molgrips

Yeah, whilst everyone worries about battery longevity they don’t seem at all bothered by flywheels, transmissions, injectors, turbos, EGR valves, coil packs, spark plugs, valve stems, HT leads, and all the rest of the crap that goes wrong with IC cars whilst they spew pollution over pedestrians and other road users.

I would think most ICE cars make it to ten years old without replacing any of those except spark plugs as per service schedule. Clutch maybe.

Whereas there is a very real possibility that the range of a BEV could be cut by 30% or so over that same period (e.g. Nissan estimate a Leaf loses 20% over 5 years), and that could be a genuine issue because the range is relatively low to start with and is affected fairly significantly by the weather. I know it affects resale as well having looked into buying a Leaf and seeing a lot of talk about how many ‘bars’ it has left on the health graph.

If those SUVs have really good real world range I assume they must have bigger batteries or have made some strides in efficiency. Or not actually be SUV tall.

This is coming from my Mate who works in Skoda, but, well sells them so pinch of salt.

In most cases this generation of EVs are going to be SUV ‘shape’, but even by 2021 standards of what we think of SUVs, they’re not really. They’re not raised for ground clearance or even to give a better view, the floor is, give or take, the same height off the ground as a saloon or hatchback would be.

What they are is tall, like the original A Class actually, which I’m sure no one is unaware of, so batteries can be stored under the floor, they do also have an SUV raised roof line, which again is a good practical thing, more headroom, allows more upright seating, which means you can have the same interior space of say an Passat in a car that’s about the length of a Golf.

The height doesn’t have to have detrimental effect on efficiency, for example the new Skoda Enyaq has a Cd of 0.257, compared to my much lower Superb with 0.275.

Word is the next generation of EVs will look different again, they’re still broadly made in the same shape as ICE cars, frontal impact protection aside they don’t really need a bonnet area as such, not such a large one anyway, they just use them to ease our transition.

Do not kid yourselves – electric cars are no more sustainable than ICE ones. Its greenwash

Reduce!
Reuse
recycle

Sorry, that’s not true.

In 2010 when the first real mass produced EVs like the Tesla S and Mitsubishi i-MiEV arrived and when we were comparing pretty much brand new technology to 120 year old technology that have been continually refined and improved, you could argue that all EVS did was move the pollution from the exhaust pipe to a more tax efficient place, a power station. This is certainly true of hydrogen cars (at the moment).

10 years later, and considering the whole life of ICE cars, and the whole life of EVs, including the fuel costs (in environmental terms) and consumables, Polestar calculate EVs are around 14% more sustainable than ICE cars, you might argue that’s not a lot, but the rate of progress is much, much higher. if/when Solid state batteries arrive and energy production becomes more and more sustainable, that figure will only improve.

I really take your point about Reduce reuse recycle, it’s would be far more sustainable for someone to keep their current ICE car, maintain it well and then recycle it at 200k miles or more rather than all rush to trade them new for shiny new Evs, but human nature being what it is, people will want new stuff and yes if the trend continues then ICE cars will lose value and be scraped sooner than they would otherwise, but the upside of that if more early adopters means quicker progress.

The ‘game’ could be changing again soon, they’re proposing to build one of the worlds first large scale fusion reactors in the UK, whilst it all sounds very science fiction, and frankly a recipe for disaster if it all goes wrong, pretty much unlimited, carbon free energy, that’s more than a game changer.

Ironically it might save the ICE and Hydrogen car, because if energy production is no longer a concern, then Hydrogen and ‘eFuel’ production suddenly become practical.

It’s all really fascinating stuff to me, a very non-scientific Muggle.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56843149

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57064305

Sorry, that’s not true.

Well, it’s true in the sense that people who buy EVs should not think that they’re OK to use willy-nilly. “Oh, I’ll just nip to the shops in the car (rather than walk) because it’s electric so there’s no shame.” I know that sounds daft but I have found myself thinking that at times too.

Even if an EV is 50% more economical than petrol in terms of carbon/journey, it’s still 50% as polluting as petrol. The answer is use cars less, use public transport systems more, be realistic about how far we need to go.

So TJ is kind of right. EVs are not the solution to climate change. But they are a little bit better and that’s still a good thing.

Even if an EV is 50% more economical than petrol in terms of carbon/journey, it’s still 50% as polluting as petrol.

Also any NOx and particulate emissions from the generation of the electricity used to charge EVs are not being released at street level for people to breathe as happens from ICE cars- especially when they are cold which on the morning school run I suspect is most of the time.

