Electric cars are NOT the future, are they?

[Isometimeswonder]

I am genuinely torn. I need want a new car but really don't want electric.
But so few smaller petrol cars are made now.
I haven't got a place to charge a car at home.
AIBU I should accept electric is the future.
AINBU I should get petrol. (Please recommend a small city car)

I'm really looking forward to cables snaking all over the pavements of the terraced streets where I live. Or dangling from first floor windows across the pavements.

sorry, but it’s bollocks to say most electricity comes from fossil fuels.In 2024 just over half (50.4%) came from renewables, compared to 31.8% from fossil fuels (source Renewables UK)
Fwiw I drive an EV- it’s nice to drive, and cheap to run. I can get enough charge for 200 miles for £3 - not quite sure how far £3 of petrol will take you

@Ayebrow

People have been talking about hydrogen for two decades, and the reason it hasn’t happened is basic physics.

And we first had electrically powered vehicles (such as trams) as far back as Victorian times but they didn't last long due to the same kind of pitfalls we see with EV's today and were eventually replaced by petrol/diesel vehicles. If electrically powered vehicles were so good, why did they virtually disappear for a century??

Hydrogen will likewise evolve over the years as more and more research is done, just like electrically powered vehicles did. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Personally, I do think that EV's will be a temporary stop gap for a few decades until hydrogen power is developed into a realistic option.

I live in the liverpool city region
I've seen them springing up in supermarkets and pubs but am not aware of any roadside chargers.

Where do you live?

We have an electric car & an old diesel it's soo much cheaper to run and maintain. Our EV is just a runabout, gets charged once a week at home. Which is almost free as we have solar panels. So I can't comment on the cost of public charging.
Our battery is guaranteed for 100.000 miles, we had the diesel car for 14 years and that has 76k on the clock. That includes several road trips to Europe. So any sceptics please feel free to do the maths. I'm sure I will get easily 15+ years out of the EV ...

Thought I’d share this picture of an electric car from 1916 which is on display near me. It still runs and gets taken out occasionally. There’s no steering wheel, you change direction by using a lever!

Hydrogen is never going to be a mainstream fuel.

Is that reg
1916 MN

MN for mumsnet 😁

what a find 🙏

I would not buy an electric car until the infrastructure is improved. Dp has an electric van for work (green energy company) we can't have a charger at home which makes it worse but it's a bloody nightmare. Works anywhere up to 2 hours away, with a van full of tools he often has to charge for 2 hours a day, in summer more like 3 becuase of the Aircon. And often chargers are broken, and they're so few and far between if you barely make it to one charger, to find out its broken or the cables been stolen or someone's on it (becuase unlike a petrol pump, they're going to be there for an hour or so) you can't make it to another.

I think maybe batteries will become a public resource and you can just swap the battery at a charging station.

But I don't understand why other fuels aren't being investigated more. Electricity is still hugely produced by fossil fuels so it's not better for the planet.

I think this, in a nutshell!

even if electric cars ARE the future, you don’t have to get one now. Your next car could be electric - whether that is in five, ten or fifteen years !

https://www.dekra-uk.co.uk/en/electric-vehicle-fires-how-often-do-they-really-occur/

Do you know, I never noticed that @StandingSideBySide It is 1916 MN - how funny. They also have a hydrogen powered car but it only has a top speed of 50mph.

As mentioned by many others on this thread, electricity in the UK is pretty much 50% produced from renewable sources these days and that’s increasing all the time.

FGS, buy a low mileage petrol car. It’s easy. Flat 500 pre 2020 twin air, VW Golf or polo. Or VW Up. Or Toyota Argo or Yaris. Renault Clio. There are lots of small nice cars. I just got a merc SLK convertible and it’s inexpensive and lovely. Who cares if it’s a few years old? It’s fantastic. EVs are huge, ugly, impractical, and depreciate like a dropped stone, and you can’t drive anywhere outside the M25 without needing hours on a charger. No thanks.

So 50% fossil fuels then 👍 it's also less efficient as the energy is being transfered and stored over and over so the actual difference in fossil fuel usage per mile will be even closer.

Why did EVs not take off 100 years ago? Maybe it had to do with the infrastructure for electricity distribution being wildly different from what it is now, the discovery of huge reserves of petroleum in the US and Henry Ford dramatically slashing the cost of his Model T, to name but a few reasons?

Now the opposite is happening, with the price of EVs coming down all the time, and the infrastructure growing fast along with the ability to generate electricity from renewable sources.

Renewable energy generation is increasing year on year so it won’t be 50% fossil fuels for long. Love the way you’re so desperate to cling on to your fossil fuel argument that you’re happy with 50% when you were claiming it was mostly fossil fuel before. I mean, you were wrong on that front so maybe you’re wrong on other ones?

https://www.neso.energy/news/britains-energy-explained-2025-review

as for efficiency- what about 1) the expenditure of more fossil fuels in, erm, transporting fossil fuels to petrol stations and 2) the huge amount of energy lost to heat in ICE vehicles? You don’t get that wastage in EVs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency

”Modern gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%,[1] but most road legal cars only achieve about 20% to 40% efficiency.[2][3][4][5] Many engines would be capable of running at higher thermal efficiency but at the cost of higher wear and emissions.[6] In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 60-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft.[7”

Is that any worse than all our streets being choked with cars?

