Electric vehicles

[MusicMan]

Looking forward to my Leaf coming next week!

You need to do this with it: https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/143 ... ngol-rally

That would be well cool!

 

[MusicMan]

The problem with this thread is that it ignores the needs of many of us. That is the 15,000 to 20,000 miles a year. Its alright for the virtue signalling low mileage driver to talk about the Leaf, Volkswagon e etc etc but these cars are merely LOCAL RUNAROUNDS with low overall ranges available. They are unsuitable for those of us who need to drive a considerable distance frequently.

EV vehicles are expensive eg Tesla S is around £80,000 for something that is less complex than an ICE car.

Range throttling is due to the car industry delivering too small batteries, restricting the range available to Joe Public and high prices are the result of marketing bulls**t where the maker believes the rubbish being put out.

It is not a battle between the Run Abouts and the Long Distance cars but about finance, overreached manufacturing costs and an inability to innovate.

The Honda e looks superb, has excellent facilities, COSTS 25% above other small runabouts and has a RANGE of only 120 ish miles. Maybe only 80 miles in cold weather. Its a toy it is not a real method of transport.

Frustrated.

Al

Nobody here is saying that the BEV suits all needs at the moment, but right now it probably does suit 60-70% of people who frankly do use a car mostly as a local runabout. I anticipate doing only about 8000 miles a year (indeed have stipulated that on the lease). I might do a 150 - 200 mile trip once a month, which is easily manageable. As the cars develop, more and more will come into their scope. People who point out the limitations for their lifestyle do a service in pointing these out to the manufacturers.

It also depends very much on how you do your 15000 - 20000 miles. I did this mileage for some years from 2003, when I would commute 200 miles at the beginning of the week, 10 or so miles a day during the week, then 200 back, about 300 a week most of the year. The Mercedes 200E I used then was perfect for it though costly. I would not do that easily on the mid-size Leaf I am getting, but I easily could on the e+ Leaf with 237 mile range (and e-Niro etc, one doesn't need the expensive Teslas), as long as overnight charging were available at the destination. And as for cost, I finally retired the Mercedes last week; the cost of maintenance, tax, insurance and petrol was by now well exceeding the lease on a new Leaf plus insurance and electricity.

However, if you can't charge your car overnight, or if your high mileage often involves daily trips greater than 300 miles or so (i.e. could involve multiple stops for fast charging) then only an expensive Tesla would meet your needs right now. As mentioned before, I only took a 2-year lease on the Leaf, as I think there will be much more choice, and scope, by then.

I don't think there is a particular conspiracy going on amongst car makers to keep prices high. Batteries are genuinely expensive to make, but the price is coming down fast. Nissan put much more milage and capability onto the Leaf 2 than the Leaf 1, and managed to reduce the price (and size of the batteries).

Threads on this forum are surely not meant to be universally appealing? I have no interest in scroll sawing or professional joinery, for example (other than to admire the results). But they do for sure have a place here.

 

[RogerS]

..... as long as overnight charging were available at the destination.

And therein lies the rub. How on earth do you find out beforehand ? Waste time ringing up ? And say they only have a couple of charging points and they are full when you get there. How do you get your 'turn' ? I came at this from wondering how I would have coped when I was commuting to Halifax from Malvern and back each week. It would have been impossible.

I'd have had to stay in a hotel as well and not my ideal choice which was a holiday let with room and all mod cons. But no charging point.

As the number of EVs rises but charging point density does not, if we will see "charger-rage". I bet we do and remember you heard that term here first

.
Threads on this forum are surely not meant to be universally appealing? I have no interest in scroll sawing or professional joinery, for example (other than to admire the results). But they do for sure have a place here.

I'm not sure that Beech or anyone else was objecting to the thread ?

 

[Woody2Shoes]

..... as long as overnight charging were available at the destination.

