To wonder how people can be bothered with electric cars on long distances.

[dixeypeach]

We've had to rent a car for a week, only one they had ready was a fully electric Mercedes, never drove one but we thought they must be alright as loads of people have them. Dear god. Since Tuesday it's had to be charged 4 times and the nearest fast charging one from us is 12 miles away. Full charge gives you 200 miles (219 max miles) which I think is rubbish also if you can't find a fast charging one some take 7 hrs to fully charge 🤦🏻‍♀️ Got caught short yesterday trying to find a charger that wasn't in use or blocked by someone parked in front (not using) the whole thing just gives me bad anxiety😬 at 3:30 today we've got to do a 370 mile round trip to pick our daughter up, we haven't even set off and it feels like a huge effort to find somewhere near her to charge it up to drive home 😳 I mean yeah people have them at home if they own one but surely when doing long journeys you feel the same panic I do!?

Yeah it's shit. I drive an EV with a 170 mile range and I rue the day I bought it. I am only thankful it is on a PCP deal and I can give it back in 12 months time. I hate it with a vengeance.

This has been an interesting read. One of the reasons I have hung onto my car for so long was because I wasn't sure whether to go for a hybrid or an electric car.

It concerns me that the battery can't be changed once it stops holding a charge. Also, how much more fossil fuels are the power stations using to provide electricity to charge cars?

There are a lot of terrace houses with no off road parking in my part of the world, so I can't see that there would be a huge take up of electric car ownership, and I think it will remain the preserve of the more well off households.

The only people I know who own electric/hybrid cars are quite well off and live in detached houses with off road parking.

They are only really good if you live in a city and never travel too far. Otherwise its a faff I agree. Don't think I'll get another.
While it may be good for clean air what about all the energy required to mine the metals needed to make the battery?

@Randommother service station

You aren’t doing it right.

To be fair, mine, which has an 80something kW- battery and that’ll easily do 300 miles on a charge, would cost around £60 to charge from empty on a public fast charger that cost around 75p per kW-h. But I seldom use them, and if I do it’s for a quick 10 minute top-up to give me 50 to 100 miles depending on the fast charger. So the cost seems fair, though I can’t see when I’d ever need to completely charge an empty battery at those rates

Climate change is an ongoing nightmare. Inconvenience yourself for the sake of you and your kids future.
Anti EV car people are tedious dinosaurs.

You do know how most electricity is generated, don't you? Just because you don't see it as you drive, those power stations are pumping pollution into the same climate.

You absolutely should not be doing 260 miles without stopping for 10 minutes.

Having done a trip to Glasgow the other week, 256 miles I got there without a need to charge, however I did stop at 150 miles in to the journey, because that's how you stay a safe and alert driver.

Plenty of people will deliberately time it so that they can share the driving: one drives whilst the other sleeps. I used to have an Audi that nagged me once the engine had been on for 2 hours (annoying flashing that stopped me from being able to see useful info on the screen) and would only reset after the engine had been off for at least 10 minutes; but it had no way of knowing if I'd had a passenger who'd been sleeping for an hour and three quarters, just recently woken up and now fresh and alert to take over for the next two hours whilst I slept.

I can see how EVs can be great if you only ever travel relatively short distances and have a drive and charging point at home, but I think they are a big step backwards when it comes to long trips.

Everybody says that you have to 'change your mindset' but this is really another way of saying 'accept significant restrictions'. It's like saying that, if you can't get out of the house and/or afford to go shopping, then you can probably knock a perfectly adequate nutritional meal together from basics, as long as your cupboards are not completely bare; but would you actually 'change your mindset' and choose this all the time if you did have money and could easily get out regularly to Sainsbury's?

I don't want to be dictated to by my car when I can/must stop for quite a long time. Suppose I'm doing a 250-mile trip in a day (maybe to a destination with overnight charging facilities) and the car's range is 240 miles, it's just a pointless waste of time. It's the modern technological version of 'is the Sabbath made for man or man made for the Sabbath?'.

I also notice that, on the one hand, people are trumpeting (not very impressive) 200/250 or so mile ranges, but on the other hand, they're saying that you shouldn't let it get below 20% before stopping to charge it!

In our average mid-range 12yo diesel car, a full tank will do about 550 miles before we would need to stop for 5 minutes to refill, before we could do another 550 miles. I get the environmental concerns (many of which seem to me to be predicated on 'I can't see the pollution, so it doesn't exist'), but I cannot see why people are so desperate to try to convince me that, at least when it comes to range, moving to an EV would not obviously be a huge backwards, much less efficient step.

The most I’ve ever paid for a full charge on mine (at an expensive service station) was about £30, and my range is over 300 miles.

So, that would be the equivalent of more like £50 if comparing to a diesel car with a decent-sized fuel tank that could do 500 miles.

Granted, you'd probably pay 50-70% more for the diesel than the electricity, but without all of the precise planning, dictated stops and other hassle into the bargain.

I remember when EVs first came out, one of the big selling points was that they would cost you a tiny fraction of the cost of petrol or diesel to do the same range, even though there was a higher one-off upfront cost for the car. That seems to have been nothing more than spin now.

