Is Boris losing the plot ?

[papasmurf]

I just about get 3 miles per kw, it should be around 4.5 according to the manufacturer. They lied 🤥

That they lied does not surprise me at all.

[Nick]

Do you actually get 3 miles per kWh in actual road conditions, Nick?

I just about get 3 miles per kw, it should be around 4.5 according to the manufacturer. They lied 🤥 

[papasmurf]

But smaller cars (again see my argument for a lower speed limit) can be effectively charged from a. 3kw domestic socket.

Not in my garage, they can't. (Which is why it would need dedicated underground wiring and a bigger "trips" box. IF I have to do it will be the most up to date charger, which is far more powerful.

[Barry]

Do you actually get 3 miles per kWh in actual road conditions, Nick? 

[Nick]

But smaller cars (again see my argument for a lower speed limit) can be effectively charged from a. 3kw domestic socket.

If your car has a 20kwh (ish) battery, which wliod be practical for a 60mph top speed, 100mile range car, then it would fully charge overnight from a wall socket. A 30 mile commute could be replenished in 2 hours.

If it was fitted with a suitinle charger (and battery chemistry) it could 20-80% charge from one of Nicks public fast chargers in about 10 minutes and £10 when you are going longer distances.

Granted if you drive a an electric F150 pickup you're going to need more than a 3pin plug. But then if you drive a vehicle like that, money and efficency probably aren't top of your list.

All pie in the sky from someone that doesn't have any real world experience of owning an EV. And it will all slap you in the face with a big dose of reality if and when you own one. How does someone who doesn't have a driveway and parks on the road, or lives on the fifth floor of a block of flats charge their car? What percentage of people living within the M25 have their own driveway? And when everyone of the 39 million cars on British roads are electric, how many wind turbines will we need? Another 10 years we might be somewhere near, ATM it's a complete logistical disaster. 

[BeElBeeBub]

And I have to hold my hand UK and say I'm not immune to this effect.

We were followed by a beautiful DB5 the other day in our unassuming family car, which we regard as a little staid. Curious I looked up the performance specs of the DB5 (wife was driving). Our boring family wagon could fairly easily out accelerate a 1960's super car. It did have the edge on top speed but then again it doesn't have 5 seats and the aerodynamics of a brick.

Yet we regard that as normal, being able to sprint to legal maximum in a hair over 10 seconds and go on towards double that.

[BeElBeeBub]

I'm not saying that we could have a car market, sizes, weights etc that we have now. Cars would have to reverse some of the bloat that has occurred over the last 3 decades (to be fair we've all put on a few pounds over time.

A modern Polo is longer, wider and heavier than a Mk1 Golf. The new golf weighs nearly 50% more than the original, is half a meter longer and 150mm wider. 

Fair enough some of that is from modern crash safety requirements but when the lowest powered golf availinle (1l petrol) punts out as much power as the orginal gti you know something has gone awry. 

[BeElBeeBub]

If you can afford to have a charger installed. (I can't.) It would have be put in my garage, (Due to nothing electrical lasting long where I live due to the salty atmosphere. )  The electricity wired to my garage would have be buried, (local regulations,) a major upgrade would also be needed to allow for the extra connection in the house.

But smaller cars (again see my argument for a lower speed limit) can be effectively charged from a. 3kw domestic socket. 

If your car has a 20kwh (ish) battery, which wliod be practical for a 60mph top speed, 100mile range car, then it would fully charge overnight from a wall socket. A 30 mile commute could be replenished in 2 hours. 

If it was fitted with a suitinle charger (and battery chemistry) it could 20-80% charge from one of Nicks public fast chargers in about 10 minutes and £10 when you are going longer distances.

Granted if you drive a an electric F150 pickup you're going to need more than a 3pin plug. But then if you drive a vehicle like that, money and efficency probably aren't top of your list. 

[papasmurf]

You can get as low as 7.5p a kwh or about 2p a mile at home.

If you can afford to have a charger installed. (I can't.) It would have be put in my garage, (Due to nothing electrical lasting long where I live due to the salty atmosphere. )  The electricity wired to my garage would have be buried, (local regulations,) a major upgrade would also be needed to allow for the extra connection in the house.

[BeElBeeBub]

You're missing the pointers, fast chargers aren't necessarily at service stations, I use charging stations at Banbury where there are 40 charging stations. They cost 75p per kw, nothing to do with expensive service stations.
Go out and buy your self an EV, then you will see just how shot they are.

But the aspiration is for the majority of charging to be done at home not at commercial rates.

You can get as low as 7.5p a kwh or about 2p a mile at home.

Saying charging costs 75p a kwh is like complaining about  your fuel costs when you only visit motorway services. 

My intention is to get an electric vehicle when either one of our current cars dies. That said, my use case isikely to be very different to yours. We rarely do more than 50 miles a day in either car, often less than 30 and the card can be charged at home easily whilst access to fuel stations isn't great nearby (not terrible but all the filling stations are on the far side of town making getting fuel more of a ball ache than it should be).

