[Closed] A new Tesla for £25k? Sounds good.

Running costs.

Here are some figures from a gentleman I know in the SW who has run a number of EVs, charging them at night from Ecomony 7 or in the day using solar on his roof. Even if the diesel car running costs are a little high, I think the numbers still stack up very well.

It will vary from country to country. If you take the UK where diesel/petrol is £1.10 per litre or £5 per gallon and a driver does 14,000 miles per year at 35 miles per gallon his fuel costs are £2,000/yr. His annual service is £400 and his road tax is £250, the total is £2,650 for 14,000 miles = 19p/mile.

An EV that does 4 miles/kWh and charges up using Eco 7 at 5p/kWh uses 3,500 kWh for £175/yr. The annual service is £125 and there is no road tax. The EV's cost is 2.1p/mile. Our first EV, the Peugeot iOn that cost £10,000 did 5 miles/kWh.

This assumes similar depreciation, replacement of tyres etc.

For someone commuting into the congestion zone, the savings would be greater. Likewise, someone able to claim 45p/mile for business trips does even better.

The perk of charging your car at work appears not to have been targeted by HMRC, yet.

For company cars, I believe they are still zero rated for tax.

There is a subsidy of £4,500 on purchase of an EV (it was £5,000).

If you have solar PV, as you do, and keep your car at home then the running costs are even less.

Second hand prices will have a cushion in that the old car can then be used as a domestic battery worth about £5,000 (price will fall as batteries get cheaper).

One will also be able to sell electricity to the grid at peak tariffs (17p) in the evening and then recharge using Eco7 at 5p during the quiet hours of the night. In Indiana where they have been experimenting with this, an EV owner can make $1,000 per year.

And they are really good fun to drive!

diesel/petrol is £1.10 per litre or £5 per gallon and a driver does 14,000 miles per year at 35 miles per gallon his fuel costs are £2,000/yr. His annual service is £400 and his road tax is £250, the total is £2,650 for 14,000 miles = 19p/mile.

Those are some seriously massaged figures!

I love all this 'technology will improve and sort out all the problems' stuff. That's nothing more than blind faith. There is are a couple of issues, called physics and chemistry.

🙂

I just quickly checked my current running costs, and they come to just under 10p per mile. My car is old enough that depreciation is negligible.

A brand new Tesla, however, will depreciate. Something like 20p/mile seems ballpark.

So ignoring the "oooh, it's all new and shiny" argument for the moment, one of these would double my commuting costs ! I couldn't swallow that.

But then I'm not their target audience. Compared to a leased Audi it probably makes a lot more sense.

If planes can be refuelled in mid air, then maybe electric trucks with batteries the size of a shipping container that could charge "on the go".

They could do that to improve range on long journeys. 'Trains' of 10 cars all tucked in behind a lorry, half a car length behind the car in front. Can't see it being any more of a problem for other road users than the current trains of salesmen sticking their bonnets in each other's boots in the outside lane.

The only way I can see mass market electric cars working is if they all use the same battery cells. ie you drive to a 'petrol' station they slide out the battery from your car and put a fully charged one in.

Range anxiety is real: [url= http://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/environment/2016/04/13/seven-drivers-a-week-run-out-of-fuel-in-manchester-motorway-roadworks ]Seven drivers a week run out of fuel in Manchester motorway roadworks[/url]

diesel/petrol is £1.10 per litre or £5 per gallon and a driver does 14,000 miles per year at 35 miles per gallon his fuel costs are £2,000/yr. His annual service is £400 and his road tax is £250, the total is £2,650 for 14,000 miles = 19p/mile.

not actually as off as you think.

take my Hyundai Tucson

if I do 10,000 miles a year which I still think is what's considered reasonable.
105p/l diesel
476.7p/gallon
it does at best 40mpg
so £1191.75 per year in fuel.
£235 in VED
and I do recall when a service cost was £300, most I've not got change from about £500, but lest call it £300

totals £1726.75 per year, or 17p per mile.

changing this about, if I had a super economy low emmission hybrid car, removing the VED and around 75mpg, I'd be looking at around 8p/mile, if it never got used battery only

😆 @ the pro EV types who are deliberately overlooking the insurmountable infrastructure & recharging issues.

"It's ok, someone will fix it for us".

lol'd also at recharging trucks on the roads(very amusing 🙂 ). But for anyone who would consider that a solution, as if our roads aren't already clagged to walking pace with heavy goods vehicles. Would be crazy.

Not to mention on-the-move recharging would require the driving skills of Lewis Hamilton.
Oh, me bad. They'll be an onboard app for that.

EVs really aren't the solution.
🙂

Did a quick calculation on this if I swapped it for my current 320d.