And therein lies the rub. How on earth do you find out beforehand ? Waste time ringing up ? And say they only have a couple of charging points and they are full when you get there. How do you get your 'turn' ? I came at this from wondering how I would have coped when I was commuting to Halifax from Malvern and back each week. It would have been impossible.

I'd have had to stay in a hotel as well and not my ideal choice which was a holiday let with room and all mod cons. But no charging point.

As the number of EVs rises but charging point density does not, if we will see "charger-rage". I bet we do and remember you heard that term here first

.
Threads on this forum are surely not meant to be universally appealing? I have no interest in scroll sawing or professional joinery, for example (other than to admire the results). But they do for sure have a place here.

I'm not sure that Beech or anyone else was objecting to the thread ?

An easy way to find out where the chargers are is to use an app like zapmap already mentioned upthread https://www.zap-map.com/live/ it would be foolish to assume that the rate of installation of new chargers will not continue to increase - including carparks.

 

[Terry - Somerset]

Charger rage is a nice emotive expression and it may indeed come to pass occassionally in the future - just as some people have fist fights over items in the xmas sales.

But at the dawn of motoring C1900 there were no motorways, self service petrol stations, car tyre repair services etc. The early motorist didn't even have an internet or smart phone to check on what might be at their destination, if indeed they did arrive. But they still ventured forth, and the infrastructure we love so much today developed. And I think this will happen with EVs over the next 5-10 years:

1. It seems unlikely that technology will simply stall at the current level after having made such rapid progress over the last 10 years. Battery capacity and range will increase, fast charging or an exchange battery model will evolve, costs will fall further.

2. Provision of recharging facilities may be driven by regulation, but much of the progress will be market driven - hotels filling rooms on the back of charging point provision, retailers attracting shoppers (on the back of .....), house builders attracting buyers by providing ..........., etc

Only time will tell which crystal ball has it right!

 

[Geoff_S]

As the number of EVs rises but charging point density does not, if we will see "charger-rage". I bet we do and remember you heard that term here first

Nah, it's already been done :wink:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-49204522

 

[RogerS]

..... as long as overnight charging were available at the destination.

And therein lies the rub. How on earth do you find out beforehand ? Waste time ringing up ? And say they only have a couple of charging points and they are full when you get there. How do you get your 'turn' ? I came at this from wondering how I would have coped when I was commuting to Halifax from Malvern and back each week. It would have been impossible.

I'd have had to stay in a hotel as well and not my ideal choice which was a holiday let with room and all mod cons. But no charging point.

As the number of EVs rises but charging point density does not, if we will see "charger-rage". I bet we do and remember you heard that term here first

.
Threads on this forum are surely not meant to be universally appealing? I have no interest in scroll sawing or professional joinery, for example (other than to admire the results). But they do for sure have a place here.

I'm not sure that Beech or anyone else was objecting to the thread ?

An easy way to find out where the chargers are is to use an app like zapmap already mentioned upthread https://www.zap-map.com/live/ it would be foolish to assume that the rate of installation of new chargers will not continue to increase - including carparks.

That's actually not a very helpful app TBH. If you could filter by hotel then that would be infinitely more useful. As it is you spend so much time clicking...nope..it's a car park..click...nope..Sainsbury's. I came at this by thinking how would I fare if I was doing the job now that I was doing then. The job was by no means unique ...anyone doing contracting and being away from home each week, at this moment in time EVs and the lack of charging points or the ability to see which hotels actually have them is a resounding raspberry.

 

[Lons]

Our local town centre Morpeth has 2 facing car parks to accommodate several hundred cars and a close by supermarket has another sizeable car park.
There are only 2 EV spaces in total in the town centre although for some reason the website lists 3 charging points, the next nearest are both out of the town centre one being the station. All those 3 car parks were constructed and / or modified within the last few years.

The LA list an estimated 1840 off street parking spaces in the town so go figure that!