We'd need one car to have a 200+ range for vising my sister or friends in London and woukd accept some extra cost fast charging on those journeys (the london one probably, my sister has charging facilities). The other can be a small runabout, theoretically a. Max speed of 40 would do as that is the maximum speed on the majority of our routes.

If I was a rep, blasting up and down the mways every day the equation woukd be a bit different.

There are some applications where battery vehicles will always struggle (heavy haulage and long distance trucking come to mind) but for the majority of people in the majority of cases EVs can provide a better overall outcome.

[BeElBeeBub]

EVs will have to get a LOT cheaper for those struggling hard, plus the guarantees on the batteries need to be transferable to new owners of second hand EVs. (The government is well out of touch as per usual.)
To keep old ICE cars/motorcycles on the road for years ahead is going to mean after market spares being available. (In some cases that is not a problem, in others more than 10 years old it is like finding rocking horse poo and Unicorns.)
I have several times in recent years had to make spares or adapt what is available. (My over 40 year old Honda  Motorcycle and sidecar now has a Landrover indicator solenoid in it.  The other BMW 1991 sidecar outfit has a "bespoke" starting system, due to known problems with the system. It has done 108000 miles.) 

New EVs are already getting cheaper. 

In anticipation of the ban, manufacturers have been gearing up for smaller cars. They would love to keep selling the ultra premium £50k SUVs like the model Y, ix5 etc. They make loads of profit on those. The razor thin margins on your ford fiesta (rip) aren't as attractive. 

But if they can sell cheap ice cars in 10 years time they need to (and were) get their arse into gear and start bulking the affordable every day cars. Notably the big releases presently have been at the smaller end, the new small volvo, VAG's ID3/2 class, a slew of Chinese small cars.

Not only woukd this give an option to budget conscious new buyers but woukd then start to trickle onto the used market giving even more budget savy buyers an option. 

That's all up in the air now. 

The tightening of spares is nothing new, my mum was having to go to increasingly desperate measures to keep her beloved 2002 A2 on the road. Before she took it off by crashing it, it had a series of ebay parts, a modified Polo gearbox and clutch, plus a turbo off god knows what. 

(you're not wrong about this government being out of touch. To paraphrase, elect monkeys, get shit thrown at you) 

[papasmurf]

You're missing the pointers, fast chargers aren't necessarily at service stations, I use charging stations at Banbury where there are 40 charging stations. They cost 75p per kw, nothing to do with expensive service stations.
Go out and buy your self an EV, then you will see just how shot they are.

Due to past experience I avoid Banbury. (I can't afford an EV anyway.)

[Nick]

I picked med rate charging as an average because the use case isn't to charge exclusively from mway super fast chargers. Even at a fairly scrappy 3miles per kwh that's 25p a mile

If you do charge exclusively for superchargers it will cost you a fair bit, but then you need to compare like for like and use the petrol diesel costs for motorway services, currently £1.80ish a liter.  For an SUV type vehicle getting 30-35mpg that works out around 25p per mile.

So in the relatively edge case of someone who always charges at the most expensive chargers the fuel costs are about break even vs an ICE equivilent.

There will always be edge cases where ICE beats EV, the rep doing 700 miles a day for example. But then there will always be cases where EVs beat ICE, eg city deliveries. The question is, what is the balance for the majority. The average daily car milage in the UK is less than 60 miles. Easily doable with electric, in fact we have 2 sets of friends who use old Nissan leafs (about 6k to buy) for daily commutes of about 50 to 60 miles round trip very happily. For full disclosure we also have friends who sold their similar leaf because it didn't have enough range, but their lifestyle put more miles on and the 90m range of the. Leaf was borderline. They never ran out but did get anxious they would.

It does bring me back towards my argument elsewhere that the national limit be 50mph. That would allow cars (of all types) to get even more mpg. In the case of electric cars it would then allow them to have smaller batteries for the same range which would make them cheaper to buy and quicker to charge.

Realistically if you could get the charge time down to less than 15minutes per 200 or so miles then it becomes a non issue.

You're missing the pointers, fast chargers aren't necessarily at service stations, I use charging stations at Banbury where there are 40 charging stations. They cost 75p per kw, nothing to do with expensive service stations. 
Go out and buy your self an EV, then you will see just how shot they are. 

[papasmurf]

It would cost just under £2000 to replace our 17 year old Marl 1 Honda Jazz, which is the fault of the NHS. If they were not so good at keeping the cottontop army alive there would be a lot more elderly motors coming onto the market, but they are so they ain't.

Where I live is high car ownership and generally old cars due to the low wages and crap public transport. 

[Borchester]

The increasing price of second hand ICE cars is to do with resistance to buying EVs and the impending ban on the production of diesel and petrol engines. (To replace my current car with a over 10 year old second hand version would cost over £7000.)

It would cost just under £2000 to replace our 17 year old Marl 1 Honda Jazz, which is the fault of the NHS. If they were not so good at keeping the cottontop army alive there would be a lot more elderly motors coming onto the market, but they are so they ain't.