Both cost around the same so repayments, insurance, tyres, services would be similar but I would save around £200 month in fuel. thats not taking into account using the 3 phase in the yard to recharge it while at work. Depreciation isn't a concern for me as once I have finished with a car its not worth much anyway.

Older cars don't work out for me as company has a 5 years or younger rule on car allowance.

As for range I do about 120 miles a day so well inside the range and my longer trips are to clients offices who have a supercharger next door. Saying that the other half would still have her car if we needed to do any really long journeys. but thats once in a blue moon.

Might be worth looking into as thats a new bike a year.

EV's are part of the solution, and yes we have an e-up and it gets used for day to day driving, I still cycle to work most days.
Its not for everyone that's a fact and to be honest that's fine.
Wait for petrol to go up to £2 a litre and see how many people hate EV's.
Just wait for OPEC to slow production.
Our car has a range of around 90 miles which is more than enough for what it was designed to do.

EVs really aren't the solution.

Well, no. The 'problem' is congestion, air pollution, and an obesity epidemic fuelled by a lack of 'active' travel (too many door to door car journeys).

EVs solve the air pollution bit, and are probably a bit better on the noise pollution front but at 30mph I reckon the majority of noise heard to an outsider is from the tyres rather than the engine. But they do nothing for congestion, inactivity or injuries and deaths on the road (to drivers and non-drivers).

A big part of the solution would be high quality bike [url= http://road.cc/content/news/186152-cycle-infrastructure-responsible-85-cycling-increase ]infrastructure[/url]. But there will always be cars. If a car is on the road, I'd rather* it was an EV than a diesel one.

*As a member of society who has to the breathe the air polluted by cars, my own included.

What do you think "the solution" is? And what is "the problem" for that matter?

Best solution to the EV vs Internal Combustion question: drive a bit less.
Ride your bike more.
Then the older, repairable car that you've already got will be fine for a fair bit longer and the whole package has far less environmental impact overall.

I could pick up a ex-demonstrator Zoe with less than 500km on the clock for around 13 000e. The battery hire would cost about the same as petrol for the same distance.

I didn't say the figures were wrong, just massaged.

35mpg, £400 serivce and £250 VED are consistent with a big luxury SUV. The Peugot iON that he then purchases is in no way comparable to the big SUV, it's a small car. Show me the small diesel that does 35mpg and costs £400 for a service 🙂

Then the older, repairable car that you've already got will be fine for a fair bit longer and the whole package has far less environmental impact overall.

Not sure what 'more repairable' means, but you've ignored the problem of what to do when you actually need a new car - say it's been smashed up.

For there to be old cars, someone has to be buying new ones.

I'd love a Tesla, but I could not warrant spending 25K on a car, ever. I prefer an electric car from fun of driving, less faff, and being very cheap in paying for the energy into the car, no tax etc etc. Lovely little thing (Renault Zoe).

Current line up:

1. my bike with a Bafang BBS01 crank kit which means I can now bike to work every day and not feel worn out (yes I could do it without electrickery but I'm really not built for endurance)
2. Electric Renault zoe as a second car (I prefer to drive this myself over:
3. Hyundai 7 seater big lump 2.2 diesel. Now bike to work instead using line up item 1.

I'm really not built for endurance

People are adaptable you know 🙂

Molgrips: I know...but the laziness is strong in me. I still pedal with the electric bike, probably not as hard but I'm building endurance anywayway now and much more likely to actually take the bike as I know, I will never suffer too much from headwinds (I work by the coast).

I just know, I'm am 99% likely to take the bike now vs a complete failure previously.

(I also get to work in 30 minutes instead of 45).

🙂 @ the pro EV types who are deliberately overlooking the insurmountable infrastructure & recharging issues.

Insurmountable?

If all the people who either have private drives, or suitable residents parking schemes, were fitted with chargers the overall drop in emissions would be huge.

Assuming my brain is working properly:

UK electricity usage currently drops by about 15GW overnight. In 8 hours that's 120GWh, or enough to drive the example EV above 480 million miles at 4 miles / kWh. The average daily commute is just 10 miles each way, so 24 million people could do that every day without adding any power generation at all (although the energy used by oil refineries would fall from the reduction in demand, so actually there'd be a bit spare anyway).

The huge majority of journeys don't need very much range at all. For the longer ones, Tesla have shown 300 mile ranges aren't unrealistic, the range is improving all the time as the technology matures, and if it really comes to it there's always hybrids, ubiquitous fast charging or the very occasional use of an old fashioned petrol car.

It may not be the entire solution - nothing ever will be - but it's a pretty blummin' huge part of it.

