AIBU to not want an electric car?

[Elevenfourteen]

I know IABU for asking such a dull question, but my Dh wants to buy an electric car and I’m not convinced.
I guess they’re better for the environment so that’s one thing. But are we set up for them properly yet? Do all garages have charging points? Do you have to hang around the garage for ages while they charge? I just can’t imagine how they can be a practical option.
Driving to work and back and charging at night is fine, but what about going on holiday?

Do any of you have electric cars and can you reassure me?

@Silverclocks

You won't get the range out of a second hand EV either. The battery life declines with age. Just like your mobile phone battery doesn't last along once its a few years old. And the batteries are difficult and expensive to recycle if you're thinking of replacing it.

The range is also less in cold weather - cars are sold on the maximum range, for a new battery in optimum conditions (the same way that manufacturers publish petrol consumption rates you won't get IRL)

That's out of date info.

we bought a second hand EV 3 years ago. It's now 5 years old and the range is about 95% of what it was when it was brand new. I worried about exactly this when we got ours. The truth is that EV batteries for cars manufactured in the last 5 years or so will last a long time and by the time they do need replacing, if they do likely 10 years from now, replacement will be far more economical than it is now.

It is true however about range being 15-20% lower in cold weather. The same is true in very hot weather if the air con is on. Shoulder seasons are most efficient.

As well as the obvious lack of petrol/diesel costs the other big cost saver is the fact that there are far less moving parts in an EV, so far less things to go wrong, hence servicing costs over the lifetime of the car, are much lower.

[quote Lunar27]@Aeroflopper.

Just to add, zapmap is a real-time app. Therefore, if you tap on any one of those location markers it'll tell you everything about the charger i.e. who runs it, the cost, capacity, whether it's in use by someone and also if it's working or not.

Quite simply, if there are two people in the car, it's easily possible to navigate to one of the numerous chargers.

That couple were doing a 260 mile round trip in a car that has a 250 mile range. If they left the house fully charged then they'd only need to stop once for 20 minutes. It's one of the most ludicrous and unbelievable stories I've read to date. And I've read many [/quote]
Agreed 😁 total joke.

I love this bit

“ When they finally got to a working fast charger at a motorway services – via two more that were not operating – they were met with eight shiny Tesla chargers but discovered they were out of bounds because they are only available to the brand’s owners.”

All I thought was perhaps this couple might have wanted to do a bit of research on how EV ownership actually works in practice then before you pay £90000 for a Taycan.

@SwanBuster.

You would've thought so wouldn't you . It's not every day you part with £90k (minimum) on a bit of new tech and completely fail to work out how to use it.

It's a real shame that non EV users read this and just take it in but that's bad journalism too. Still, while articles like this exist and people blindly believe it, it keeps EV costs lower for those who are able to do their own research and work it all out. It's hardly rocket science but certainly beats a great many!

Is London the only city that has the ULEZ? Where I live, if your car isn’t electric or doesn’t meet the low emissions requirements, you are charged £12.50 per day as soon as you move anywhere in it. Surely this will be rolled out to all cities and towns soon enough to encourage people to switch?

@sulalu

Is London the only city that has the ULEZ? Where I live, if your car isn’t electric or doesn’t meet the low emissions requirements, you are charged £12.50 per day as soon as you move anywhere in it. Surely this will be rolled out to all cities and towns soon enough to encourage people to switch?

www.gov.uk/guidance/driving-in-a-clean-air-zone

Several have them.

Greater Manchester's is on the back burner because St Andy of Burnham, being a naked populist, promised residents they'd be exempt for private cars so everything was loaded on to goods vehicles. Once everyone woke up to 'Andy's Van Tax' - and the little weasel woke up to the fact that small business owners happen to be voters too - they did a deal with the government to kick it into the long grass. The official reason is that there aren't enough compliant vehicles available, the real one is that St Andy realised it was voter-repellant.

I’m fascinated by how many people cite charging on long journeys as their major hesitation about EVs.

I don’t mean people who do those long journeys regularly. I mean friends in London who 90% of the time use their cars to nip around town, who say that they can’t get an EV because they do a long trip up North once or twice a year.

Having to stop once or maybe twice more on a rare long journey hardly seems like a dealbreaker to me when there are so many other great advantages to having an EV. I don’t think they will suit everyone but there definitely seems to be a knee jerk ‘that won’t work for me’ reaction that a lot of people have and they simply don’t want to hear otherwise.