I was in town yesterday morning when both spaces were occupied by taxis, still there 2 hours later when I returned and I saw several EVs looking to use those spaces while I sat in the car waiting for my wife. Fights over charging points or flat batteries, both a distinct possibility!

 

[Rorschach]

FWIW I took a medium length trip at the weekend. Just shy of 200 miles each way.

For curiosity sake I did a little planning as to how would I have carried out this trip if I had an EV. This of course is not meant to be representative of how life will always be, or even of how things are in the whole country but I thought it would be a good example of the current situation and a counterpoint to all those who say it's easy to plan your journey and it's "cheaper" to have an EV.

Well firstly due to the horrendous weather it looks unlikely I would have been able to get there without stopping. The conditions really lowered fuel economy, I have made that trip in the past and even my gas guzzler would eek out nearly 50mpg on that journey in fine weather, we managed 44mpg, so a good 10% reduction.
The almost certain stop we would have had to make in an EV would have been ok though, we did actually make a toilet stop and a breakfast stop (we couldn't combine the two annoyingly) and both services had charging points available and we stopped 20minutes for breakfast so a 30min charge would have been fine.

Then for a our destination. We stayed at a budget hotel quite close to the city centre, we were able to park outside the door for free. We paid £30 per night. Despite the hotel being part of a larger complex with massive car park, there are no charging points. Approx half a mile to the nearest charger, a single charging point in a council car park, (multiple high power type plugs, 2 are out of service). The next nearest is 2 x 7kW Tesla points, about 3/4 mile away, both are currently out of service. So potentially the closest is a mile away, it's a single 3kW charger that is currently in service.
So on that basis we are looking at charging being unavailable for the hotel I stayed in without me making a specific trip at some distance from the hotel for a slow charge, or a longer distance to find a fast charge and waiting for it to fill the vehicle.

So as Roger has pointed, you need a hotel with charger really. The website didn't make it easy to find one but my local knowledge helped me find a budget hotel with charger in the area we wanted to stay. The hotel has 2 x 3kW charge points, so an overnight charge needed I would suspect. Problem is both the chargers are out of service, so no luck there.

Only other hotel in the area is actually at least a mile further out than we wanted to stay, so we now can't walk and will need to get a taxi twice each day (no bus there). The hotel is a more expensive hotel, over £100 per night, plus £20 per night to park the car. It has 2 x 7kW Tesla points. Oh and of course they are both out of service as well.

So yeah, the long and short of it is if I had an EV and wanted to make the trip we did this weekend, I will waste several hours working out charging for the car, or pay literally hundreds more for my hotel and extra travel costs, and actually at this point in time I can't do that because all the convenient charging points are out of service.

Our real trip however didn't even require a fuel stop as we had plenty of fuel for journey there and back. We parked right outside the hotel and did all our extra travelling on foot. We paid approx £40 for the fuel and £30 per night for the hotel.

 

[RogerS]

Bloody good post, Rorschach,and injects some much-needed reality into all the rose-tinted spectacles here. Extrapolate all those 'out-of-service' charging points across the country and EV at the moment is pointless for 90% of us. Revisit EV again in five years, I say.

 

[AJB Temple]

In real world usage...
I do two long trips regularly (every month) and the rest is local.
One long trip is to Coventry - I can fast charge at Heathrow, Oxford or Warwick and I can see in real time in the car how many chargers are free. I usually have breakfast at Oxford services and do a top up. I must have done this trip 40 times and never had a charging issue.

The other long trip is either Cologne or Delft (most of the route is much the same). I have numerous charging choices, including at the Channel Tunnel, but I usually stop for coffee at a hotel just off the motorway at Antwerpen, where they have about 12 Tesla fast chargers. Never an issue.

However - and I've made this point before, the whole EV thing only works IMO if there is good access to fast chargers AND the car has a decent range in the first place. Frankly a 3kW or 7kW charger is next to useless really. Takes forever to do a full charge - I have a much more powerful charger than that at home and it is nowhere near as good as a fast charger.