The height doesn’t have to have detrimental effect on efficiency, for example the new Skoda Enyaq has a Cd of 0.257, compared to my much lower Superb with 0.275.

Cd is only part of drag – area (and therefore height) is also important.

(p looking character is mass density, u is mass velocity)

The drag force is proportional to the Cd, the area, the density and the square of the speed – so slowing down is more important than having a low Cd.

How much difference would motorway speed have on EV range, say between 60 & 80.

How much difference would motorway speed have on EV range, say between 60 & 80.

Over 60 has a noticeable effect but cruise control sitting at a steady speed helps with the range, I have no idea about 70 officer. A friend says it again reduces the range. So, a bit like an ICE car.

Sorry, that’s not true.

TJ doesn’t like cars.

I heard he even owns one now. Hypocrite 😛

Bit of a thread hijack here but there seems to be lots of real world experience reading this thread!

Are any of the EV owners on here charging their cars at home whilst parked on the public street instead of a private driveway?
We live in an end terraced house and can usually park outside our front door. If we go electric then I’d like to put a charger in the front porch (where the mains fuse box is) so I can charge with a cable running over the pavement.
Issues: parking; we’re on very good terms with our neighbours but it’s not ‘our’ space so there is no guarantee we can park there every day.
Cable over the pavement: with a high vis protector would that be ok? I can’t find much guidance from my local council about it. General internet wisdom suggests liability shouldn’t be a big issue.
People messing with the cable: is that an issue do people think?

Cheers for any thoughts on this.

Well, 8/6 = 1.333 and 1.333 ^2 is 1.777 so you’re doing 78% more work against air resistance. And that’s most of the work done when driving (although not all).

I didn’t usually drive my old car at 60mph on motorways, but the difference between 70 and 80 on the cruise control was about 60 down to 52. But that’s a somewhat different situation since it was on mainly IC power most of the on the motorway and it was petrol, and petrol cars are more efficient when the throttle is more open.

The other day I looked found a spreadsheet of reported efficiency (in terms of miles/kWh) vs temperature and the numbers were between 2.5 and about 10, so clearly there is a huge variation and that can only be speed related. People with 10s were averaging 30mph or so, so if you have journeys with lots of open 30mph stretches like you do in West London suburbs you could get those numbers.

so there is no guarantee we can park there every day

How long is your commute? You probably won’t need to charge every day. If we only commuted in the one that is being delivered tomorrow we’d only need to charge it once a fortnight probably.

45 mile round trip as a commute.

Ironically it might save the ICE and Hydrogen car, because if energy production is no longer a concern, then Hydrogen and ‘eFuel’ production suddenly become practical.

Careful how you word that here, apparently hydrogen is impossible to transport.

TJ doesn’t like cars.

He’s not wrong though: there’s nothing green about EVs.

Careful how you word that here, apparently hydrogen is impossible to transport.

News to me: could you provide some evidence?

No absolutely nothing at all he’s right and so are you, you can move on now.

No absolutely nothing at all he’s right and so are you, you can move on now.

Do grow up.

Careful how you word that here, apparently hydrogen is impossible to transport.

News to me: could you provide some evidence?

I think he’s having a wind up, given the scale of infrastructure we have in place now, I really doubt it’s impossible to transport, after all we DO have a few hydrogen station in the UK. James May ran a Hydrogen powered car for a while.

AFAIK, and I assume we’re all just non-experts having a natter here, the biggest issue with Hydrogen is that it’s very inefficient to produce/refine, you’re just spending more carbon at the power station to save it from the exhaust pipe. More renewables like wind power can solve that problem but there are limits. Fusion reactors, which are a reality, if not on a large scale could solve that and then it makes sense for Hydrogen cars / fuel cell cars.

He’s not wrong though: there’s nothing green about EVs.

Depends on your point of view, as above and considering every aspect of them from factory to scrap yard and everything in between they’re supposedly 14% greener than ICE cars now, a reasonably new technology evolving quickly verses a really well established technology that’s had lots and lots of research thrown at it for well over 100 years. 10 years from now it could be 50%, 10 years after that who knows. That’s “green” to me.

Compared to banned private ownership of cars? Less so, but we live in a democracy and the people don’t want that.

Careful how you word that here, apparently hydrogen is impossible to transport.

Not impossible just difficult and uneconomical. It was explained earlier.

