I see that’s 4wd. I wonder if there’s an inherent advantage to driving all four wheels, because the current flowing to front and rear would be half that required by just one axle, so you’d save on wasted heat.

EDIT it also has under-seat storage in the back! Fantastic!

Doesnt the new transit custon phev have a little 1.0l petrol engine that powers the electric motor when the leccy runs out. Think it gets about 350 miles on the petrol….

Yep, that was the one I saw…

The Ampera’s engine was there purely as a generator. When it was in extended range mode, the revs would be constant and it was there purely to generate power for the electric drivetrain. From what I remember, it meant that the petrol could be used as efficiently as possible if it had to be used.

For all the drawbacks of that car (really vile interior and lack of boot space for dogs) it was not bad.

That VW estate looks great. Except for the white seats obviously…

BMW have an i4 coming next year (or maybe the year after) in true BWM style it’s got some very good performance stats (0-60 in 4, 375 mile range) which may, or may not be achievable in real world testing.

Anyway, it’s got a unique body/chassis but it’s based around a 4 Series Grand Coupe – aka the 4 door hatchback version of the 3 series, so it’s likely there will be a saloon and Estate version at some point.

They seem to be following VWs high voltage model so it runs cooler and charges faster than Tesla, but not as fast as the Porsche Taycan which has roughly the same size battery in the ‘basic’ version but it’s 35 mins for a 80% charge or possibly more interestingly it’s 6 mins for 60 miles.

If they can make it for high-end 3/4 series Money (£50K) they won’t be able to make them quick enough, yes £50k is still a LOT of money, but in the world of PCP a top of the range 440i is £450 a month and a 440i driver doing 12k miles a year is paying about £200 a month in petrol at the moment.

Yes I know lots of people spend £10k / £5k or whatever on a 5/10 year old car and maintain it for a nice long life, but one day it will be in that price range.

ICE engine, small, designed to run hyper efficiently at a fixed rpm, driving a generator, driving electric motors at the wheels.

I don’t understand why that isn’t done more, either. I’ve driven a Toyota Auris and was expecting it to work like that, but it has a really complex scheme for driving the wheels by a combination of a 1.8L ICE and electric motor. I think the Prius is similar, so there must be a good reason.

I really hope the id.5 is on sale by the second half of 2021, that’s when the lease on my company Passat GTE is up and with an estate of that range I’m ready to go full electric. Hope it doesn’t cost more than the Passat either. Wishful thinking? Hopefully not looking at the id.3

@molgrips – article says there will be 2WD and 4WD versions

Doesnt the new transit custon phev have a little 1.0l petrol engine that powers the electric motor when the leccy runs out. Think it gets about 350 miles on the petrol….

Yeah. Looks utterly pointless. It will do 25-30miles on battery alone then the petrol motor will kick in and charge it giving a woeful mpg (can’t find the figure). It will suit a city based short miles operator I imagine, but a full electric van would be much better. It looks like a gap-filling product before the fully electric transit appears.

You mean like the Nissan NV200 electric version?

They have been out for ages, but I have only ever seen a couple out on the roads.

Yeah. They are smaller though. Chipps and Clover did a magazine article in one I think.
Anyway, it’s the larger medium sized panel van, and variants, combis etc that will be out soon I think.

Yeah. Looks utterly pointless. It will do 25-30miles on battery alone then the petrol motor will kick in and charge it giving a woeful mpg

I tried the charge more on my Golf GTE when I got it I got about 25mpg so never done it since. I’ll see if I can find the exact figures.

I’ve often wondered why this hasn’t taken off in cars. A generator ICE (low rpm diesel) which is either on or off charges batteries (far far less of them than in a full EV). Powerful electric motor drives the wheels. Its a type of series hybrid, but not in the auxilary generator plug in type or PHEV type.