Penetration of EV into the market depends on fast chargers, so that cars can be on and off them quickly. Turnover is necessary. It will come, but will take time.

Anyone who is doing mainly local mileage and can charge at home, will find their fuel and maintenance costs drop like a stone with EV, at the expense of higher price of the car to begin with. Overall cost of ownership, taking account of these things, will be governed largely by depreciation and the cost of financing.

It is also worth remembering that the experience of driving an EV is quite a bit different to a conventional car.  Mine is very quick - and will give a Porsche 911 a shock in a straight line - but is not fun to drive. They are a bit anodyne. It's all very quiet and super smooth - but not really engaging. It depends what you want - my business partner likes the fact the car will self park, she can summon it out of a tight bay with her phone, etc, whereas I find self parking much slower than me. She really likes auto navigation, whereas I think the car makes completely different decisions to me and needs development to adapt to different driving styles and expectations.

The market is learning. So are the cars. So are the mapping systems. If the government is serious about phasing out petrol and diesel, then we will definitely see infrastructure being a major part of the planning process for new developments, and we will also see changes to the tax structure.

 

[Geoff_S]

FWIW I took a medium length trip at the weekend. Just shy of 200 miles each way.

For curiosity sake I did a little planning as to how would I have carried out this trip if I had an EV. This of course is not meant to be representative of how life will always be, or even of how things are in the whole country but I thought it would be a good example of the current situation and a counterpoint to all those who say it's easy to plan your journey and it's "cheaper" to have an EV.

Well firstly due to the horrendous weather it looks unlikely I would have been able to get there without stopping. The conditions really lowered fuel economy, I have made that trip in the past and even my gas guzzler would eek out nearly 50mpg on that journey in fine weather, we managed 44mpg, so a good 10% reduction.
The almost certain stop we would have had to make in an EV would have been ok though, we did actually make a toilet stop and a breakfast stop (we couldn't combine the two annoyingly) and both services had charging points available and we stopped 20minutes for breakfast so a 30min charge would have been fine.

Then for a our destination. We stayed at a budget hotel quite close to the city centre, we were able to park outside the door for free. We paid £30 per night. Despite the hotel being part of a larger complex with massive car park, there are no charging points. Approx half a mile to the nearest charger, a single charging point in a council car park, (multiple high power type plugs, 2 are out of service). The next nearest is 2 x 7kW Tesla points, about 3/4 mile away, both are currently out of service. So potentially the closest is a mile away, it's a single 3kW charger that is currently in service.
So on that basis we are looking at charging being unavailable for the hotel I stayed in without me making a specific trip at some distance from the hotel for a slow charge, or a longer distance to find a fast charge and waiting for it to fill the vehicle.

So as Roger has pointed, you need a hotel with charger really. The website didn't make it easy to find one but my local knowledge helped me find a budget hotel with charger in the area we wanted to stay. The hotel has 2 x 3kW charge points, so an overnight charge needed I would suspect. Problem is both the chargers are out of service, so no luck there.

Only other hotel in the area is actually at least a mile further out than we wanted to stay, so we now can't walk and will need to get a taxi twice each day (no bus there). The hotel is a more expensive hotel, over £100 per night, plus £20 per night to park the car. It has 2 x 7kW Tesla points. Oh and of course they are both out of service as well.

So yeah, the long and short of it is if I had an EV and wanted to make the trip we did this weekend, I will waste several hours working out charging for the car, or pay literally hundreds more for my hotel and extra travel costs, and actually at this point in time I can't do that because all the convenient charging points are out of service.

Our real trip however didn't even require a fuel stop as we had plenty of fuel for journey there and back. We parked right outside the hotel and did all our extra travelling on foot. We paid approx £40 for the fuel and £30 per night for the hotel.

My recent experience. I've got a BEV that does 144 mile (allegedly). It's a VW e Golf and bloody brilliant!

