To think a 100 mile range is not a lot?

[jennymanara]

Where I live we are being encouraged to buy electric cars through billboard adverts. These say things like electric cars can travel 100 miles before needing to be charged and that the average charging time is half an hour.

That sounds fine if all you want is a run around for a city or town to go to the supermarket and work, but pretty impractical for a lot if people. Especially given how few charging places there are. It would in reality mean that I could never drive more than 100 miles before going nack home to charge up the car.

There will have to be more charging points available in the next few years. Ranges will also get longer as thechnology develops.
If you want to travel further you would just have to plan your journey around the stops ( I would imagine you’d have to book ahead your charging slot).

It really depends on your lifestyle. I know a couple who have a small 4x4 type car (hybrid) that they use for going to the mountains, skiing, longer journeys across the country. They also have a smaller electric for popping out and about in the city, and for smaller journeys. Lots of people don't ever do the longer trips, or prefer to do these kinds of trips on trains, so I can totally see why it would suit some people.

Charging points will become more common. I’ve had one installed at our holiday let already although I’m not sure it has ever been used!

100 miles is not really enough for me either. Plan your journey with care but you can still be derailed. They are fond of sudden road closures and long diversions which can easily add 10 miles or more to a journey around here. Annoying with a conventional car but could be a real problem for a car with such a restricted range

What is the point of having a car if you have to plan stops and book charging points? You may as well take the expensive train. The point of cars is to give you much more flexibility and freedom.

It’s hopeless for most people, my round trip on my commute is just over 60 miles meaning I’d have to charge everyday. Not sure how using electricity made from burning fossil fuels daily is better for the environment. We regularly do long distances to go to football/see DHs family.

Ranges are getting much better, my husbands Fully electric car gets about 320-330 miles which is the same as my petrol Corsa (and for cost comparison costs about £14 to fill from empty, compared to my corsa’s £55ish for the full 45 litre tank).
I think the new e-corsa promises around 220, and the electric Jaguar and Audi say they go around 280.

Cars with smaller ranges like that realistically would be used for running around town etc.

Cars like Tesla’s have a much better range (300+miles) and to be honest a 30minute break every few hours is necessary anyway.
Over the coming years car manufacturers need to find a way to make higher range cars more affordable so that more people can switch to them.

Realistically (a good many years into the future) petrol forecourts will do away with the pumps and install chargers as electric cars become more prominent.
It will take time though and in the interim there probably will be a shortage of chargers making it difficult for people who drive a lot, even assuming the cars themselves become more affordable.

It will work if people change their mindset about how and why they travel.

No it's not and it's the main reason we didn't buy an electric last time. DH commutes to work around 50 miles each way. There are charging points at work but the lack of range doesn't leave much "wriggle room" if he gets caught in traffic or has to go somewhere else rather than coming straight home.

We also regularly travel 250 miles to relatives. I don't want to have to break that journey at least twice to recharge. Then drive around looking for somewhere to charge the car up before driving home, stopping again multiple times on the way.

Yanbu. 100 is not far enough and after several years of use, the battery would give you even fewer miles for each full charge. We already have power cuts when there are surges, the grid wouldn't be able to cope with 100 million vehicles drawing power from it. Not to mention the UK's electricity is only actually 50% renewable currently.

It would make more sense if the service stations had a battery bank where you could just pull out your empty one from the car and swap it for a fully charged and you would be able to drive away in minutes like we can now. It would mean the manufacturers would have to have standardisation but they would also be able to maintain the batteries and recondition them when they reached their end of life. But no, we have a potentially brilliant product with no infrastructure to support it.

I am basing the 100 mile range on what the adverts where I live are saying.
And surely no one has a 30 minute break every 2 hours of driving? It would take an incredibly long time to get anywhere. If we are driving a long distance we share the driving for a break, not park up regularly.

We've just ordered a plug in hybrid as our next car - day to day the electric range will be more than ample for us, and we still have a petrol engine for the occasional long trips.
We don't do long trips often enough to justify the cost of a fully electric car with a large range so this was a good compromise for us

And 100 miles on a motorway could easily mean you have to charge for half an hour after 1 and a half hours of driving. That is ridiculous.
I get that a small electric car as a run around a City will work, but really I would question if that was what you were using it for, whether you really need a car at all.

As an example, using my husbands car, we drove from south west England to Edinburgh (via Lake District for an overnight stay - which we didn’t charge at) and stopped 2 - 3 times each way, which we would have done anyway for lunch/toilet etc. In a petrol/diesel car we could have swapped, but my husband has cars that I don’t like driving due to the size so wouldn’t have anyway.

100 miles would probably be enough for my needs, I need a car because my husband works away frequently and the bus service is terrible and it’s £25 taxi to the nearest train station, and sadly our town doesn’t have many shops etc that are suitable for me other than supermarket.
So I can see it working for some people, but I agree 100 mile ranges wouldn’t work for everybody, and thankfully tech is getting better :)

So you stopped for 1 to 1.5 hours charging time on a journey from Edinburgh to Lake District which would normally take 3 hours driving?
Absolutely fine if that is what you would want to do. That would not suit me.
We stop for toilet stops, but they don't take half an hour.

I suppose I just wish they had not bothered spending money on promoting electric cars when the tech is still so poor. Or spend the money on electric charging points rather than adverts. Just seems very ill thought out and a waste of money.

No we stopped 2-3 times in total from south west England to Edinburgh. We stopped overnight at Lake District by choice but didn’t charge there (we had stopped I think twice on route to Lake District (once for lunch for 30 mins or so and once for toilet and coffee not for 30 mins). Only once from Lake District to Edinburgh and that was for lunch.

It may make sense at this point for some couples to have one electric 'shopping trolley' and one conventional or hybrid car.

The one place I've seen an abundance of charging points relative to the population, and where distances may typically be within range, was on holiday in the Western Isles earlier this year.

@bouncytiger fair enough. I wouldn't stop for half an hour in a journey that should take a maximum of 3 hours, often less. We would have breakfast wherever we were staying in Edinburgh, then lunch on the Lake District once we got there.

At weekend we drove 82 miles to visit a relative then 83 miles back. No stop necessary. No charging point when we got there. Where we were visiting was a city so there would have been a charging point somewhere, but we would have had to park up somewhere, plug in to charge, then travel by taxi/bus to our destination. Relative lives in a flat so we can't charge from there.

Those kind of journeys are pretty routine for us. We only have one car, can't afford two cars, and public transport costs more than having a car for the type of journeys we do.

The ranges are much further on the newer models. If it's not for you op it's not for you, it's about saving the planet not convenience.

I know it is about saving the planet. But maybe it would be better improving public transport and encouraging people to ditch their cars then?

I mean the 160 mile round trip we did at the weekend could easily have been done by train, it would not have taken much longer and been more pleasant. But the cost was extortionate. We simply could not afford it.

Apart from the range issue my problem with electric cars is:
They're still very expensive.
Batteries deteriorate with age so 300 mile range may be 200 in a few years.
Replacing the batteries is expensive.
Environmentally batteries are nasty to dispose of.
Battery technology is advancing - no guarantee that the batteries we use now are future proof.

I have to change my car in the Spring and was looking at the electric Golf yesterday. It bills as having a range of 186 miles but the motoring reviews don't believe it. It's also horribly under powered.

As I need a car bigger than an i3 and can't afford a Tesla I think I'm going to get a hybrid instead.