How so?

You’ve hedged your electric car usage with an old ICE. the current solution is not yet an EV for all. Range, Load carrying capacity (dog cage in an i3?), Cost. Pick two.

Where’s that?

@molgrips
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3560989,1.0229272,3a,75y,283.67h,65.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sDTuSnFMfPO2tY-RT0BLgzg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3619195,1.0251893,3a,75y,339.49h,57.96t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spnvjlGXkSm3QWGmMfOucsw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

What do you think will happen to the ‘what’s wrong with my car?’ threads when everyone’s driving EVs?

Dunno, but one thing I am 100% certain of is that you’ll be starting one, @molgrips 😀

Great, hope to see more of those everywhere.

They will have to line those streets with those street-side chargers, but I don’t see why they couldn’t.

Dunno, but one thing I am 100% certain of is that you’ll be starting one, @molgrips

I admire your work!

It’s an i3. When we first got it, it would do 155-160miles, in summer on a full charge in eco mode. Now, 6 years later it will do 150-155miles on the same journey, the difference being the kids are bigger, but I can possibly drive it better.

The max capacity indicator is showing 31.6kWh (33 when new) but it’s been measured at 32.1kWh (based on 7% remaining and what it put in from the Zappi) so 2-3% degradation. We charge maybe once per week always on 7kw and have only charged from 3 pin maybe 3 times. We rarely charge to full.

The i3 also has a much bigger battery than you’re allowed to use. Ours is a 33kWh REX and so I think has a capacity of 37-39kWh, but you can’t use the extra.

Another advantage of the REX is that you rarely ever deplete the battery beyond 7%, so no deep discharge. Perhaps this also helps

I

The i3 also has a much bigger battery than you’re allowed to use.

Most manufacturers do that except Tesla who let you use it all so they can claim higher range, but then tell you not to.

I think newer cars will have better battery management. They are making adjustments to software and also hardware as they continue to make them, AFAIK.

You’ve hedged your electric car usage with an old ICE. the current solution is not yet an EV for all. Range, Load carrying capacity (dog cage in an i3?), Cost. Pick two.

Sort of. We need two cars, we live where there are no shops, busses or trains. We replaced the Panda with the i3. The i3 now does 90% of our journeys. This isn’t that the Touring is needed for the other 10 due to its range or size, it’s just sometimes both cars are in use.

I could and would happily replace the Touring with a large EV IF the environmental economics of doing so made sense…they don’t. A plug in hybrid like a 3 series might be best for us. Small battery, less embedded material cost and 80% of its 10% total household car journeys are on solar powered battery.

We do (as a household) between 10 and 12k miles a year.

Sorry, but that’s classic 😆

How so?

TBH I’m pretty much on your side. I’d love an EV (but as my only car is also an ageing 3k/year jobby, I don’t see much benefit to anyone of chopping it in, especially as I couldn’t charge at home and it works fine anyway). So I broadly agree with your position on both points – I really doubt (most) people with 2 cars need them both to be ICE.

But you do have to admit that the combination of your slightly sanctimonious opening salvo in that post, when combined with the admission that you’ve kept a large ICE car so that you don’t REALLY have to suffer any inconvenience, is quite amusing…

I like to think of EV being the MiniDisc to the ICE CDs

This is what I’m afraid of. I bought a MiniDisc when they came out and recorded maybe 2 discs. I still needed my CDs for the car anyway, and then iPods came along.

On the subject of cars, I rode around Italy in a friend’s second hand Tesla S. He had driven it from Denmark to Rome with no infrastructure issues – got charged at Tesla points and hotels no problem. He mentioned that he’d had no service issues at all except for cleaning the brake pads. I was won over to the joys of EV and when I got home I looked around. Couldn’t afford a Tesla and couldn’t buy an EV now anyway. Bought a 2nd hand Polo from Cazoo, intended as a stop gap but may replace it with a fossil Golf if things don’t change.

you don’t REALLY have to suffer any inconvenience, is quite amusing…

Okay, I can see that it looks like that, but that’s not why it was kept.

It’s only marginally bigger than the i3 and we’ve used the i3 more than the Touring over the past years for long journeys due to cost and sustainability.

The reason it’s been kept is that I’ve had it since it was a year old, it’s been very well maintained and is worth nothing to anyone else. It only does 35mpg on a run and 29th pootling around, but at 3000miles per year, it makes little difference. It costs more in MOT and road tax than it does in fuel.