@Otherpeoplesteens “green” hydrogen generation ie putting renewable electricity through an electrolyser is inefficient and the technology is extremely expensive and not available at scale.

On a side note, I work with lots of sensible scientists who do think EVs are the answer.

@BigHeartyTruffle But that's the case with any new technology. It's not available at scale because there's little demand, and it's expensive and inefficient because it's not at scale. The ability to do it is there. Keep an eye on Woven City in Japan - as ever, the Japanese are waaay ahead of us.

There was a time in living memory when making an international phone call meant booking it in advance at the Post Office, attending at your slot time where the staff would connect you, and it would cost a week's take home pay. We now have international video calls available to almost everyone in the west at no marginal cost from a handheld device while out and about. There was also a time in my life (I'm 46) when wind and solar power was barely viable on a commercial scale, and it was the most expensive way of generating electricity. When it works, it's now the cheapest.

Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements on the planet, and fuel cell technology recycles it in its entirety. Its time will come. Every product has a long run average cost curve which eventually heads downwards.

@FirewomanSam I travel around the country for both work and my hobby. These have finite start times when i need to be somewhere by, being too early is pointless as you can't start early and being late is, well, late. The long journeys are the ones where the stops make the difference because they lengthen an already long journey, or you have to factor in such a percentage of just in case time that would allow for you to wait for a car to do a charge ahead of you, then you charge yours you would end up twiddling your thumbs at the other end if you were able to drive without the holdup, which is time i would rather be at home with family and not spent sat in a car park somewhere on the side of the M6.

To the PP who said about people not wanting to waste time/the time it takes to charge... why is it selfish to want to be efficient with time? I sure as hell wouldn't expect my boss to just merrily accept me using 40 minutes of the working day to charge the car so why should my family, rest and social time be the thing that has to give? Why does that not have a value?

@lampygirl I pretty clearly said in my post that I was talking about people who make long journeys very infrequently. Obviously that doesn’t apply to you. My point was that for me as an EV driver, the benefits vastly outweigh the inconvenience of having to stop for an extra 20 minutes on a rare long journey. That won’t be the case for everyone and that’s cool, we don’t have to all be the same.

@FirewomanSam I think it's reasonable that the long journeys even for people doing it occasionally are not something they want to make even longer. It's also somewhere where people won't necessarily know all the best local places to charge the car. Coming from Manchester to holiday in Brighton you won't know what charging is like when you get there, if you can do it where you'd need to park up anyway or if you have to charge elsewhere on the way in and re-park. It's extending the unexciting bit of the trip, and plonks you somewhere often pretty dull, dirty or expensive, or massively diverted from the route.

@lampygirl Those are totally valid concerns of course but I find it interesting that I only really hear them raised as hypothetical problems by non-EV drivers and never really hear them as real complaints on any of the EV forums or groups. I guess that may be because those who would be most bothered by such issues probably wouldn’t select an EV in the first place!

I’m in a couple of Facebook groups for EV drivers and people treat it like a bit of an adventure, planning where to charge (using apps like ZapMap as mentioned a few times on this thread). People swap tips about where the best charging stations are in a particular area. There are certain service stations on major routes which are known to be really good for having plentiful EV chargers which can always be relied on. There are also particular providers that are known to be more reliable than others (lots of people seem to look for InstaVolt chargers for example since they seem to be to be the most reliable around).

But there’s no doubt that it’s a bit of a novelty for many at the moment and it will be interesting to see how it scales up as more and more people get EVs.

They might be better for the environment but nobody thinks about the poor kids who have to mine cobalt and usually end up dying from it.

YANBU.

@lampygirl Just to add, in your example I expect most EV drivers would have chosen a hotel in Brighton with EV charging available, or looked at ZapMap ahead of time to make sure there was a charger near their guesthouse or whatever. They wouldn’t need to go ‘massively diverted from the route’ because they’d have planned a journey that took them to a convenient stop along the way, within range, with a selection of chargers that had recently been reported as being working and reliable. It’s honestly not as much of a headache as people seem to think it is, it just becomes part of your journey planning and can even be quite fun. I can see how it’s not something everyone could be bothered with though!

