EV are they worth it?

ericmark said:
That's Crow Castle is it? And yes steep if that is it.
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Aye; every hill in the country has a castle atop it. The worst was climbing out of Ambleside in the Lakes. Damn nigh killed myself to get to the pub at the top. How much does such terrain affect the performance of an EV? It'd reduce the effective charge, i'd have thought...
 
Odds said:
Aye; every hill in the country has a castle atop it. The worst was climbing out of Ambleside in the Lakes. Damn nigh killed myself to get to the pub at the top. How much does such terrain affect the performance of an EV? It'd reduce the effective charge, i'd have thought...
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If it's the road I'm thinking of, it goes from Ambleside to the top of the Kirkstone Pass. That road is called "The Struggle" by locals...

...for reasons I'm sure you'll appreciate!

Have you tried the Hard Knott pass yet? That's nasty - 25% in places!
 
Talking of EV charging, the 'village' (suburb) at the bottom of our road has a very small car park which now has about 12 spaces compared to 16 previously because the trendy council (in its wisdom) has installed two EV charging points.
Actually, I have never seen any EV actually using them (and I walk past the area almost every day).
I suppose the fact that there are only a few shops and outlets in the village would not be a great attraction to any EV owner who needs to spend half an hour or more to use the chargers, as they'd find themselves kicking their heels waiting with nothing much else to do!
 
JBR said:
Talking of EV charging, the 'village' (suburb) at the bottom of our road has a very small car park which now has about 12 spaces compared to 16 previously because the trendy council (in its wisdom) has installed two EV charging points.
Actually, I have never seen any EV actually using them (and I walk past the area almost every day).
I suppose the fact that there are only a few shops and outlets in the village would not be a great attraction to any EV owner who needs to spend half an hour or more to use the chargers, as they'd find themselves kicking their heels waiting with nothing much else to do!
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There needs to be some thought put into village public chargers. What you really need is average car park "dwell times". If people spend, on average, 10 minutes there, it's pretty pointless having any chargers unless you're near a major trunk road, in which case, you need bloody powerful ones - say 200kW+. If, on the other hand, the village has some tourist attraction like a castle or stately home, and people spend on average, at least 4 hours there, you can have a larger number of much less powerful ones. Workington has just put a load of powerful chargers, (some 300kW and some 150kW) in a retail park with a supermarket, B&Q, Halfords, B&M, etc on it. Completely pointless! Workington is a dead end, at the Western end of the A66. NOBODY goes to that retail park for tourism! and ALMOST NOBODY goes there because they were passing on a road trip. Locals go there to do their shopping. There hasn't been an EV made yet, with so little range tat it couldn't get to the lcal shops and back! Who the hell is going to pay 80p / kWh to charger their EV while they go shopping? They're going to go home and charge at 7 or 8p per kWh that night! :ROFLMAO:

The other thing small villages do, is put up those stupid 7kW "bring-your-own-cable" chargers. Not only are you not going to get any meaningful level of charge in the time you're there, but you're probably not going to have your cable with you. (And before the law changed, most of these village ones were installed by obscure companies where the only way of paying is by dowwnloading and installing yet another "app" on your phone that's already full of charging apps, and setting up an account. (...which would be a pain -even if there was any mobile reception in that village)!

It is becoming clearer to me, that what we need, are lightning fast chargers at motorway service stations, motorway junctions, and near major trunk road junctions. We need medium powered ones at retail parks and places where people are going to stop for an hour or less, and we need massive numbers of low-powered "destination chargers" where people are going to stop for 6 hours or more. Places like stations or park-and-rides, where you know that most people will be leaving their cars for the day.
 
Avocet said:
There hasn't been an EV made yet, with so little range tat it couldn't get to the lcal shops and back! Who the hell is going to pay 80p / kWh to charger their EV while they go shopping? They're going to go home and charge at 7 or 8p per kWh that night! :ROFLMAO:
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I see your point, but every EV owner does not have a drive where they can use the overnight tariff. I note the latest points have a large box near to them, so maybe they are batteries to allow a fast charge, can't see the point, no shops near, so only people likely to use them are people who live local, side of main road there is a pair of 22 kW points, which when a trip on the train takes 2 hours is fast enough, although it seems some cars can only charge at 7 kW even when it is a three phase charging point.

It does seem odd that people buy an EV with no charging at home, but they do. What seems odd to me is no sign saying 50 p per kWh or 100 p per kWh or 8 p per kWh I would not drive into a filling station with no pump prices displayed.
The price charged per litre must be clearly visible to the user before they begin to dispense fuel from the pump. This can be by a separate indication on the pump, or by the price per litre being displayed during the zeroing process for multi-nozzle pumps.
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so one would assume same rules apply for electric?
 
Avocet said:
If it's the road I'm thinking of, it goes from Ambleside to the top of the Kirkstone Pass. That road is called "The Struggle" by locals...

...for reasons I'm sure you'll appreciate!

Have you tried the Hard Knott pass yet? That's nasty - 25% in places!
Click to expand...

I didn't know it was called that, but it's very apt. First time i tried was on a 12-speed racer, laden with stuffed panniers - yes. I am an idiot. In my defence, i had no idea what lay ahead as i set off. Gave up after the first incline, coughed up a lung then walked the rest of the way, just for the view. I'd like to see the TdF try that bugg'r!
Got me an 18-gear MTN bike and conquered the climb two years later - just. Enjoyed a well earned pint, got the feeling back in my legs, then sailed back into Windemere on the ten mile downhill road. My favourite road in the Lakes. Yes, i've climbed the Hardknott P. I can only assume it's called that after the way it twists your muscles into weird shapes after going up there. One of those roads where you go up a corner then keep climbing while trying to ignore the screams for mercy from your body.
I'm too old for that sh!t now. I used to practice on the Snake Pass, around the moors and into the Peaks. Plenty of testing roads but nothing like the mountains in Wales or Scotland. Happy days. :)
 
Back on track...how about taking one of these to work?