Efficiency takes a massive hit when you have to factor in conversion from ICE to electric via the genny, then the loss from charging, then the losses in converting to rotary drive again from battery out to motor. Even if cruising in diesel-elec loco style with the battery bypassed you’re still converting from ICE to elec and lose efficiency.

If you have a spinning ICE, then connecting direct to the wheels (see prius drivetrain) beats that idea hands down, and the motor can be sized/geared for motorway cruise at peak efficiency.

IIRC diesel-elec locos have traction considerations from a standing start which favours electric drive, via the series hybrid thing, plus electric torque delivery characteristics are better use to a train on gradients than the straight diesel-wheel method. gearboxes aren’t so viable to a big loco pulling a massive rake at speed.

No really all that practical and certainly not cheap but the Porsche Taycan Sport Tourismo (aka the estate) is out next year.

Given the popularity, the already huge weight of SUV’s (hence BEV don’t seem to have much different dynamics), you can see why manufacturers are “following the money” and building BEV SUV.

It looks like BMW are bring out a 330e Touring in 2020. Goes to the top of my leasing list now that you can no longer buy a rwd 3.0ltr petrol 2 series 🙁 (to replace my existing 330e saloon

I was looking In to the maths recently.

The whole thing seems heavily skewed to the company car market .

Take the Nissan leaf (the most economic on electric per mile at 4pence/mile – the e-golf is quoted at 14 pence/mile and the Zoe’s quoted at 7pence )

Take a compatible car -in this case the note.

Using base spec the leaf is 28k otr

The note is 14k otr

That’s 14k difference.

Notes quoted mpg is 60 mpg or at current fuel prices 9p/mile
Oil
So remove the Scottish grant £3500

That leaves 11500 differential.

That’s over 230000 miles to break even

Even at 50mpg it’s 11p/mile

And that’s 165000 miles to break even

I’d understand if it was a magical green bullet but it’s not.

I simply don’t do the miles to require that outlay.

Add in bik and it makes sense.

Last time I had a company car the stipulations meant that the company would not entertain a car as small as a leaf as a company car…

*Tax is just noise

** Both cars need servicing and both will need repairs over 160000 miles and both will rot at the same rate

Discuss.

When you say many do you actually mean there are some.

The company I work for has a fleet of over 90 cars.

At one point in 2015 over half the fleet were Outlander PHEVs due to operator tax reasons.

The company fuel bill doubled, so PHEV’s are now banned

Self Charging Hybrids are starting to trickle back, but the mass exodus to badly thought out hybrids has done long term damage to a lot of car policies.

Going a bit OT, but…

Leaving the economics out of it, has anyone got numbers for the CO2 cost of building and running a new (electric or otherwise) car Vs an old one?

Curious as I drive a 35 year old diesel land rover. It’s not very efficient, so produces more co2 per mile than a modern equivalent. It already exists though, and does maybe 4k miles a year. I’d be interested to know what age a modern car would need to live to at that kind of annual mileage to actually be greener than an old car that already exists.

I would be happy to sacrifice the cost (within reason) if the environmental benefit was there, were there a suitable modern alternative which was demonstrably greener. Anyone seen any studies on this type of comparison?

The tax Dodge bit for PHEV was that company car owners didn’t use the electric bit. The company bought the car view the tax discount, but the driver didn’t ever plug it in. The company pays for the fuel at the pump, the driver pays for the electricity from their home. Yes they could claim it, but I guess most companies aren’t set up for claiming X kilowatts – how do you provide the receipts?

I’ve read a couple of articles recently:
One said estate cars were going to make a comeback. Cannot remember the reasons but it was something about SUV’s becoming too common, plus not being sporty or ultilitarion (and rubbish) and the boot is too small get 10 dogs in.
The second said that petrol estates were the fastest selling cars this year.
The car industry always seems to a few years behind what people actually went so I would expect to electric estates on the horizon.
(Cannot find either article now!)