I stand corrected, someone has built a very small ship to transport LH2.

https://www.lr.org/en-gb/insights/articles/world-first-for-liquid-hydrogen-transportation/

For this trade, the hydrogen will be produced by a prototype brown coal gasification facility at Port of Hastings in Victoria, South Australia. The LH2 receiving terminal is being built near Osaka

So now you can gassify brown coal in Australia to have your green car in Japan 🤣 . Sometimes I despair.

n.b. you can’t then ‘store’ LH2, it’s like transporting LNG by ship, you insulate it and allow for a rate of evaporation which maintains the temperature, running that boil off gas through the ship’s engines. So it’s not feasible for your car (although I suppose a filling station could put their boil off into the natural gas grid subject to someone figuring it out if it was safe).

Do grow up.

My point is yourself and TJ keep entering threads telling us this yet I’ve yet to see anyone claim they’re ‘green’. There is a number people saying they’re better than buying an ICE due factors such as local air pollution, backed up by evidence. But we know is not the solution and have never claimed them to be.

My point is yourself and TJ keep entering threads telling us this yet I’ve yet to see anyone claim they’re ‘green’. There is a number people saying they’re better than buying an ICE due factors such as local air pollution, backed up by evidence. But we know is not the solution and have never claimed them to be.

I made no claim about the green credentials of EVs until you decided to play TJ and not the ball. And earlier, I made supportive comments about EVs in comparison with hydrogen, if you bother to look back, so your comment about “entering the thread” is well wide of the mark.

You also don’t know what other people’s motivations are for buying an EV. If it’s for environmental reasons, then there may well be better alternatives which are worth discussing in my view.

Depends on your point of view, as above and considering every aspect of them from factory to scrap yard and everything in between they’re supposedly 14% greener than ICE cars now, a reasonably new technology evolving quickly verses a really well established technology that’s had lots and lots of research thrown at it for well over 100 years. 10 years from now it could be 50%, 10 years after that who knows. That’s “green” to me.

I take that to be “a bit less brown”. Preferable to ICE, certainly, if there is genuinely no alternative.

A key advantage of EVs is that they allow for better ways to source the energy. Half might come from gas now, but in a decade it might be ten percent – and the means to generate and distribute renewable electricity are in place, use well known technology, they are being rolled out right now and are constantly being improved. And once people change their car to EV then no further investment on the part of the customer is required to take advantage of improvements in renewable generation.

If EVs take off and battery tech evolves we might end up seeing replacement batteries offered in a decade using the same patterns so that you could ‘upgrade’ your range after your old one’s deteriorated. The rest of your car should last for donkeys years as long as it doesn’t rust. It’s a fascinating idea. If you’ve just spent say four grand on a battery, and say your shocks start to fail you’re more inclined to fix the shocks since you know the battery’s new. This could really change the used car market.

If EVs take off and battery tech evolves we might end up seeing replacement batteries offered in a decade using the same patterns so that you could ‘upgrade’ your range after your old one’s deteriorated.

That’s went well with mobile phones…

Different though.

In 2 years, by the time your phone battery’s knackered, the OS and hardware are also obselete, it’s also battered and chipped and the screen might be cracked.

Cars are a lot more repairable and they always do essentially the same thing. The battery is really the only thing that is subject to tech advancements. And perhaps the charger too.

EVs will be a key way of reaching net zero

The more EVs we have and the smarter the grid the less carbon we will need to charge them. We will keep adding renewables to the grid and as we know the the problem is that most are weather dependent. You’ll have an app for your car charging and the more flexible you are the lower your rate will be. So I might say I need at least 20Kwh of charge each week day morning. My energy company might skip 3 nights of charging waiting of the wind to blow on Thursday night when energy will plentiful and cheap. Some one who says they only need 10Kwh of charge each mornng will pay less as they offering less flexibility. If I say I need a full charge by tomorrow that will be charged at a higher rate. But it’s exactly the flexibility we will need

I can see EVs being somewhat useful for balancing load on the distribution network, but strongly suspect that we will need to radically increase storage on the transmission network, including with grid scale batteries. On the distribution side, I think we’ll see more buildings installing batteries offering fast frequency response and balancing load at times of peak demand.

Cars are a lot more repairable and they always do essentially the same thing. The battery is really the only thing that is subject to tech advancements. And perhaps the charger too.

The issue with that is a ~3 year old phone is worth about £300, and a new battery is about £30.

A 10 year old small electric car is perhapse worth £3k and the battery costs £10k.

So while you could spend that money on the old faithful family run around. I’m not convinced many people actually will. Although I guess if you can then stick the old batteries in your homes powerwall and have your own solar doing the charging etc then the economics start to stack up differently. But it’s still an expensive way to drive arround in an old car.

