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I personally can’t see any benefit for me to get an electric car....
House!
Every so often I flick through the lease deals on Autotrader. Ioniq 5s have gone up to £450 or so, but for £490 I could get an EQA.. mm.. but then again, nearly five hundred quid a month is a shit-ton of money!
If we go to one car, the most likely option for us I think is going to be a used Passat GTE.
Waiting for the delivery of my new Citroen EC4, was the same cost as leasing a 1.2 petrol. I'm looking forward to the quieter, more relaxing and much cheaper daily commute. No more smelly diesel fuel pumps 🤢
Zap-map has been a godsend already – hadn’t seen that can filter on networks too though.
Most useful zap-map filters are "Networks" to filter for a reliable network, "Connector Type" to filter for rapid and the power of rapid you prefer and "Payment Type" so you can choose those that are contactless payment with no need for an app.
When we EV drivers don't have to do this BS before every long trip and can leave on a journey with no planning and nothing but a carefree smile and a contactless debit card then I'll know we're getting somewhere with charging infrastructure but unfortunately that day is years away.
it wouldn’t release their car for over an hour.
My car did this once when it was charged and if you pop the bonnet there should be a lever that releases the cable manually. Well, there is on KIA anyway.
I had fun with the fast charger at the Torridon Hotel a couple of weeks ago.
I couldn't see or work out where you were supposed to wave the Chargeplace Scotland card to initiate the charge.
So I tried to use the app, but there was no Three signal (or any reliable mobile signal I later learned) to set things off.
After a drink in the bar, I managed to use the free wifi from the hotel to fire up the app and get things started.
Just need a bit of tenacity and lateral thinking; thankfully, that's what Mrs OTS is for. 🤣
My car did this once when it was charged and if you pop the bonnet there should be a lever that releases the cable manually. Well, there is on KIA anyway.
I've had the issue where my cable is stuck in the charge point.
I’ve had the issue where my cable is stuck in the charge point.
Luckily I've not had that.
Sounds familiar, Oldtennisshoes. Except the bar wi-fi was too slow as it was running on old copper. It was a remote village in Spain. They told us where to walk to to get a mobile signal so I returned to the car and waited while Madame did the walk, when the charger came to life thanks to Madame I plugged in.
Re Geniepoint
I've been using them (well, Engie, but exactly same chargers, app, helpdesk etc) around West Yorkshire for almost 100% of my charging over the last 2 years. Coincidentally the years of free charging finished today and the West Yorks Engie chargers have now been combined into Geniepoint, so I'll have to use the home charger a bit more from now on. Anyhow, I've found the hardware is pretty poor for some reason, resulting in more downtime or user problems than you would expect to be normal. Things like the screen reading your RFID card is really flaky and quite often I've given up and used the app instead (local Osprey's card reader works every time), I quite often had problems with the charger and my car making a handshake (local Osprey works every time). All the chargers seem to suffer from breakdowns and these ones are all brand new or no more than 2 yrs old, none of them seem to be long term reliable, in some cases off line for quite a period of time if they required parts.
On a positive note, at least with their app you can see which chargers are broken, occupied or available to use. Also always got thru to helpdesk quickly.
I just did some maths for when we come to change the car - leasing an Ioniq 5 (shorter range model) on 10k/year would save about £50/mo on fuel, given my estimated mileage, and it'd cost about £40/mo more than I am currently paying for the finance on the Merc and its warranty.
The longer range model is a lot more money though.
Waiting for the delivery of my new Citroen EC4, was the same cost as leasing a 1.2 petrol.
Nice car the EC4. There's roughly a £10k price difference between the entry level petrol manual version and the EC4 so that's an interesting set of lease figures. Obviously with leasing you are paying for the depreciation but it shows how the maths work and why purchasing a new EV is out of the question for most people.
I’ve wanted to switch to an EV for a while. The new generation with bigger batteries, at reasonable lease rates (esp with my work salary sacrifice ) have made it a reality.
Still can’t decide between an Ioniq5, Enyaq or EV6.
The EV6 is more expensive than it’s stablemate, but does look nice inside & out……
Electrical resistance will of course slow the blades. That’s why a dynamo hub powering a light will have more drag than a dynamo hub with the light switched off.
Guys, while this has little to do with EVs, a light that is on presents a lower resistance to the dynamo than one that is off. The high resistance (normally provided by the switch) prevents current flowing. No current, no power, no light. It is power being taken from the dynamo to the bulb that causes the drag.
Counter-intuitive I know, but correct.
We can go on to talk about voltage collapse for close up faults if you want, but I’ll have to charge (money 😉) for that.
Back to EVs?
You missed ‘I haven’t got a drive’.
I'll bite.
Why is that not a legitimate concern?