There are currently three or four charging points at service stations. There are about 20 petrol pumps, with maybe six or eight in use at any time. Bear in mind you'd need a lot longer to charge an EV than to fill a petrol car. So you'd need most of the car park to be wired up with a charging point. There might be 150 cars in the car park, most of which would want to charge up given that we're told we'd be charging whilst we stop for coffee. A Tesla charger seems to be 11kW, so the motorway service station would need 1.6MW of power. Do service stations all have that kind of supply available out in the middle of nowhere? What about rural petrol stations?

the range is improving all the time as the technology matures

This is the elephant in the room. The range is NOT improving all the time. The Tesla has a long range because it's jammed with batteries, which is why it's so expensive. The same batteries we've been using for a couple of decades.

Yes, MOST journeys might be less than 10 miles or whatever, but a lot aren't. So you're talking about having one car for small journeys and one for long ones. A small car which is intrinsically very expensive cos of all the batteries.

There are some BIG problems, currently, that don't look like going away unless something really dramatic happens.

Now I sincerely hope we can overcome these issues - I'm hugely pro EV, and I'd have one in a shot if I could afford one - it would work for us. But don't stick your head in the sand, and don't just say 'range will improve' without any science backup.

(although the energy used by oil refineries would fall from the reduction in demand, so actually there'd be a bit spare anyway).

The 15GW/h extra demand will take care of a good chunk of that 'spare' fossil fuel.

EV is without doubt the future, but IMO it only becomes an 'answer' when we aren't using fossil fuels to generate the electricity.

UK electricity usage currently drops by about 15GW overnight

Except that with CCGT the UK demand matches, so there isn't free capacity, you'd either leave CCGT on-stream and be burning gas and oil, or have to build new power generation.

Molgrips is correct about battery tech, it is quite mature technology. We've know about and researched batteries for over 100 years, so sudden massive leaps seen unlikely.

£2 petrol 😆 unlikely anytime soon unless the government really wants to ruin the economy.

I like the flow battery idea. Two liquids that combine to create a current, you can then separate then with electricity to recharge them.

You could suck the depleted liquid out of the car at a filling station whilst filling it up with new fluids in as long as it takes to fill with petrol. The filling station could then recharge it, or send it somewhere else to be recharged.

If there were a distribution network for the fluids you could pipe them to the sunny parts of the country to recharge when it's sunny, and the windy ones when it's not. Maybe...! Or do all your recharging in Cornwall from geothermal.

diesel/petrol is £1.10 per litre or £5 per gallon and a driver does 14,000 miles per year at 35 miles per gallon his fuel costs are £2,000/yr. His annual service is £400 and his road tax is £250, the total is £2,650 for 14,000 miles = 19p/mile.

If my diesel was doing 35mpg I'd sell it. Even the shitty petrol we have on loan at the moment does 45. My tax is far from £250 per year too at £20 per year.

Bear in mind you'd need a lot longer to charge an EV than to fill a petrol car. So you'd need most of the car park to be wired up with a charging point.

We travel around quite a lot but of all the journeys we've made in the last year I think only a tiny number of them have been more than ~250 miles each way.

Whilst battery tech hasn't progressed all that far in the last 100 years, it is progressing faster now as there is so much investment being ploughed into it. The other thing that is progressing (my faster in fact) is the charging technology. The CCS DC chargers on motorways will be capable of charging four times as quickly in the next few years, and obviously there will be more of them too. The combination of greater range (eg circa 200 miles vs under 100 miles) for lower cost EVs should avoid Molgrips' scenario.

Edukator - the cost of a nearly new Zoe is about £7k, plus battery lease (which I wouldn't recommend), but a brand new one can be had for £180pcm for two years including battery lease, which seams pretty compelling for people who manage their motoring that way.

Since 2010 the cost per kWh of batteries has fallen by two thirds, even though for most applications (phones, laptops) the cost of the battery isn't really a major factor, unlike electric cars. Even cheapy batteries with bike lights from China last longer than just a few years ago.

Battery technology is currently a massive area of research; if the same colossal amount of money spent on improving the efficiency of the internal combustion engine over its history was spent on improving batteries who knows what we'll end up with.

it is progressing faster now as there is so much investment being ploughed into it

What improvements are you expecting?

You cannot make continuous incremental improvements to a battery technology, like we've seen for other areas of tech. The chemistry has a ceiling. What we need is a new chemistry, and that's a very difficult thing to find. A lot of people are working on it, and we may get the revolution we need - but we may not.

The combination of greater range (eg circa 200 miles vs under 100 miles) for lower cost EVs should avoid Molgrips' scenario.

Or decent range extenders. Neither the GM one or the BMW one are much good, apparently. 100 mile range with unlimited petrol range for those odd trips would go a long way to sorting the problems out imo.