We used to do around 18k miles/y as a family, but at the same time as we got the i3, I made the choice to cycle to work, so eliminated 7k of my annual mileage.

I went the other way. I had a petrol Golf written off and fancied an EV as a replacement. We are a 2 car household with the other car being a big diesel for longer journeys so this car was really for commuting and local (sub 60 mile) trips. However the cost of a used EV was much more than I was hoping to pay. I posted a thread on here and really went back and forth in my mind. In the end I bought a used Nissan Leaf for more than I wanted to pay initially. I also had to spend a few £hundred to get a charging point installed. For my use case though, having an EV has been brilliant. I charge exclusively on the driveway on an EV overnight tariff so charging costs are minimal. I have already seen savings with £0 road tax and much lower fuel costs. In addition, living in London and with EVs being exempt from the congestion charge for now, my partner has been taking a small detour on her way to work to drop me to and collect me from central London on the days when I have to be in the office, with the result that that the savings made from not using public transport more than cover the cost of charging the car.

I do realise that my circumstances are quite specific but it has worked out very well for us. I can easily see us moving to EV only in the future if we can get a reasonably priced car that will do about 300 miles on a charge. I don’t think that will happen for a few years but I have no doubt that it will, and by that time I would expect huge improvements to the charging infrastructure too.

most people don’t have a petrol station on their house/street either

Oh my god, how many times are you going to trot out that crappy argument? No, of course I don’t because guess what? It takes 5 minutes to fill up and it makes sense to have a centralised filling point. If you apply the same model to charging you are relying on being able to get a slot when you NEED it. I worked out the logistics of EV ownership and no home charging when I was seriously looking at them, it was a non starter if not for me then certainly for my wife who I sure as hell wouldn’t be sending to sit in a deserted car park at christ knows what time.

Short term or not that ain’t happening.

It’s easy to suggest all these great ideas when it’s not you that has to live with them.

Long term – all that’s required is for local councils to place 1 or 2 street chargers in place which can be used for an hour and are then automatically fined if blocked. You have an RFID card linked to your house and your usage is charged as part of something like council tax.

That’s a good idea and I’d be all for it. Let me know how it pans out, do you honestly think it would happen like that in real life? Our local authority can’t even get parking decriminalised so they can start fining folk that use double yellows or install a paid car park properly, what hope do they have with a metered charging system? I really hope I’m wrong though because that’s actually a really good idea.

yeah these are springing up in/near residential areas here now. EVs only, 2 hour stay max. Some kind of membership scheme. Handy as right in town, very few houses have driveways.

Oh, seems so. Here’s hoping.

Like what?

Everything to do with the combustion system and it’s monitoring.

Air flow meters and sensors, EGR valves and sensors, camshaft position sensors, injectors, coils, high pressure lines, head gaskets, oil seals, fuel senders. All of these things MUST be monitored and when the thing (or more likely the sensor) goes wrong, it’s a right PITA.

And you think your motor, batteries and power management don’t?

I’d also speculate that a lot of electronic items will last longer and be far less likely to fail on an EV because they’re not subject to heat and vibration

Wait, wut?

All motors vibrate, especially ones attached to a moving vehicle. They are subject to wear and tear and imbalancing as a result. The windings can fret, insulation degrade, stators delaminate, rotor bars crack and the bearings wear. Cables aren’t immune to damage or loosening either. That’s before you start getting into the deep stuff involving flux that I don’t understand (I’m a mechie, not a spark). I’ve been on shift when 3 motors have gone on fire in just the last year alone so I’m not just making this stuff up in my head.

What do you think will happen to the ‘what’s wrong with my car?’ threads when everyone’s driving EVs?

They’ll still exist because the rest of the suspension, braking and drivetrain systems will still be there, not to mention the “engine” that really has become a sealed black box.

with the result that that the savings made from not using public transport more than cover the cost of charging the car.

Well that’s not exactly eco is it 🤣

@squirrelking

I work for a global manufacturer of engines – we install them both with alternators for power generation (gensets), mechanical drive stuff and electric drive applications – I.e. an alternator attached to the engine and the vehicle driven by electric motors. Right the way up to the enormous mining equipment you see on the discovery channel.

The electrical machines (alternators, motors) are an order of magnitude or greater more reliable and need massively less (close to none) maintainance.

You’re comparing a complex reciprocating machine with a simple rotating one.