My trip was 85 miles one way. Same as you with the weather by the sounds of it. I checked the Zap Maps app and there was a 40kwh charger at about 75 miles and I could have used that, but it was in use.

No problem, I was visiting a mate so could charge there at 2.4 kWh. Err no, the nearest socket was a garden socket on a 6 amp fuse.

Never mind, next day I would charge up on the charger that was blocked on the way in. Again no, it was in use. So now this thing called range anxiety kicks in and I would need to get Zap Maps out and find another charger, or wait at the blocked charger until the guy had finished.

Fortunately, I was in my Range Rover

On the plus side, I am doing about 6,000 miles a year urban/suburban/medium range in the Golf and that's a lump of money saved.

The way I see it for now, and I think a while into the future, is that electric cars are a brilliant 3rd option if it works for you. Nothing more apart from the environmental stuff, which helps.

 

[Rorschach]

I am glad things work for you AJB but something I would like to point out for your experience (I don't think you will disagree) is that not only do you have arguably the best EV currently available, but you are also doing the same regular trips within the greater London sphere and to a known European destination. You have a long range, access to the best fast chargers and you have the local/regular knowledge of how to do that trip.

I do not live in the greater London sphere, and while my trip was to a city, it was only a regular sized one. I would not be able to afford a high end EV, in fact I can't afford one at all at the moment but that is not the point. When planning my fictional EV holiday everything revolved around charging the car and I estimate that even if we found a working fast charger I am looking at a couple of hours dedicated simply to get the vehicle prepared for going home. Since our trip only lasted 2 days anyway that represents a big chunk wasted. If I were to plan my trip around currently available hotels then the cost of the trip either quadruples if I go for the fancy hotel or at a minimum doubles if I went for the other budget hotel. Of course neither had working chargers anyway.
Quite honestly if we did have an EV, I am not sure how we would have been able to do this trip, as I say we don't have a lot of money, all of our trips are based around budget hotels so we can spend our money on experiences instead and we would rather have 3 or 4 short, cheap breaks through the year than one expensive fancy holiday.

For some balance, I have said before I am not against EV's in principle. We are definitely one of the groups of people where a large part of our driving is local. My partner drives to work everyday, a round trip of 8 miles, we go shopping etc at the weekend and every 6 weeks or so we visit family, a round trip of 70 miles. An EV would work great for all of that and if we could afford 2 cars then our second car would almost certainly be a small EV, even a 100mile range would be plenty for any of the day trips we do. However for our holiday trips and business trips through they year an ICE is what allows us to make those trips affordably and conveniently.

Oh and an extra interesting point. We go to London a couple of times a year, staying on the outskirts and using public transport when there. I looked at charging points near where we stay. None within a mile, no fast chargers either. I am not going to waste my time doing another planning exercise but my 5 minute quick check shows this would be another trip made either very much more difficult or at the very least very much more expensive!

 

[AJB Temple]

I completely agree. As I have mentioned before, we did our research before buying our EVs. We have a high density of charging points in the areas where we live and work, and our journeys are predictable. I had been considering EVs and hybrids for a while - three years previously I looked at the i8 and i3 and realised that hybrids are pointless and at that time EV networks were not developed. For both of us though, in terms of fuel costs they are close to zero.

I doubt if we would have gone EV if we had not also had a conventionally fuelled car.

 

[RogerS]

I said 'Give it five years'. I was wrong.

Ten years is closer to the mark - if not longer - and even then I'd argue that without any coherent plan for chargers involving state and private enterprise it will, at best, be a mediocre solution. When was the last time that any Govt project on this scale - regardless of Party - was a success.

Geoff_S ...that was an excellent post. Were all those chargers really out of order ? If so then that reflects the disinterest in providing them. What was the phrase ? Follow the money. As a country, we cannot afford both HS2 and a well-integrated and maintained charging infrastructure. HS2 is a vanity project ...or as I like to put it

 

[beech1948]

I have decided to check my frustration not just with Toy like EVs but you guys as well. To do this I am going to spend a week of odd minutes finding and loading every EV charging point app I can find on my phone and also loading 2 or 3 map apps to locate these things.