7868.jpg



The Microlino goes on sale in the UK this month, in the face of a trend that is pushing the car industry in the opposite direction. Despite global heating, and the warnings of environmental scientists, the demand for ever larger cars just keeps growing.

The grauniad
 
Odds said:
I didn't know it was called that, but it's very apt. First time i tried was on a 12-speed racer, laden with stuffed panniers - yes. I am an idiot. In my defence, i had no idea what lay ahead as i set off. Gave up after the first incline, coughed up a lung then walked the rest of the way, just for the view. I'd like to see the TdF try that bugg'r!
Got me an 18-gear MTN bike and conquered the climb two years later - just. Enjoyed a well earned pint, got the feeling back in my legs, then sailed back into Windemere on the ten mile downhill road. My favourite road in the Lakes. Yes, i've climbed the Hardknott P. I can only assume it's called that after the way it twists your muscles into weird shapes after going up there. One of those roads where you go up a corner then keep climbing while trying to ignore the screams for mercy from your body.
I'm too old for that sh!t now. I used to practice on the Snake Pass, around the moors and into the Peaks. Plenty of testing roads but nothing like the mountains in Wales or Scotland. Happy days. :)
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Nicely written! And huge respect for having done it! Despite living in the area, I never have... I've conquered the Koppenberg, (which I was quite pleased about), but it was a dry day, and I was on a MTB on commuter tyres, so, maybe not the triumph it could have been (and of course, mercifully short, compared to the Cumbrian climbs). Only other one I've done was Whinlatter, but that was embarrassing, as for about 5 minutes of it, I was neck-and-neck with a middle aged lady. Trouble was, she was walking!

Latterly, I've done it a few times on the e-bike, but that really is cheating!
 
ericmark said:
I see your point, but every EV owner does not have a drive where they can use the overnight tariff. I note the latest points have a large box near to them, so maybe they are batteries to allow a fast charge, can't see the point, no shops near, so only people likely to use them are people who live local, side of main road there is a pair of 22 kW points, which when a trip on the train takes 2 hours is fast enough, although it seems some cars can only charge at 7 kW even when it is a three phase charging point.

It does seem odd that people buy an EV with no charging at home, but they do. What seems odd to me is no sign saying 50 p per kWh or 100 p per kWh or 8 p per kWh I would not drive into a filling station with no pump prices displayed. so one would assume same rules apply for electric?
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Yes, that does seem odd. As you say, the 22kW seem useful for the dwell time. Unless it's on a popular tourist route, no point in having anything faster.

I do accept that people without home charging need somewhere, but it would be ruinously expensive. 80p per kWh, would be like me having a petrol car that did 25 MPG. Perhaps the government, (if it really is serious about encouraging uptake), should set up a discount card for people who can't charge at home, to use certain public chargers? Trouble is, you wouldn't want them tying up fast public chargers all night, just because they could. The problem, is that (like most things with this government), they expect the private sector to provide the service, and the private sector has no interest in special concessions for anyone. Competition is the only thing that will bring them to heel. This is where the real benefit of a Tesla lies. Public fast charging at (I think), about 34p per kWh.

And yes, there are regulations requiring public fast charger installers to display prices, but only on the chargers themselves (and then, only on the display screens, and it's not always obvious how to do that). It would be a bit like having petrol station pumps where some of them had a trigger that you had to pull to dispense the fuel, some where you had to turn a knob, some where it was more like a tap, but on the back of the pump, rather than the nozzle, and so on. Time will, I'm sure, force all the suppliers to converge on the most convenient method. The other thing is that unlike petrol stations, which evolved before the days of GPS, and had to make themselves visible to passing trade, EV charging stations are much lower visual impact because the people who use them, tend to navigate to them electronically (and the app that they use, will tell them the location, price and power anyway, long before they get there).
 
robinbanks said:
People being pillocks is nothing to do with EVs. As is adequately demonstrated here on a daily basis, pillockery will persist regardless the fuel that powers locomotion
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I suspect that whole video is largely BS. The image at 1m 41s, looks like a setup. I'm pretty certain that's an e-bike charger. The cable's nothing like thick enough for 2kW. I'm also not sure about the cover image either. That charging lead doesn't look long enough to reach the house. With a hedge that size behind the wall, the garden isn't going to be tiny. I think the longest Type 2 leads you can buy are 7.5m long. Still, it's probably good enough to fool Nutjob... ;)

Meanwhile, there are some real solutions emerging. More needs to be done, obviously, but it's happening, bit-by-bit:

 
DiyNutJob said:
I don't remember the last time an ICE burnt down legoland.

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You really are a sucker for this ****e, aren't you? I take it you're going to complain about the bit where they said the fire was "quickly extinguished"? I mean... it's got to be lies...right? It'll still be burning now... right? (What with them being impossible to put out, & all that...) ;)
 
It was an electric rail car, battery powered, it did not say it was the battery which caught fire, it simply said there was a short circuit, we don't know if lithium battery, for all we know could be lead acid.

The point about containing the water used to fight electric fires was a good point, if lithium batteries can't go in land fill, then one assumes the water used to fight the fire would be toxic, however I am sure the Liverpool garage fire caused far more pollution, seems main problem was plastic fuel tanks and drains, so the fuel was released when the vehicles caught fire, and it then ran into plastic drains which also melted, we as yet have not had a land EV fire anywhere near as bad as the ICE fire in Liverpool, there have been some claims of ferry fires, but fire at sea is very different to a fire on land.
 
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