MG just launched an electric estate, deliveries due to start Oct – Dec 2020

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/new-mg-5-electric-estate-headed-uk-214-mile-range

Mazda are apparently planning to build a new hybrid, the difference being, as several have suggested, it will be driven by electric motors, but will use a small, single-rotor Wankel horizontally mounted purely to generate electricity, so it won’t go through a mechanical drivetrain, and will be relatively unstressed.
Until there are decent quality hydrogen fuel-cells, with as wide a range of filling points as for petrol/diesel, that may be the best option.
What I find a little odd is the criticism of current IC power for environmental reasons, yet the high environmental costs of electric power in cars is barely questioned – there’s the cost of mining the lithium for the batteries, then there’s the cost of mining the neodymium for the rare-earth magnets, there’s a clue in the name, right there…

The environmental cost of these features of EVs is often raised as an issue. I’m not sure it’s fair to say it’s barely questioned. For me though, a key point is that the analyses we do see tend to be disappointinly clouded by heavy vested interests in one direction or the other. I think genuinely objective evaluations of the overall environmental cost of EV vs ICE are still in short supply. It’s not that hard to look at carbon emissions over manufacture, supply and burning of fuel, and even in those the range of outcomes is ridiculous, including fanciful conclusions in both directions. However it is relatively more difficult, and I haven’t seen it done, to incorporate the other impacts of both and weigh the whole lot up on a “which is worse overall?” basis.

Driving a less impactful car will never make someone an environmental saint. To achieve that you need a bicycle…

If you read or watch a lot of the reviews they report SUV or SUV look is the biggest selling model of any type. So manufacturers are going to make what sells.

Leaving the economics out of it, has anyone got numbers for the CO2 cost of building and running a new (electric or otherwise) car Vs an old one?

Although the clickbait headline is misleading (welcome to internetworld) the conclusion is

So are electric vehicles better for the environment?
The evidence says that they are. Locally, there’s little doubt electric cars make our urban areas cleaner and quieter too.

Once on the road, they’re also responsible for much lower emissions than cars powered by fossil fuels.

The challenge now is to further reduce the emissions produced through EV manufacturing and energy production.

As electric cars become more widespread, cleaner energy generation, better recycling schemes and improvements to battery technology are all needed before we feel the full benefit of their green potential.

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/emissions/are-electric-cars-actually-worse-for-the-environment/

Of course, geopolitically it’s far more complex.

Lithium is plentiful and can be extracted from seawater if need be, and the name “rare earth metals” is a bit of a misnomer; they are not rare at all, but they are generally widely dispersed rather than being found in concentrated areas like most materials.

There is a lot of research going on regarding the materials that go into batteries and motors; cobalt is often cited as a metal with a terrible environmental and human record, but many companies are aiming to phase the metal out completely in the near future. Some EVs have already used batteries without cobalt in; early LEAFs were an example IIRC.

A lot of the problems will be reduced as the market expands and matures. As demand goes up it won’t make sense to get cobalt from small companies with dodgy labour practices when you could just go to a multinational that will use mechanisation to remove half a mountain in a fraction of the time. As the technology improves it will be less dependent on more expensive materials and make more use of more common materials that are easier to extract and process.

The breakeven point of EV vs ICE cars depends upon region of manufacture, ethicacy of manufacture and region of use when comparing Co2.

Generally however, it is shown that on an average 15000km annual usage cycle, and EV will hit CO2 breakeven with an ICE car in the first year and then reduce CO2 emissions by around 30t per year thereafter. This is substantially reduced/increased on higher milage or stop/start usage.

When comparing an older car to a newer one, sadly there’s little justification for keeping the older one. A modern car will pay for itself (production and material usage) in reduced CO2 inside of 18-40k kms (car and engine size dependent) and then be a net positive contributor thereafter.

I too have an older car (17y) with a large 3l petrol engine and only do around 3000km per year, so the breakeven point for me would be more like 7-10 years for an EV.