Speaking of legitimate concerns, as a male-centric discussion we seem to have missed a point:
scattered about in one’s and twos at the back of some retail park or hamburger joint carpark
How busy are these places? How well lit are they? How closely are they monitored?
How safe are they for a lone female after hours?
Was sent this the other day and I have to admit it's not something I'd ever considered.
I’M not going to sit here and bore you with all the usual reasons why Britain is not ready for EVs.
Because I’ve discovered something more worrying: It’s not safe. Especially for women on their own.
Allow me to explain.
One of the safest places to be is a petrol station forecourt. They’re bristling with cameras, back-lit like a Hollywood film set, and there’s usually someone at the till watching.
Even in a dodgy part of town at three in the morning, you know you can stop, bang a tenner in and be on your way again in minutes.
But what I found on a lap of Scotland ahead of COP26 is the complete opposite for electric car drivers.
You are a sitting duck.
Take Ullapool as an example, although there are many places like it all over Britain. There’s an EV charger tucked away in the corner of a car park behind a load of lorry trailers.
No canopy. No CCTV. No proper lighting. No one to help. You’ll be sat there for 45 minutes with a big arrow above your head.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/16557105/scotland-road-electric-corsa-green/
Please excuse the source and the rest of the article, it's predictably negative but that bit I've quoted is a fair point and not exactly unique. Here's the Chargeplace Scotland charging hub in Kilmarnock for instance:
https://goo.gl/maps/fKZB7ruJ3a5vWeUo7
Now right behind that is a gimbal mounted camera but there's a lot of hidden space under that canopy. The charger at the school next door to my house is on the far side of a mostly unlit car park, same with the one up the hill at the sports centre and the one at the leisure centre. I can see why someone may be very reluctant to use them. Obviously some areas are worse than others but they are poorly sited in a lot of cases.
Some stats from my first long trip in an ID4.
256 mile trip Newcastle to Craobh Haven (20 miles south of Oban). One charge required in Glasgow (osprey charger, nice).
2.8 miles per kWh. Fully loaded boot, two kids two adults with medium sized roof box. NCL-Glasgow. No massive amounts of rain but windy. Avoided doing 70.
Home trip dropped to 2.7 miles per kwh but I was hitting 70 often and the weather awful with high winds and crazy rain with a lot of surface water.
Net: I think the worst you can do must be close to 2.5 if you stick bikes on too.
Actual motorway (mainly) real range probably then around 210-220 in winter with roof box.
(Also Lochgilphead CCS charger didn't work but the type2 did). Three pin plug in the cottage charged at roughly 2.5% per hour.
@squirrelking I agree the lack of a drive is a legitimate concern, along with many of the others in the original bingo card. I'll add another 'insurance groups are a bit nuts'.
Thankfully those brave early adopters will take care of all these issues for us, so we can all enjoy them down the line.
CH4 now just showing how green and ethical the dream of EV cars are
To me more evidence EV’s are not the answer
At least you're watching something that challenges your views.
CH4 now just showing how green and ethical the dream of EV cars are
To me more evidence EV’s are not the answer
They're not just mining cobalt for EVs...
But yes it needs resolving, conditions etc but thats no different to many other parts of African working practices. It's just a general problem with Africa as a whole, not just cobalt mining.
To me more evidence EV’s are not the answer
Do you have an answer?
I've been walking through the Basque country this week. Given the lack of places to buy food and the reluctance of my ageing legs to carry too much we used public transport to get between start/finish points and shops. There were four trains a day on the line we used, the passengers were mostly people on holiday with no time constraints. The bus journey shocked because we were the only passengers for the 20km we were on the full-sized bus. The driver commented it was always like that. Four empty buses a day.
People are hooked on the car, there were taffic jams along roads with two of us on a bus.
The politician who tries to change that loses the next election. Macron put a few cents on diesel and got the gilets jaunes who had some legitimate demands but on transport it was simply a rejection of any alternative to the diesel car. Even the EV was damned on their tracts.
I don't have an answer to dragging people out of their extremely comfortable tin boxes. I do know that if poeple have to have tin boxes I'd rather they didn't stink, make a racket and produced a tad less CO2. The EV ticks those three boxes and that'll have to do, because you aren't going to get enough people to use their feet, bikes, e-bikes, busses, trains or any other alternative while they still have the right to use a car - even with a 1e bus ticket, 3e train ticket and a reliable service.
EDit: Incidentally the way a lot of walkers get around the difficulties of getting to food and accomodation on the Grande Randonnée/Compostelle routes is to use two cars. One car is left at the end of each day's walk and then used to collect the car from the start point and so on. Two cars to and froing along the route. A walking holiday in which cars are driven four times the distance walked.