If I were buying EV it'd be a plugin hybrid. 40 mile range for running about, petrol when you need it. Seems like the car could be redesigned a bit for more batteries to bring that 40 miles up to 60 miles or so, and the IC engine ought to be a super efficient generator rather than a repurposed car engine.

Battery cell tech is a significant area of research.

I'm told that Formula e is major driver for EV innovation.

We've had over a century of internal combustion engine innovation and only about a decade for EVs.

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/06/theres-a-new-entry-level-tesla-model-s-and-its-even-cheaper/

New version with !!software limited!! battery capacity and lower price.

Real world review of a drive to France took 11 hours to do what in a normal car would take ~7! The also sind horribly sparsely specced for such an expensive car.

[url= https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/27/tesla-model-s-electric-car-driving-holiday ]Guardian Tesla holiday to France [/url]

The real world review being.... a driving holiday.

2/10 - try harder

yep and a bit of a whiney sounding guardian journo....

Yes for long road trips you need to plan and it will take a bit longer AT THE MOMENT, charging will be an issue AT THE MOMENT but hell you can drive from London south into the Loire in an Electric car with no petrol or diesel and back again!

With orders and lead times it should allow for well planned infrastructure implementation, getting you charging points where they are needed. The bit about running out in the middle of nowhere sounds dramatic until they point out later you can charge it from aywhere that you can run a kettle - won't take enterprising garages long to have a plug with a coin/cc meter attached to it.

I'm guessing when the Ford Model T was rolling off the production line fuel stations were not as common as they are now.

Robert Llewellyn went on holiday to Italy in his Tesla and put a video on his youtube channel about the journey; they went 2,500 miles and paid absolutely nothing for fuel.

I'd put up with having to have a slightly extended lunch occasionally for that.

When I worked for Ansys there were a number of companies who could split water to make hydrogen. I wondered if it was ever going to work for EV.

My observation "in the real world" is that the owners/PCP leasers of these vehicles have an innate Cardigan smugness about them, which translates into barging into traffic, pulling out where no gaps appear, lack of indicators (obvz those run the battery down, so justified) and staring down folks expecting them to move first.

I suppose dicks will be dicks.

which translates into barging into traffic, pulling out where no gaps appear, lack of indicators (obvz those run the battery down, so justified) and staring down folks expecting them to move first.

[quote=bikebouy ]My observation "in the real world" is that the owners/PCP leasers of these vehicles have an innate Cardigan smugness about them

Like cyclists?

When I worked for Ansys there were a number of companies who could split water to make hydrogen. I wondered if it was ever going to work for EV.

The energy cost for hydrogen as a fuel is ridiculously high, completely uneconomic.

and we don't really know how to store hydrogen yet...

Tesla are at the office today showing their new car off. I'll let you know what I think later.

@phiii intersting, I will look that up.

I sat in one recently as a friend just took delivery, very nicely finished. He sold a Lotus Evora to buy it, says the Tesla is faster in day to day use and a million times more comfortable. He saidnthe problem at the mkment was the lack of fast charge points as the difference between fast and effectively overnight was massive for obvious reasons. He got a government grant to have the charging point put in his garage. Tesla was his retirement present to himself. To me that sums the car up at the moment, its a luxury purchase for those wishing to have something different. I'd rather spend close to half the money and buy an even better car (eg Macan S 🙂 )

Aberdeen City are running 10 hydrogen powered buses right now

[url= http://aberdeeninvestlivevisit.co.uk/Invest/Aberdeens-Economy/City-Projects/H2-Aberdeen/Hydrogen-Bus/Hydrogen-Bus-Project.aspx ]Hydrogen Bus Project[/url]

they went 2,500 miles and paid absolutely nothing for fuel.

Yeah some other mug did i.e. the tax payer, and that is somehow progress!

that is somehow progress!

Duh..the point of electric cars isn't free fuel.. it's free for now to try and stimulate the electric car industry.. which is working, by the look of it. So yes, progress.

But in that case I thought it was Tesla that paid for the charging points?

Electric cars are ace.

You have all that lovely torque from 0rpm upwards, they're vibration free and can be better packaged than an internal combustion car. Four wheel drive can be done without driveshafts, transfer boxes and whatnot, ultimately, they'll be cheaper to build and run than their diesel or petrol powered predecessors.

The only downside to me is the lack of a soundtrack, however given how artificial the noise of a lot of new cars is these days, it won't be long before you can pick a suitable synthetic engine noise to suit.

Battery technology is improving at an astounding pace too.

Yeah some other mug did i.e. the tax payer, and that is somehow progress!

This. Ditto with wind-power.

The Chinese are driving their economic growth with coal and yet we are happy to lap up their cheap goods whist paying £100k for an electric car thinking we are saving the planet. Madness.