Next week I will plan every journey as though I was an EV with a 230 mile range. I will try to report back on what I find.

Todays revelation is that there are at least 3 if not 4 different types of EV charge plug. What a joke. Obviously Tesla is the most common by far.

 

[RogerS]

I have decided to check my frustration not just with Toy like EVs but you guys as well. To do this I am going to spend a week of odd minutes finding and loading every EV charging point app I can find on my phone and also loading 2 or 3 map apps to locate these things.

Next week I will plan every journey as though I was an EV with a 230 mile range. I will try to report back on what I find.

Todays revelation is that there are at least 3 if not 4 different types of EV charge plug. What a joke. Obviously Tesla is the most common by far.

Beech...good idea and I'd be interested to see your results. Aso just how much time you have to spend on your research. To be fair, at 230 mile range you're giving EVs a head start !

 

[nev]

Regards 'mpg' It seems the manufacturers quote miles per kWh.
e.g. The E-Golf is quoted as 4miles per kWh. (and has a range of 120 miles.)
I assume that this is related to the battery capacity.

My electricity bills show I pay (lets say) 12p per kWh.
Is it as simple as 12p will get me 4 miles?
Surely the cost to fuel the car is how much electricity is used to charge the battery to full.
Does the transfer of energy (charging) work on a 1 to 1 basis? do I need to put 1 kWh worth of electricity into the battery to get 1 kWh out?

 

[Geoff_S]

Regards 'mpg' It seems the manufacturers quote miles per kWh.
e.g. The E-Golf is quoted as 4miles per kWh. (and has a range of 120 miles.)
I assume that this is related to the battery capacity.

My electricity bills show I pay (lets say) 12p per kWh.
Is it as simple as 12p will get me 4 miles?
Surely the cost to fuel the car is how much electricity is used to charge the battery to full.
Does the transfer of energy (charging) work on a 1 to 1 basis? do I need to put 1 kWh worth of electricity into the battery to get 1 kWh out?

That’s about right. Check this:

https://pod-point.com/guides/driver/cos ... ectric-car

 

[AJB Temple]

It can be a bit more complex. In our case:

1 As early adopters we get free charging at Tesla superchargers for as long as we own the car. This is what makes our fuel costs largely free. Manufacturers offer deals but this one is no more.
2 When charging at home, it is timed (by the car) to run on night time economy tariff.
3 When in use the car uses regenerative systems on deceleration and braking to add charge back to the battery.

In practice (my sole experience is with Tesla) there are numerous factors affecting range, of which the most dominant is driving style. If you go easy on acceleration and keep the speed down, range is increased very substantially compared with hard acceleration and high speeds. As with any car, range is also affected by the rolling radius of the wheel/tyre (big wheels reduce range but may look sexier) and wide low profile tyres reduce range through friction losses. Temperature plays a part - but much more so in cold weather if the car is kept outside and the battery is not pre-conditioned.

Use of in car gadgets like steering wheel heating and seat heating, don't seem to make much difference.

Many EVs show your power usage on the dash, in kW. This is pretty useless. What you actually want to know is how far you can go on the current charge. The Tesla has algorithms for predicting this and you can choose between calculation methods (essentially just different assumptions about how you will drive and at what speed).

In my experience of test driving cars and talking to owners or various makes, many manufactures are wildly optimistic in their range claims. You have to drive with minimal acceleration and quite slowly to achieve them. This also applies to Tesla - I generally discount the claimed range on the dash (usually 320 miles when I leave home) by at least 10%. It is also noticeable, I think, that the battery usage / range calculation is not linear even with consistent driving. It all requires a different mindset but is perfectly manageable.