There simply no comparison.

Well that’s not exactly eco is it 🤣

Where did I claim it was? Even so, a 10 minute each way detour on an EV is hardly an eco crime.

@whatgoesup

I work in a power station with everything from small 415V motors to 11kV giants that move the cooling water pumps and gas circulators.

I’ve seen plenty of failures in my time there, 99% of the time it’s either bearings or terminal boxes that blow up but occasionally you get a spectacular winding failure. Motors need maintaining. Full stop. I’m honestly not prepared to entertain the ridiculous notion that they are some sort of sealed for life magic widget that will never fail. They might not require as much manintenance but if they’re not getting checked based oh running time then it’s going to be fun when they do eventually start routinely failing. Which they will.

I don’t think EV’s have come to anything like sufficient numbers or age to comment on reliability, wait until they have fallen to “white goods” status with all the care and preventive maintainence you would associate then we’ll see.

@squirrelking I’m genuinely curious about the duty cycles involved.

In a car that does 200k miles, that’s 5,700 ish hours of operation or about 8 months. Presumably there are many motors in industrial applications that are on 24/7 and 8 months doesn’t represent a very long time in that context? What would the mean time between failure be in an industrial aplication?

Of course EVs will go wrong, but I think with far fewer moving parts and sensors in the drivetrain, they are bound to be significantly more reliable and cheaper to maintain, surely?

I can’t find any details online of EV motor servicing. The motor/generators in my old Prius were considered part of the transaxle and that was a sealed unit that some said was sealed for life and some said needed an oil change at something like 70k. There were some failures supposedly especially on gen1 cars.

@squirrelking Yes, of course motors can and do fail. If you work with a lot of them, with high duty cycles then you’ll see failures.

My point is that they fail a lot LESS than the equivalent reciprocating machine when in a comparable environment. If your pumps were driven by IC engines rather than electric motors you would be seeing an order of magnitude more failures and more maintenance (which is one of the reasons why rotating machinery is preferred over reciprocating in industrial uses).

The good news with a motor in an automotive application is that it’s not different to the motors that are used in other applications, so all of the improvements that have been made over the last 100+ years will apply. Improvements sourced from really harsh use cases like your industrial pump motors. Cars are a really mild duty cycle compared to this and I’d expect the motors to easily outlive the rest of the mechanical parts of the car if designed correctly. (200,000 miles @ average 30mph = 6,670 hours use in a vehicle lifetime, most of which will be at light load. I would expect an automotive motor to be designed with this in mind, and hence be a sealed unit with no maintenance needs in its expected lifetime.

An industrial pump motor by comparison will often run 24/7 = 8,760 hrs per year typically at high load and lasts for several years. That’s often too harsh a use case for an economic sealed-for life design so things like bearing grease ports can be applies and periodic bearing replacements become an option.

The rest of the car (wiring, suspension etc) is the same as an IC car so the same logic applies if it’s a competent company that’s designed it, except that a lot of the parts that commonly fail are longer subject to vibrations from the IC engine, just from the road etc, so will perform slightly better than the IC engine version would.

The ABS pump control module failed in my Passat. It was in the engine bay, so I’m guessing it spent a fair bit of its working life at fairly high temperatures for electronics. It’s well known that high temperatures shorten the lifespan of electronic components. That said, probably not quite as much as the stuff in the interior of the car sat baking in the sun all day for however many months it’s sunny.

It’ll be interesting to find out how EVs age and how that affects resale values and consequently car lifetime. Once you get a battery replaced or refurbished, it should in theory be as good as new, whereas with an ICE the expensive engine/transmission parts are queueing up to fail one by one as it ages. Ask me about it…

I imagine that battery degradation and general wear & tear over the whole vehicle will define end of life.

My 17yr old diesel for example is running excellently, engine fine, but it’s now old, tatty, nothing quite as “tight” as it used to be and is pretty outdated in many ways. I think this will be similar to EVs, they’ll still “work” but just get old and less desirable over time and of course the regular stuff will still fail over time – e.g. air con packing up etc.

On the phone so can’t do a big copy/paste but @molgrips that’s a fair question. Quite a lot of the failures I’m more concerned with were on pumps that generally ran in earnest for a few days a few times a year or else tested every few weeks so comparatively low use. I’m not sure how you could compare the duty cycle but it was certainly a lot more stop than start.

