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So glad that governments aren't filled with people that have such a prehistoric perspective
Electric theft by EV owners causing charge points to be switched off.
- Thread starter ericmark
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There is another way of looking at it, though, depending on your pattern of use. For pretty much the whole of my motoring life (about 30 years), I have had to go and get fuel from a filling station. I wouldn't aim to get home on "empty". I'd get fuel when I was out somewhere near a filling station. With an EV, it's very different! Depending on your electricity tariff, it's nearly always a LOT cheaper to charge at home, so you actually end up trying to get home on empty. Shove the lead in and forget about it! When I wake up in the morning, my car will have about 200 miles of "fuel" in it. Every morning, it's the same - I wake up to a car with a couple of hundred miles of fuel in it. (And at my night rate, that's working out at about 5p a mile)
Now, maybe, you do more than 200 miles a day, most days, in which case, an EV probably isn't for you. But for most people, most of the time, it's actually a whole lot easier "fuelling" an EV than it is an ICE vehicle!
This is quite a good site for tracking the country's electricity generation and consumption:
National Grid: Live
Shows the live status of Great Britain’s electric power transmission network
grid.iamkate.com
Right now, you can see that we have lots more generating capacity at night than we can actually use - and, of course, EVs generally charge at night. Storing the stuff has always been the problem. If we could even-out demand, we could do a lot better.
None of that is to say that there definitely WON'T be a problem in the future, but I don't think the problem will come from insufficient overall capacity, rather than from managing the "peaks" in demand.
Indeed. We have a very powerful road haulage lobby in this country - and of course, a vocal (though much-diminished) truck industry that seems to have the government's ear. I live near Workington in Cumbria. An ex-steelmaking town. Railway lines, predominantly! Every day, I would see long artics laden with lengths of rail, heading away from the mill on the A66. The utterly bizarre thing was - the steel mill straddled a bloody railway line! It actually had travelling cranes that could pick up bundles of rail lengths and drop them straight on to railway trucks! HOW, in Heaven's name, did we get to the point where it was thought cheaper and easier to move railway lines (which, as far as I'm aware, have very few uses other than on... er... railways), by ROAD?!
Are you able to back up any of those claims with any kind of credible evidence, or is it just "a load of cobblers, pretty much par for the course on this forum"?
Really? What about the many folk in flats or terraced housing or who have only on-street parking, and hence no EV charging point at home?
No, obviously, at present, no practicable for them. That's a well-known issue. That said, I was in Berlin for a meeting before Christmas, and on many streets, along the kerbside, there were short (maybe 2' high) bollards every few yards, with a socket on them and a cable from there to a parked car. No cables trailing across pavements. It all looked pretty simple, really...
The point is, for everyone who CAN:
(a) afford an EV - (they are expensive), and
(b) charge it at home,
it's really not such a bad deal. The funny thing is, for everyone who does that, there's one less car in the queue at the petrol pumps for the ICE driver, there's lest demand for petrol and diesel, which helps keep prices down for ICE drivers, yet there's this almost visceral hatred of EVs from certain ICE drivers! That's before you get into any environmental arguments. That's just direct advantages for ICE drivers. You'd have thought they'd be pleased!
There is another way of looking at it, though, depending on your pattern of use. For pretty much the whole of my motoring life (about 30 years), I have had to go and get fuel from a filling station. I wouldn't aim to get home on "empty". I'd get fuel when I was out somewhere near a filling station. With an EV, it's very different! Depending on your electricity tariff, it's nearly always a LOT cheaper to charge at home, so you actually end up trying to get home on empty. Shove the lead in and forget about it! When I wake up in the morning, my car will have about 200 miles of "fuel" in it. Every morning, it's the same - I wake up to a car with a couple of hundred miles of fuel in it. (And at my night rate, that's working out at about 5p a mile)
Now, maybe, you do more than 200 miles a day, most days, in which case, an EV probably isn't for you. But for most people, most of the time, it's actually a whole lot easier "fuelling" an EV than it is an ICE vehicle!
