able to support more at once.

[Buzzark]

I've been a petrol (or diesel) head for many years and currently have a diesel Fabia vRS which I bought when diesel was safe for everyone and a good option for reducing CO2. I've had much hotter cars in the past but I love the torque and economy combined with it.

Seriously looking at electric for my next car but I'm realistically restricted to the used market. As I want something still sporty then there appears to be only one option under £15k and that's a BMW i3. All the other options are just too lacking in grunt, I don't drive fast I just want enough power available for wen I want/need it.

I'd have to love it a lot to justify spending £15k as that's double the amount I've ever spent on a car.

I'm just not sure the built-in-range vs infrastructure is quite there yet though on the earlier i3 models or other EV cars in my budget. So if it doesn't wow me enough then probably a small petrol hot hatch despite wanting an electric.

[Zak33]

Can't justify affording to spend that much on a car, just to see the internal combustion car that I drive be driven by someome else anyway, while I see my new electric car be transported half way round the globe on a diesel powered traporter ship and diesel trucks, having been made by smelting steel and digging precious metals from the earth to create it, leather clad and Air Con gassed, glass made and plastic trims created, lithium barries and electrric motors wound.......

I'll go now,.....

[Dribble]

What no one seems to want to mention is if we drove electric cars the countries power network would collapse. It's not even close to being able to provide sufficient power (max power output would have to over double, the cabling to take all that power around the country would need upgrading and local cabling in cities would need completely redone). It's not a problem that's being fixed either - as that would be very expensive, particularly if you wanted to do it green.
Hence if you hear any MP telling us how we'll all be electric in a few years time, know that they don't really have a clue and are just saying it to sound good.

[Buzzark]

What no one seems to want to mention is if we drove electric cars the countries power network would collapse. It's not even close to being able to provide sufficient power (max power output would have to over double, the cabling to take all that power around the country would need upgrading and local cabling in cities would need completely redone). It's not a problem that's being fixed either - as that would be very expensive, particularly if you wanted to do it green.
Hence if you hear any MP telling us how we'll all be electric in a few years time, know that they don't really have a clue and are just saying it to sound good.

The National Grid have stated on a number of occasions that we have plenty of capacity for the ramp up to electric vehicles, even if the take up rate is much higher than predicted. https://theenergyst.com/millions-electric-vehicles-sooner-predicted-no-sweat-says-national-grid/

[darcotech]

I do, but it is radio-controlled :-)

Joke aside, the economics of buying an electric car is just not there for me (my car has been paid out, has high mileage), so if I wanted to go electric now, it would be quite a raise of cost in my budget.
If I was going to buy a new one now, I would probably go for Hyundai Kona on lease.
Next year will be the big one, as many big players are coming to the market. Geneva Car Show 2020 will be great.

[Wolfsbane2k]

No. Although, eventually I'm likely to do so, I'm going to be buying an electric bike first and foremost.

Electric cars are often sold as the panacea to pollution in our cities, however all they really do is shift the generation of pollutants externally, and do nothing about the congestion or death (1700 a year) and destruction caused by drivers of vehicles on our society.

We need fewer cars, not newer cars.

[Ttaskmaster]

The amount of people in here who have said something along the lines of "no I don't and no I never will" genuinely scares me.

I'm sorry that my inability to afford a jumped up golf cart scares you. I'm sorry that where I live and work being so unlikely to see charging infrastructure installed scares you. I'm sorry that my aggressive distaste for being preached at by self-righteous [censored] cry-bullies scares you.

Most people I know round here live in terraces and have to park several hundred yards from their house. But even if they could park right outside (never happen as long as someone can make money from parking restrictions), the infrastructure would be getting nicked or vandalised on a nightly basis. Sorry if that scares you.

I suspect the same will happen to fossil fuel transport. When they are eventually forced to queueing up to share the few gas pumps that are left on the forecourts, amidst the dirty looks and sniggers, as they pay a fortune to keep their dinosaurs going.

The queues will be electric owners all waiting for their turn at a 'quick-charge'.
Us diesel demons will zip up in the morning, refuel and be gone within 5 minutes. Might wave at you on my way home that evening.

Meanwhile, the minute electric cars become the majority, electric charging will cost an absolute fortune... and you'll still be limited to 10 minutes at a time, lest you cause even longer tailbacks. It'll be like when there were fuel strikes, but permanent and not even something you could blame on the French!

[Dribble]

The National Grid have stated on a number of occasions that we have plenty of capacity for the ramp up to electric vehicles, even if the take up rate is much higher than predicted.