Test driving an Enyaq on Sunday.
They’re not just mining cobalt for EVs…
We've moved on from that one now, Lithium Phosphate batteries with no colbolt or nickel. All Tesla model 3 SR+ coming from China are now Lithium Phosphate and soon to be same in USA. They don't have quite the energy density but like being charged to 100%, are more robust (don't catch fire if punctured and potentially will last longer) and cheaper to produce (something like $70 a kwh as opposed to $100 a kwh for Lithium ion). They're already used in China's domestic market and I'd expect them to filter into the cheaper end vehicles in the EU, if it isn't all surpassed by something else in the mean time.
TF1 news this evening did a cost comparison for Paris-Bordeaux. For one person:
Plane 200e
Medium-sized ICE saloon car 160e
Train TGV 60e
Bus 40e
The train and bus look attractive till you do it for a family of four. That's in France where the tolls are a major part of the cost of a car journey and train tickets are good value. The car whether EV or ICE is the default means of transport for the majority for a reason.
The train and bus look attractive till you do it for a family of four
Round here it's me and the daughter on the train before we hit the obvious cost barrier (not counting the hidden costs which to be honest most folk don't count anyway).
I'd still take the train if it didn't take an hour to do a 35 minute drive. Don't even talk to me about buses, I reckon a bus to Ayr from Largs is probably going to take in the region of 2 hours.
Nope, 1h 37m which is about twice the amount of time it would take to drive .
Just a thought though, does France not have a lower tier but still relatively fast service below TGV like the German Inter/Euro City services? And crazy cheap group tickets like Schoenen Wochenende?
The SNCF are bringing the slow cheap trains back on lines such as Paris-Lyon, night trains too. Locally we get 20% off for two travelling together. Nothing as attractive as the Quer-durchs-Land or Schönes Wockenende tickets though. We once did Berlin to Lake Constance as a family of three with a tandem and solo fully loaded for 35e IIRC. Eight train changes mind.
I like both the bus and train especially at night or very early in the morning. An early TGV gets us into Paris for a full day and a night bus gets us to Portugal, much of Spain, Florence... all for 180-240e return for 2.
Not forgetting the BlaBlaCar app. Car sharing has got us to remote places with poor public tansport access. When I take the car any distance I put up an ad on BlaBlaCar for any empty seats and often fill them.
Anyhow yesterday we ordered a BMW i3s. Mrs FD’s X1 lease finishes in 6 months time so needed to place an order for something now.
Looked at VW ID3’s, well tried but the local VW dealer didn’t have any in the showroom. Plus the fact the BMW is way less per month to lease on salary sacrifice. Just doing a 2 yr lease as I am sure in 2 yrs time the market will have changed and hopefully there will be a better option than EV’s
Looked at VW ID3’s, well tried but the local VW dealer didn’t have any in the showroom. Plus the fact the BMW is way less per month to lease on salary sacrifice. Just doing a 2 yr lease as I am sure in 2 yrs time the market will have changed and hopefully there will be a better option than EV’s
As opposed to getting a new car every 2 years,
I’m not sure how that plays out with green ethics 🙂
A walking holiday in which cars are driven four times the distance walked.
People are strange.
How safe are they for a lone female after hours?
As safe as they are for a lone male after hours.
Nothings stopping them putting charge points in petrol stations.
If the current infrastructure is just about working for 1% EV ownership, there’s a long way to go for 2030!!!
I’m definitely getting an EV, and considering home solar /battery system in the near future. I’m not convinced it’s that beneficial financially, but I would like to be using solar for my water/heating as much as possible.
As opposed to getting a new car every 2 years,
There is a slight difference here. Lots of leased EVs will result in many more coming onto the used market and provide the cashflow for investment in production. Which will help decarbonise the fleet. So normally lots of lease deals might be bad but it may balance out if all the new cars are EVs.
Am about to get a home charge point installed - any real world experience of tethered vs socket at home?
Tethered seems to be sensible so I don't have to unplug it all the time, or leave the cable at home by mistake, but I could just buy a spare cable.
Our car came with a cable, it loves in the car in its own compartment in the car and it's there if we ever need it. The home charger has a cable attached, that gets used most of the time.
If the current infrastructure is just about working for 1% EV ownership, there’s a long way to go for 2030!!!
Ten years ago, EVs pretty much didn’t exist barring a couple and neither did the charging network.
Currently, according to Zap-Map there are about 27,000 public chargers in the UK and just over 900 added in the last month alone. This is catering to a user base of around 300,000 cars perfectly fine, despite the stories you hear.
Ten years from now, the situation will be vastly different. These problems are not beyond the whit of man to solve. It’s really nothing to worry about.
I went for tethered home charger as I'm the numpty who would forget to take it with them when needed.