@whatgoesup fair point I see what you mean now. There are things you can do with an electric motor that can tune it for reliability/efficiency or performance, its just going to take time to see where the red lines are in this particular application. I hope you’re both right about vibration and especially heat issues , yes there is a lack of high frequency vibration but certainly more shock loading.

In response to the link to National Grid Mythbusters about EVs.
They seem to base it all on an annual average for power production and consumption by EV users. Everyone will be fair and use a smart device and charge their EVs when they’re told to…which is obviously nonsense as many in the UK are selfish.
The head of Decarbonisation at National Grid was on Top Gear and came out with the 10% extra statement. He wasn’t that close if you look at number of cars and average mileage and convert that to EV and energy use. (32 million cars, an average of c7000 miles per annum and use an optimistic 1kw per 4 miles you end up adding 56 billion Kwh to the c 300 billion kwh the UK uses. Domestic use is cited as being c 27% or c80 billion kwh)
56 billion is over 18%. They’ve not even added the push for ASHP into the EV equation nor have they mentioned the loss of most of our nuclear in the coming years. (We lost Hinkley B on the day National Grid did the mythbusters page)
They obviously have time to sort stuff out by 2035/40 but the overall plan for energy seems somewhat foolhardy. That buffoon Johnson obviously believed that wind could power the entire country by 2030, if only he’d thought of those cold, grey winter days when it is still and energy demand is high.
The road I live on has about 50 properties. The cables supplying electric are decades old. I have my doubts that they would stand up to a doubling of power thru them if we are pushed down the ASHP route, coupled with EVs (and perhaps electric hobs/ovens etc)

certainly more shock loading

That is a good point, when you hit a pothole in a hard corner there must be a fair old shock to the motor since it’s directly connected. But that’s so true of a manual transmission I’d imagine.

1kw per 4 miles

Don’t you mean 4 miles per kWh?

Don’t you mean 4 miles per kWh?

Yes.

the motor since it’s directly connected

The motor is typically in the middle of the car and connected to the wheels with cv jointed driveshafts, rather like a conventional transmission is. I used to think they were best directly mounted at the hubs but that increases unsprung mass which is a bad thing.

I don’t know if the motors are soft mounted to the chassis or not – can’t see why they couldn’t be though if it helps with life (giving the motor bearings an easier time).

@squirrelking – yes, more shock loading in this application than in a stationary one such as pumps. There is good accumulated experience of electric motors in environments with high shock loadings though so hopefully that helps to get it right first time.

Let’s hope it’s better than the E-bike motor manufacturers have as there seems to be a world of pain going on there re motor reliability.

Quick check – Teslas at least seem to soft mount the motors to the chassis (probably more to stop motor vibration making its way to the cabin) so that gives the motors some shock protection.

It is pretty clear that for widespread EV purchase/use two major things need to happen;

1. Price is lowered to at least get close to equivalent petrol version
2. Charging speeds need to increase

Point 1 will no doubt happen over time but point two has a physics element to it although the more expensive EVs tend to charge faster but then back to point 1.

Charging speeds need to increase

Yes. The 800v architecture cars are already pretty good for this – 10-80% charge in 18 mins. If that’s not quick enough then imagine we can hopefully halve this to 9 mins, allow for payment whilst charging rather than before or after and the total charge time would be pretty much on a par with buying petrol and paying in the kiosk.

The other factor here is that for “most” journeys the car starts off fully charged* so charging away from home becomes a fairy uncommon thing, and in the majority of cases is part way through a long journey when you’d want a break anyway, so the the car can do it’s 20 min 10-80% charge while the driver is grabbing a drink / toilet etc.

The bit thats more of a concern to me re charging right now is the number of chargers and their reliability. I’ve heard too many stories of people queuing for quite a long time to use the single functioning charger at a service station. That has to change pretty quickly.

* this assumes that people have a means to charge overnight which not everyone does. This also needs to change and is probably the hardest bit to solve.

The motor is typically in the middle of the car and connected to the wheels with cv jointed driveshafts, rather like a conventional transmission is. I used to think they were best directly mounted at the hubs but that increases unsprung mass which is a bad thing.

I guess at end of day, if it is cheaper to have one motor bolted directly to a conventional diff and then driveshafts to the wheels, that’s what will be done. Having two motors directly connected to two wheels likely complicates the electrical system (on top of the unsprung mass issue) more than a diff complicates the mechanical system.