Peak power in this country (if they turn everything on) is about 60 million kw (i.e. about 1kw/person or 1/3 of an electric kettle). We do hit that when we all turn the kettle on half way through a big football game. That's for everything too - not just for you it's for police stations, street lights, the lot.

A rapid charger for one electric car draws 43kw alone, let alone buses/trucks/etc. If we were all using electric cars with 50-100Kw/h batteries, and buses/trucks say 300Kw/h batteries and need charging every other day then you can do the math.

In addition the cost of electric power goes through the roof when you have all the cheap power stations running and have to start powering up the expensive ones to reach the grids max power - by through the roof it's the cost for those last few million kw can be 1000's of times the cost when it's quiet.

[Saracen999]

....

Meanwhile, the minute electric cars become the majority, electric charging will cost an absolute fortune... and you'll still be limited to 10 minutes at a time, lest you cause even longer tailbacks. It'll be like when there were fuel strikes, but permanent and not even something you could blame on the French!

That's one of my concerns. For mych of my usage (7%, at a guess) and EV would be fine, and a 100-mile range adequate but I quite regularly do 150-mile trips, and less often but still enough to be an issue, 300-400 trips. Ideally, I don't want to stop on the latter, and definitely don't on the shorter trips. I emphatically don't want to be expected to stop fir a coffee and a sandwich while my car charges. 10 minutes in a layby, a homemade sarnie and a flask of my own coffee will do fine, and I resent blatant overcharging at most motorway service stations. Besides, I prefer my own sandwiches to theirs.

Anyway, the point is, until an EV can cover a similar range between 'fuel stops' and take the same sort of time as filling a tank, it's not going to be an attractive propositioj for me, or for quite a lot of others. They either have to significantly improve the technology (very plausible, over a period of years) or somehow massively shift driver expectations.

[keithwalton]

For some reason when i tried googling it i couldn't find the study from the horses mouth.

But since i viewed the article at work it's now my top google result.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news...the-wheel.html

VW are actually quite open about the findings and you're right the e-golf is not a good BEV so much so they halted sales some time ago in part to bolster second hand values and avoid the Zoe situation.

On the Note of the Zoe the cost to buy the battery outright last time i looked (some time ago mind) is the same as 5 year / 50k miles lease. Tesla have pulled a lot of batteries from their cars to do power storage projects.

Back to VW they admit that the power source has a big impact on it's lifetime emissions and that in Germany and USA the e-golf emits slightly higher and in China a lot higher. They also intend to recycle batteries over and over with most of the polluting materials only needed the once.

I suspect a recent top gear episode has an impact on opinions on batteries. they purchase a first gen leaf which when new only had a 100 mile or so range on it but through the episode they're getting around 30 miles from a charge

[AC81]

Never mind....

[Rad77]

not currently but next car (3 years time) will almost certainly be. Was taken for a short drive in a Tesla S a few years back and ICE cars just seem like stone-age tech to me now.
The only thing preventing me having one now is that I have nowhere to install the charging point (my driveway is not adjacent to the house and I'd have to dig up a big stretch of shared ownership tarmac to get power to the car). In three years time I would like to think that a 2nd hand Tesla 3 might be in my price range (as a cash buyer) but they are being projected to hold on to around 60% residual value, so finance on a new one is looking more likely (or some other newish model that's around then, possibly the new VW ID3).

As for all the weird misinformation in previous posts... the batteries generally don't degrade by much at all over the normal lifetime of the car. By the time you'll be looking at replacing the battery (around 10 years) much of the rest of the car will be obsolete and equivalent batteries will be far cheaper anyway.

Running costs over the car lifetime are a fraction of that of a conventional ICE car. Just brakes and tyres to replace.

Carbon footprint of electric car is much smaller than ICE cars cradle to grave.

Infrastructure may lag a bit but there's no great extra requirement for power, that can't be managed within the existing grid.

Google some *reliable* info if you have doubts about the accuracy of what I've said (not some Top Gear comedy episode). There are people in the US and Northern Europe who have been running fleets of electric cars as taxis and they have proven the durability and cost effectiveness.

Note also that everyone is still playing catch-up to Tesla - so the battery/motor/management tech (which is what determines range efficiency) is just not as good in other makers vehicles and there may well be some duds out there, just as there are plenty of "lemons" in the realm of conventional cars.

[Saracen999]

....

I suspect a recent top gear episode has an impact on opinions on batteries. they purchase a first gen leaf which when new only had a 100 mile or so range on it but through the episode they're getting around 30 miles from a charge

I can't speak for the opinions of others, but it had no relevance to my reservations, as I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any Top Gear at all since the team change, and was an irregular viewer beforehand. And on case anyone's wondering, no, haven't seen any of Clarkson's new prog either.