@FirewomanSam

I’m fascinated by how many people cite charging on long journeys as their major hesitation about EVs.

I don’t mean people who do those long journeys regularly. I mean friends in London who 90% of the time use their cars to nip around town, who say that they can’t get an EV because they do a long trip up North once or twice a year.

Having to stop once or maybe twice more on a rare long journey hardly seems like a dealbreaker to me when there are so many other great advantages to having an EV. I don’t think they will suit everyone but there definitely seems to be a knee jerk ‘that won’t work for me’ reaction that a lot of people have and they simply don’t want to hear otherwise.

Agree 100%. We do long journeys 2/3 times a year. All 100% totally doable with a bit of planning, namely looking at zap map app figuring out best places to charge. Yes marginally more faffy (for now) than in an ICE car where you can pretty much keep going until you're empty. But overall the advantages(especially cost and convenience of just charging at home most of the time) vastly outweigh the negatives.

I have an electric Audi and am loving it. It’s new and exciting, saving me a lot of money and good for the environment.

(If you’re interested, I just plugged Manchester to Brighton into ZapMap for a car with a 120 mile range on a full charge - which is at the lower end of what’s available - and it has me charging once at an InstaVolt in Solihull and once at a Gridserve in Beaconsfield. Neither of them taking me on any kind of diversion from the route I would have gone anyway. A car with a bigger range could probably do it with just one charge en-route. Not a huge drama at all.)

YANBU.
I don't want one either, for the reasons you state but also because of the way I've heard that the cobalt for the batteries is sourced. Child labour is used apparently and the conditions they work in are reported to be appalling! The reason I suspect we don't hear about it much because it would put too many people off. Furthermore, the cobalt mining allegedly causes more pollution than us driving our petrol cars, but again, we don't hear much about that either. I had to do a fair bit of digging to find this out and I'd advise anyone to look into this before they decide to buy one.

@2Gen

YANBU. I don't want one either, for the reasons you state but also because of the way I've heard that the cobalt for the batteries is sourced. Child labour is used apparently and the conditions they work in are reported to be appalling! The reason I suspect we don't hear about it much because it would put too many people off. Furthermore, the cobalt mining allegedly causes more pollution than us driving our petrol cars, but again, we don't hear much about that either. I had to do a fair bit of digging to find this out and I'd advise anyone to look into this before they decide to buy one.

What are the sources for this please? I’d be interested to read them. Thank you.

The cobalt question is interesting, and complex.

Yes, the majority of the cobalt used for EV batteries is mined in DRC. And there are definitely human rights and child labour abuses going on there.

Being aware that an EV could well contain a big chunk of cobalt that was scraped out of the ground by an eight-year-old on a chain gang is definitely something anyone who owns, or is considering, an EV should bear in mind.

But of course like everything else, it isn't that simple.

There's cobalt in anything with a lithium-ion battery. The laptop or phone you typed that response on will have an amount of cobalt in it. So no one gets away without blood on their hands for that one. (At least, no one who owns a smartphone, computer, tablet or gaming console.)

Also, technological developments are apace which will first reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the need for cobalt in EV batteries.

So yes, it's a consideration I think. But it's also something that (hopefully) should be addressed within the next few years.

@2Gen I’m also interested in reading more about this. Could you share the results of your digging please?

It's not hard to find -

[[https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/11/industry-giants-fail-to-tackle-child-labour-allegations-in-cobalt-battery-supply-chains/#:~:text=Amnesty%20International's%20previous%20research%20exposed,to%20cleaning%20up%20their%20batteries.][

@2Gen sorry, to be clear, I know about the cobalt mining in the DRC and the pressure on manufacturers to ensure their supply chains are clear. I hadn’t heard about cobalt mining causing more pollution than petrol cars though and am interested in reading more on that.

@daimbarsatemydogsbone cross posted, it’s the pollution point that I was interested in hearing more about since 2Gen said they had to do a lot of digging to find out about that.

@BalladOfBarryAndFreda @FirewomanSam This Graun article from November has some stuff on it.

Here's a Forbes piece on the same subject albeit from 2020 and another from Nature.

As I mentioned in my post, the whole situation is actually pretty complicated and more nuanced than 'cobalt bad' although there are undeniable abuses within the supply chain, especially regarding mining in DRC, that shouldn't go unacknowledged.