It was tongue in cheek, I guess that passed you by! But either way, there’s no way they come close to the affordability or convenience of a combustion engine. It’s going to be a disaster when they’re all that’s available.

How is it more convienient to have to drive to a petrol station rather than just plugging in overnight?

Obviously, that relies on having a driveway or whatever, but my EV is way more convienient than my petrol car in that regard.

Well, I’m glad it was after all as silly a thing to say as it sounded.

”there's no way they come close to the affordability or convenience of a combustion engine. It's going to be a disaster when they're all that's available.”

You’re right. I keep forgetting that EV charging points can’t magically grow out of the ground the way petrol stations did when ICE cars appeared.

We live in a terrace with no drive in a northern city. There are no lamppost charging points. We share a small petrol car.

We'll have to replace our car soon. I'd like to be environmentally friendly but I can't see how we'd manage with an EV. Maybe they'll add lamppost chargers at some point - however there are more cars than lampposts, and you can't pick and choose where you park, so I think it will be tricky.

And to @glowfrog as point is the same - exactly. It’s fine for people with a drive, but do explain how this is going to work for all the many houses with no off street parking? Or if you’re visiting somewhere and just parking on street with nowhere to charge, so the car can’t recharge while you’re using your time you still have to stop at a station and wait. A friend of mine drove to Cornwall in their new electric car and it took 12 hours because they had to keep stopping to charge the damn thing 😂 me and DP got there in half that time in our Land Rover.

And it’s not just about the stations “popping up”, but the inconvenience of sitting around waiting for the car to charge up.

The actual vehicles are great, but the logistics are cumbersome and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of logical plan to make it work on a large scale across the country. Coupled with the expense and lifecycle of the batteries, and sorry, but they’re just not going to work.

It will be interesting to have the same thread in another 15+ years.

@taxguru

If electrically powered vehicles were so good, why did they virtually disappear for a century??
Hydrogen will likewise evolve over the years as more and more research is done, just like electrically powered vehicles did.

I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to do this, but since you ask, here goes 😀

Electrically powered vehicles were very good when first developed, and indeed challenged the ICE and steam engines for supremacy in personal transportation, but did suffer from some of the same things as modern EVs do for sure (range, charging infrastructure and times yada yada)

Petrol engines weren’t a nailed-on certainty either, at a time when gasoline was only available in small quantities from pharmacies. There were no fuel pumps and certainly none of this nonsense about “I just want to get in my car and drive 500 miles” for ICE back in the day.

In one of histories delightful little ironies, what rescued the ICE engine was the battery powered motor invented to start the things, rather than using a knuckle scraping cranking handle. It didn’t harm that oil gushers had been found a little earlier than that, which birthed the modern oil industry.

So lead-acid batteries, motors and generators/alternators became a critical component of the success of the ICE, with traction batteries used only in milk-floats for one very important reason - they are much quieter than ICEVs.

But electrically powered vehicles didn’t go away. In one transport mode the power and torque curves, together with the relatively light weight, of the electric motor has come to utterly dominate - every single one of 1,000s of high speed railway locomotives is 100% electrical.

Several recent developments have then come together to allow passenger cars to be electrified in their turn: rare-earth permanent magnets, Lithium-ion batteries, high-power electronics and computers, none of which existed in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

So it is disingenuous in the extreme to argue that a modern EVs suffers the same issues as the early ones (even if they have the same headings) so will therefore suffer the same fate.

And now to hydrogen, which you seem to think will take the Model-T role in your story of technological supremacy over modern EVs.

Hydrogen is an element that likes bonding to other elements. So much so that it takes a lot of electrical energy to split it from one of its favourite partners on this Earth - Oxygen. Once split from H2O, it forms a gas that is very difficult to store and handle, and converting it back to water, either in a fuel cell or heat engine, in order to deliver useful energy to provide traction incurs very high losses.

So while it’s theoretically possible to power cars with hydrogen, the process is wildly less efficient than simply storing the original electrical energy in a battery and then delivering it directly to the traction motor of an EV. Your dream that this process can somehow be improved will remain that, a dream - the constraints on the conversion efficiencies of electrical energy -> H2 -> electrical energy -> kinetic energy are not ones of knowledge but of the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

When studies have been done by people like the ZEMO partnership, to establish whether hydrogen will ever make sense in any vehicle, the conclusion is always the same. Far more energy is wasted using H2 as an energy storage medium, in all the conversion losses, so battery electric vehicles win out.

And the final nail in the coffin of the “hydrogen is the future” argument is that created by learning curves. Every doubling of installed capacity reduces cost by a given % each year. Even if hydrogen technology were to benefit from some mystical and unforeseen Eureka moment that overcame the laws of physics, the installed base of EVs and grid scale batteries will have grown to such a scale that usurping them would be practically impossible.

And remember that we are only in the foothills of battery development - that mythical hydrogen tech won’t be competing with Nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry but with some combination of Sodium-ion, Lithium-iron-phosphate and various flavours of solid and semi-solid state batteries.

The future is bright; the future is battery electric.