I’m definitely getting an EV, and considering home solar /battery system in the near future. I’m not convinced it’s that beneficial financially, but I would like to be using solar for my water/heating as much as possible.
We've just had a solar array installed and will be getting battery storage as soon as Elon can make me a Powerwall 2. From my limited data over the 2 weeks its been running is that even at this time of year if we had the battery and could make use of every solar generated electron it would cover close to half our electricity demands for October. The array is conservatively estimated to produce 5,000 kWh per year so in theory its going to save us £1100 a year at the 21.8p per kWh were currently paying (just been moved from AVRO to Octopus). Now I'm with Octopus I'll have a look at how much switching to their Octopus Go rate might save once we get the battery installed as this might make a big difference over winter.
I've also switched my PodPoint fast charger to a Zappi which can handle solar diverting to only charge the car when there is surplus solar so hopefully in Spring/Summer I'll be driving on sunshine. BTW anyone want a slightly used PodPoint then make me an offer?
I reckon payback is going to be in the region of 10-15 years at current electricity prices but as I'll be retiring in a year or two I'm prioritising reducion in monthly outgoings ahead of quick payback.
Am about to get a home charge point installed – any real world experience of tethered vs socket at home?
I've gone tethered for less faffage
Currently, according to Zap-Map there are about 27,000 public chargers in the UK and just over 900 added in the last month alone.
Trouble is only about a third of those are run by reliable networks and actually be in places you might want to use them without having to navigate off the highway to find a lone charger at the back of some retail park somewhere. Plus EV drivers get to know which networks can be depended upon and their chargepoints can get very busy at peak times and unfortunately EVs take at least 30 mins to top up vs 5 mins for ICE. Agreed nothing that can't be solved with sufficient will but we're behind the curve at the moment.
As safe as they are for a lone male after hours.
With all due respect that's a load of shite and ignoring facts. Like I said, totally male-centric.
The array is conservatively estimated to produce 5,000 kWh per year
What size array??
As safe as they are for a lone male after hours.
With all due respect that’s a load of shite and ignoring facts. Like I said, totally male-centric.
I'll nibble 🙂
I didn't say it was safe(I was being ironic but a smiley didn't seem appropriate) and I also stated charging points could be put in petrol stations.
With all due respect(to anyone who lives there) the issues with the shite area not the sex of the driver.
Cars get nicked and people assaulted(to death)at petrol stations anyway.
Ah okay, I never got your meaning. Yes, they could be installed in petrol station forecourts but the point is they aren't. They don't seem to be (generally) put in high footfall areas which is where the entire safety risk comes from.
But yes, the sex of the driver does make a difference, depending on the intent of the attacker.
What size array??
14X 375W panels = 5.25 kW. 10 south facing and 4 west facing.
The panels are in-roof mounted as we renewed the roof at the same time and in-roof looks a lot neater.
The inverter is "standard" 3.7 kW but I deliberately oversized the array to make the most of autumn and winter solar.
I'm not sure undersizing the inverter is a good idea. When a big cloud allows the panels to cool the inverter is going to get about 4.5 - 5kW when the sun comes out again mid afternnon. Is it going to trip out?
What are peoples opinions on Hydrogen powered cars. The new Toyota Miria seems to get incredible mileage 1003 KM’s from a few Kg’s of Hydrogen that takes 5mins to fill. Surely it’s in the interests of the service stations to push this fuel rather than have their forecourt’s blocked with loads of vehicles getting a quick top up 30mins plus to get to the next charge point. Lots of car manufacturers are pushing this technology in the background BMW and Merc, KIA and Hyundai. I know they are expensive at the minute but as the take up increases as with electric the cost will come down, 5 mins to fill up and a 1000 km range. I can’t help but think that electric cars are nothing more than a stop gap.
Not to mention no disposal and expensive recycling of the batteries, I know they can be repurposed but surely the raw materials could be put to better use or not used at all for battery production.
The cars are ok. The Mira if I recall is really an EV charged by a hydrogen fuel cell. But…
How do you make hydrogen?
Most of the viable methods now are carbon intensive.
Electrolysis is possible, but very inefficient as a electric-hydrogen-motion cycle (mainly due to compression losses I think, but correct me) and needs vast amounts of water. Also you need a distribution network - so if you’re in Hartlepool you’re ok. Not yet practical.
H2:
For: lighter cars, faster refueling, no battery to recycle in addition to the rest of the car
Against: hydrolosis and fuel cell losses are higher than battery charging and discharging, it's inefficient. At present commercial hydrogen is nearly all fossil fuel produced but electricty to charge cars has a good proportion of renewables and nuclear. Electricity is easily transported to point of use with existing infrastructure and no road transport.