A new Tesla for £25k? Sounds good.

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.

Would you, though? Petrol stations are busy because you have to use them, you can’t refuel at home. If you can charge your car at home, you can do even fairly decent journeys without ever needing to actually recharge anywhere else.

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.

Guardian Tesla holiday to France

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.

I’m impressed you can differentiate that from the general driving population who mostly appear to do just that…

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

Hydrogen Bus Project

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.

and we don’t really know how to store hydrogen yet…

Er, what?

Apart from the fact we ship tonnes of the stuff every day we have a convenient national distribution system in place that could easily be converted from methane to hydrogen.

With the right infrastructure in place you could easily generate hydrogen. Desalination plus solar would easily give you the means, there just lacks a certain will at the moment to make it a reality. North Africa could easily be the next big player, in Europe at any rate.

Isn’t hdyrogen less efficient?

You’ve got to convert solar energy to make electric. Use electric to extract hydrogen. Then transport the hydrogen. Then use the hydrogen to make electricity. Then convert electricity to kinetic energy with the motor.

Every step has associated conversion losses presumably??

Apart from the fact we ship tonnes of the stuff every day we have a convenient national distribution system in place that could easily be converted from methane to hydrogen.

No it couldn’t.

1) hydrogen will find leaks that methane can’t, it will fit through the gaps in the crystal structure of most metals, let alone a leaking flange.

2) as a result of fitting through the gaps in metals crystal structure it will turn normal metals brittle, so needs specific grades of steel for the pipework.

3) it’s incredibly low energy density on a volume basis (roughly double by mass), because 1kg of hydrogen takes the same space as 8kg of methane as a gas, and you can liquefy methane practically to increase it’s density orders of magnitude further)

As a result of those three, no you can’t just put it in the gas mains and expect it to work.

Well if you do it like that, yes. But there are huge losses in generating electricity, sending it all over the country in wires and stuffing it into a battery too.

The thing with hydrogen is that there are places in the world that have huge spare renewable capacity, as said above.

Storing hydrogen is possible now, but shipping it is harder because large scale infrastructure is hard without lots of leakage – as I understand it.

there just lacks a certain will at the moment to make it a reality.

Not quite, but partly. The litre of petrol you buy was shipped as crude oil which gets has thousands of very high value uses. These usages mitigate the cost to a large extent. A tanker laod of crude goes a lot further than a tanker of pure H destined for cars, and yet the latter is probably more expensive to handle and ship.

Hopefully it’ll come, cos it’s a great solution, but the infrastructure needs work.

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.

Very true, no point doing anything until the Chinese improve…
But it’s still new technology it’s still being developed and the infrastructure isn’t there so some bribery is needed. If you can move people in cities to electric cars and use home solar, wind, storage and off peak generation to charge them then you get cleaner cities and a chance to develop the technology and lead the way selling around the world (you know focus on the Asian markets like you keep banging on about)

Governments should be subsidising or funding renewable and nuclear to reduce carbon usage. Want to be the one out of carbon before its 10x the price?

@mike the interesting thing is we already pay 5x the cost of “carbon” for petrol due to taxes and the reality is if it was £2 or £3 a litre we’d still buy it. I read the other day Germans pay 50% taxes on home energy, we in the uk pay 5% – my point being the demand is quite price insenstive and as shale has proved there is a lot left. (admittedly with serious concerns about extraction). In Singapore a basic car costs £60k not £25k due to taxes yet the roads are still packed.

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

http://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/manufacturer-news/2015/09/18/itm-power-opens-m1-hydrogen-filling-station-near-sheffield

I’m sure they had a van that ran on water too.

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?
Indeed, it’s only “free” in as much as it’s basically included in the price of the car, so if you’ve bought one you might as well use as much of their electricity as possible.

They’ve always been up-front about their plan to get electric cars to the masses, with each step trying to encourage uptake while financing the next. Free use of superchargers is an optional extra for the Model 3; presumably if you don’t take that out it’ll be some kind of pay-as-you-go system. It’ll undoubtedly still be much cheaper than petrol.

Ecotricity have said the same about their Electric Highway system; they’re paying for it now, but they won’t forever.

I can highly recommend Robert Llewellyn’s “Fully Charged” youtube channel, there’s a wide variety of very interesting stuff on it.

oh and with some makes you don’t actually own the batteries in them.

It’ll undoubtedly still be much cheaper than petrol.

9e for recharge for a Zoe on French autoroutes. Given that you will probably fill up when you still have 20% charge and the fast charger stops when the battery is 80% full you get about 50km at motorway speeds. A Clio would use about 4.5e of petrol to cover the same distance.