Pretty much the same as me. I'll fill back up when I've got about 1/8 to a 1/4 of a tank left, conveniently near my home. For a routine lifestyle the EV method of 'charge and forget' is fantastic, but I'd be worried about when something falls out of the routine and I have to do more miles than planned. For me the range is so short at the moment -- I'd be concerned with the limit of the range.
I do agree it's a lot cheaper to charge the battery of an EV than fill the tank of my car.
However.... my car only cost £800 and like previous cars has done me years of service. I don't know what an equivalent EV costs but I'd imagine it would be far more than I'd like to pay! Can you get an EV with 526 litres of boot space and a range of 800 miles?
I know they are the future, but - for me - they're too expensive and too limiting.
I think everyone worries about the hypothetical long distance "emergency mission". The most likely one for me, will be something going wrong with my elderly parents, 150 miles away. That's well within my 200 mile real range, so happy days, just pop down there. The next thing will be "Ah, but what if you've just come back from a 180 mile trip AND THEN something goes wrong with your parents"? (Well, the honest answer to that, is that I'd grab my wife's car keys and use her car)! But then you get the "What if you've just come back from a 180 mile trip and something goes wrong with your parents and your wife is out"? And in that situation, yes, I'd have to visit a fast charger on the way and yes, it would add about another 20 minutes to a 150 mile trip.
But it's interesting that you have to get down to that sort of level of unlikeliness! Nobody would ever dream of applying that kind of contrived scenario to an ICE situation!
Since I've had the car, the only actual, unforeseen event was when the lad had to go back to university after Christmas, and the trains were on strike, so I had to take him. He's a good 250 miles away in Leicester, so there was no question of getting there on one charge. It meant I had to stop for a short break to charge - which I would have done anyway, on a trip that long. I could have stopped for about 10-15 minutes on a fast charger, but we actually stopped for 45 minutes while we had some lunch, so that reduced the amount of time I had to spend charging on the way back. It really wasn't a big deal.
But as for the other problems, yes, there are electric MPVs that probably have that much boot space. And yes, they are still way too expensive. Part of the reason for that, however, is because everyone is putting off buying an EV because they don't have an 800 mile range, so there are very few second hand ones and they haven't filtered down to the £800 mark, yet. But of course, that's very much a chicken-and-egg situation! The problem is that if we all keep waiting for "the future", there may not actually be one...
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I've never really got on with that argument either. They park their cars somewhere, so to say "it's impossible to put charging infrastructure on that somewhere" is a bit weak.
Heck, there are wires that go from the street, under the pavement, to the house..
..and we then seem to have this mental block that "the wires to charge Mr X's car (which is in the street) must come out of the street, into Mr X's house, through Mr X's meter and back out to where they started in the street" - it's utter nonsense
Dig a hole above where the existing wire is, splice in a charger, give the EV driver an account so they can charge on any similar charger and the fee goes on their electricity bill. It's simple and the technology exists. Problem is it requires the cooperation of the DNO, who probably need a legislative punch on the nose before they would get it going
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I've a Tesla. 300 odd mile range.
Chargers at work.
Charger at home.
Electricity cost is 1/3 compared to diesel, per mile.
Don't need to travel for work, predictable mileage (maybe 30miles a day)
Absolute win.
Also the acceleration of an EV is awesome.
Still have a petrol and diesel cars.
EV is nicest.
Each to their own
Chargers at work.
Charger at home.
Electricity cost is 1/3 compared to diesel, per mile.
Don't need to travel for work, predictable mileage (maybe 30miles a day)
Absolute win.
Also the acceleration of an EV is awesome.
Still have a petrol and diesel cars.
EV is nicest.
Each to their own
I don't have a Tesla, but many of the same things are true. However, it is a bit like driving a dishwasher. Don't get me wrong, it's fast. Bloody fast off the line, in fact, but "uninvolving" to drive. I still have my old Alfa, which is "keeper", but the way I see it, if I can do most of the miles in the EV, I won't feel so bad when I "treat" myself in the Alfa now and again.
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How does one drive a dishwasher?
It does pretty much everything by itself - you just programme it and sit there! (OK, I exaggerate to make a point. I do still have to steer it, but compared to a 1980s ICE with manual transmission, it doesn't take much driving at all)!
Well said. The sooner our inept politicians begin to realise that, the better.