So if you can't change the battery do you have to throw recycle the car away? How can that be in anyway more environmentally friendly than an ICE? They still use energy which still largely comes from fossil fuels.
Lithium-ion requires huge energy and water consumption, so we're just making it another countries issue, but since climate change is global it doesn't seem either environmentally or morally sound ... sort of 'don't shit in your own backyard, shit in someone else's'. Also lithium-ion is horribly polluting once it's at the end of its life as it can't be recycled, so presumably it has to be kept somewhere, where it can't risk leaching into the ground and aquifers...because if that shit gets into the water course the planet would be completely fucked and global warming would pale into insignificance.

I've put off buying an EV for exactly that reason.

When I retire, I'll buy a very small ev as a daily use car, and then hire a petrol car for occasional long journeys.

I used to travel every day for my job and an ev would have been completely impractical for me then.

I think part of the reason it's so inconvenient is to discourage travel all together.

I love ours ! Have just driven our first long distance Scotland to Devon . Zapmap plans it for you . It took a little extra thinking but we soon got used to it. And it cost us less than petrol would have . At home running around it is really good , on an overnight 9p kWh tariff we have saved an absolute fortune compared to petrol, we’re really pleased. Lovely car to drive too.

Which service station? Genuinely asking so I know to avoid it - for it to have really cost you £60 you would have had to go from 0 to 100% charge, and paid around £1 / kWh and I don’t know anywhere that charges that, unless I’ve just been lucky so far!

I usually pay 9p / kWh to charge at home overnight and between 40 - 50p / kWh for a service station supercharger.

you need to plan a bit but it's doable.

though I think that the charging infrastructure needs to improve a lot. especially at hot spots.

we regularly drive with rental cars (don't own a car) to visit family 300m away.
we plan a rest stop halfway through, have s meal.

also did a 2k mile european round trip. that was sometimes interesting with regards to location of the chargers but we never were in danger of running out. one memorable time the nearest charger was at a private air strip. was very cool watching the goings on whilst waiting for charge.

When I retire, I'll buy a very small ev as a daily use car, and then hire a petrol car for occasional long journeys.

Car hire places tend to keep very new/recent stock - apart from the rent-a-wreck-type joints. It won't be very long before none of them will offer ICE cars at all; the only ones still left will be those in private ownership that were bought before the ban came in.

I'm guessing that the hire companies will also favour EVs largely because of the range issue and the co-ordination and time needed to charge them - so their cars will not clock up as many miles as quickly; plus, people might have to hire them for a longer period for whatever tasks they need to do, to take account of all the charging stops.

I think it is a trade off. I used mine mainly for commuting, doing a 70 mile round trip, and then local journeys. I have a charger at home and it saves me a fortune in petrol.

I tend use DH's petrol car if we are going longer distances. However, I would take the trade off of extra hassle on the odd occasion, given the advantages the other 90% of the time.

The idea that EVs are more environmentally friendly is for the birds. It is a useful narrative to try to maintain a viable car industry with ‘green jobs’ while enabling virtue signalling to the middle classes, but a more honest (but less saleable solution to a nation wedded to individual car ownership) would have been long term investment in mass transport infrastructure, town centre planning and car sharing. Go ahead and buy one, but don’t pretend you are helping the planet or your ‘children’s’ future’.

Totally agree. A friend took me somewhere kindly and had to recharge at the venue which was awful.to do. I as a result don't want an electric car

Can you charge it at home overnight with a 3 pin plug?

i’ve not got any range anxiety with my EV but I can imagine it could be disconcerting if you suddenly have one for a week and aren’t used to it. And things are a LOT easier if you can charge at home.

I have an EV and absolutely do not.
we need less cars not switching everyone to EVs.
but they DO make a positive impact to local air quality and poisonous emissions.

This. One thing that no-one ever seems to mention, especially in relation to 15 minute cities, the idea being that most things we need is within a 15 minute walk or cycle away is that secure bike storage is rare.

I live in a village 2 miles outside a town and I'd be very happy to cycle to the town, but there is nowhere safe to leave a bike (chaining it to a lampost or bike hoop doesn't count) so I don't.

@Randommother baldock. Fast charger took an hour but was £60. It was very low, had 5 miles

Sure, but you’ve said yours has an 80kw battery and gives you 300 miles. Op said her range is only 200, so why is it costing £60 and taking an hour to charge on a rapid charger? It doesn’t add up to me - the fast charger at the services mentioned is 74p / kWh, so expensive but she’d need to be pulling 80kw to get that bill, so either the cost is wrong, the range is wrong or she’s got a really duff car!

Or she drives it very uneconomically….or it’s an inefficient car. I can easily get the range down by driving very quickly…and definitely constant accelerating then slowing down (which can be addictive as these things do accelerate quickly!) absolutely destroys the range. Simply sticking to 70 and not 80 makes the difference between a real word 300/320 miles and 260/280 miles. I’m sure I could get it down to 200 miles if I tried ;)

@Randommother it'll be dh driving. The acceleration on the thing is rapid fast it's like your in a rocket. He don't drive it economically that's for sure. And that's definitely how much it cost as I was there.

DH hired one on holiday abroad. Charge should have lasted day for route we took. It was a rural location and imperative we were back on time (cruise!) We both found the journey back stressful and it impacted on enjoyment of day trip. I wouldn’t buy one one.