TBH I think this will be the point where EVs become a PITA. People like me who can’t afford a new or even new ish car. But also want to do big, intercity mileages. There’s never going to be a £600 car that can do London to Manchester even with a rapidcharge arround Birmingham. I suppose financing and battery longevity will just have to reach a tipping point where I can buy a car monthly fuel savings the months I have work that needs it, offsets the risk of it sitting on my driveway whilst I’m not getting paid.

I’ve tried renting, it kinda worked but was a hassle. Although I didn’t look into whether the rate would drop enough to make it worth while renting for a medium term.

Range related to speed was a question up there. Renault provides a calculator that IME is pretty accurate for the higher speeds but a serious underestimate a lower speeds:

https://www.renault.fr/vehicules-electriques/zoe/batterie-recharge.html

So 297km range at 90kmh but only 202km at the 130kmh limit here.

On busy routes nationales with 50/70/80 limits the range is remarkable and much higher than the Renault calculator suggests. We recently did home to Anglet beach and back, 2x118km = 236km, and got home with 49% battery remaining, but the average speed was just over 40kmh. If we do it pedal to the metal on the autoroute we have to stop for a charge half way home. The best overall time for the journey is sticking to 100kmh on the autoroute which makes the journey possible without a charge – still not much above 50kmh average which tells you how bad Anglet traffic is.

You also don’t know what other people’s motivations are for buying an EV. If it’s for environmental reasons, then there may well be better alternatives which are worth discussing in my view.

If it helps, since I started the thread:
1. We didn’t buy the vehicle. Its a company vehicle which it appears the company lease.
2. It was replacing a previous petrol burning vehicle which was >5 years old and the lease expired on (and it was due quite a bit of mechanical work on!)
3. The tax situation with an EV made it a bit of a no brainer

Whilst I think we are both relatively “climate aware”, Green was not directly the driving force. However, we have used it a little for trips we would previously have used the family gas guzzler for whereas I never even sat in, never mind drove its predecessor, partly because its more eco (and nearly free charging in Scotland just now!).

There’s never going to be a £600 car that can do London to Manchester even with a rapidcharge arround Birmingham.

That’s what car clubs are for. You buy the short range EV then easily hop into a long range one when needed.

Renault guaranteed to make a big ICE hire car available even at peak holiday times when we bought the Zoé. Easy enough to do considering the number of second-hand cars they have sitting around.

My point is yourself and TJ keep entering threads telling us this yet I’ve yet to see anyone claim they’re ‘green’.

Strawmen are easy to defeat when ppl want to ‘win’ something?

Not sure if this was mentioned in response to the OP’s question.

Charging close to 100% has a significant disadvantage in that it reduces the regenerative braking effect. In our Teslas it shifts the experience towards old-style accelerate-brake driving. Much less fun, and think of the wear on those discs and pads 😕😏.

Charging to 100% doesn’t really have any advantages over charging to 80-90% unless you’re aiming for a long, single journey, distance.

I tend to go for 80% or 90%.

Not sure if this was mentioned in response to the OP’s question.

Charging close to 100% has a significant disadvantage in that it reduces the regenerative braking effect. In our Teslas it shifts the experience towards old-style accelerate-brake driving. Much less fun, and think of the wear on those discs and pads

No, it wasn’t mentioned. For some reason you have to turn the regen on each time you drive so I’d probably have thought I forgot. Tempted to go charge to 100% to see if I notice the difference! I’m not sure I’d describe regen as “fun”… there’s also only disks on the front – the rear has drum brakes!

Charging close to 100% has a significant disadvantage in that it reduces the regenerative braking effect.

Not for long though, surely, as you would pretty quickly use enough power to create a space for the regen power.

Are any of the EV owners on here charging their cars at home whilst parked on the public street instead of a private driveway?

That’s me. although I’ve hardly used it as loads of local rapid chargers are currently free until end Ocober 2021. I bought a dumb untethered charger (new unfitted 2nd hand) and had it installed in my ally behind a gate. Total cost was approx £470 that was with a little meter so I know house electric / car electric. That was Jan 2019, before the olev smart charger rules were introduced with the olev grant, but you should still be able to get a cheaper dumb charger to fit outside the olev approved rules. I later bought a 5m smart Ohme cable thru Octopus £199. That’s my set up.
I’ve got a 1m pavement directly outside the door, 3 terraced/cottage type houses, pavement goes nowhere. So really only residents, post lady and amazon/dpd etc might use it. Got one of those yellow/black cable ramps, but long term I will get a 1m drainage channel set into the pavement so the cable can run from my ally gate to the street under the pavement. Can’t always get to park outside my house, but doesn’t matter as don’t need to charge every day and if desperate I could use a public rapid charger.