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)

50% of energy from renewables doesn’t equal the other remaining 50% from fossil fuels.
theres this thing called nuclear power

We’ve just came on holiday and had a 2 hour wait as an electric car went on fire. No one hurt but road closed for 2 hours. It’s burnt out but fortunately no injuries.

@Sunsetseascape not sure you’re interested in a reply given you are clearly very fixed in your mindset but here goes anyway:

“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?”

We don’t have off street parking. What we do have is plenty of lamppost chargers around, where we plug in for an overnight charge that easily covers us for 3 weeks of local driving, or for quite a long way on longer journeys.

On these longer journeys, we also have apps that help us plan when and where to stop. Usually coincides with the need to stop for a break and some food anyway. We plug the car in and we leave it to charge while we eat etc. The Tesla superchargers are so fast that sometimes we barely have time to go to the toilet and pick up a coffee before we have to unplug the car as it’s ready to go.

“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.”

See above. For sure, there are still plenty of places with little infrastructure to support EVs. But that can change in the same way that petrol stations appeared where they were needed.

“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”

We’ve driven from London to Scotland and back down again via North Wales and it genuinely didn’t cost us anymore time than it would have with an ICE car. Some EVs obviously have a more limited range than others but that’s a model-issue rather than a fundamental problem of EVs (unlike the energy waste of ICEs as per my previous post). I’d be interested in the road they took as well. Plenty of very fast chargers on the motorways we’ve used.

“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.”

I’d suggest you spend some time reading through the thread. EV batteries have now such a lifespan that they will last longer than the car and for hundreds of thousands of miles. And they are getting better all the time.

Just like ICE cars and the infrastructure to support them grew progressively, so it is for EVs. It’s bizarre to me that you seem to think that EVs are entirely fixed and will never get better and nor will the infrastructure to support them. As if it was impossible to put in more charging points. No one is talking about an overnight shift!

Lastly… obviously a personal preference (shared by all the people I know who’ve driven EVs, mind) but EVs are so much nicer and better to drive than ICE cars. For that reason alone, they are the future.

This thread just goes round in circles.
The attempted reasons re lithium and replacement batteries are debunked repeatedly
people say they can’t do it without a driveway or range issues
others point out the level of investment in both which will massively change these issues

rinse and repeat. It’s almost as though people don’t look into things

Hopefully, privately owned cars aren't the future. It is taking a long time to try and advance the agenda on this though.

@DisappearingGirl

however there are more cars than lampposts

True, but an EV doesn’t necessarily have to be charged every night. Ours does well over 125 miles on the 35 kWh it picks up in the 7 hours of off-peak electricity, and that covers 20-30 odd short trips or 2-4 weeks of our usage if we don’t do a long road trip.

We may be on the lighter end of the scale, but the average journey length in the UK is 8 miles and 28% of daily drivers do less than 10 miles with 69% doing less than 21 miles, so those 125 miles covers many days of most people’s car use.

Which means that one lamppost charger can service the needs of many EVs. In London, many lamppost chargers are ICEd at any given time, and yet we have had zero difficulty finding one when we need to. I am assuming that as more people drive an EV locally, they will avoid blocking a lamppost charger out of courtesy, but we will see.

Even if lamppost chargers weren’t a thing, we also have some dedicated chargers/parking spaces that are a bit more expensive, and again we have never had an issue using one at times when the dedicated parking has been useful.

And if we ever get to a point where we fail to get a local charge for several days, and the battery somehow dropped to 20% or less, I would drive it to one of the Sainsbury’s that have banks of rapid charging and plug in there while I shopped.

I totally understand that in some parts of the country none of those things are possible yet, but they weren’t a thing in London either, and now they are. So by all means replace an ageing petrol car with another one, or a hybrid or whatever, but please give a modern EV a serious test drive before you make a decision. When I first took one for a 10 mile drive it was a revelation. And everyone I know who has tried one has ended up loving it.

We are lucky with the charging facilities in London for sure, but I would accept a whole lot more hassle (and even cost) for the benefits that an EV provides. I’ve had to drive someone else’s (very good) diesel automatic in the last two days, and it’s been like driving a museum piece. All engine stopping and starting, and creeping forward unless my foot is on the brake with all the noise and laggy responses yada yada.

And that’s to say nothing about the toxic shite the thing puffs out the back. I’m never going back.

@Scotiasdarling

When I fill the Volvo with diesel the range is around 680 miles. I don't want and don't have time to be stopping every couple of hundred miles.

Neutral lurkers may note that you are essentially saying you want to drive for long periods at high speeds without much or, or indeed any breaks.

The law states that an HGV driver must take 45 minutes break every 4.5 hours and drive for no longer than 9 hours total (10 hours by exception). A modern EV in the same class as your XC90 can easily pick up enough range in a 45 minute break to cover the next 4.5 hours of driving if it started the journey with around 90%.

So your suggestion that an EV could never meet your desire to drive in those conditions is manifestly untrue.

Granted, there are some conditions that would need meeting. You would need to be able to charge before you left, and guarantee being able to charge at the destination for the return trip. And of course your break/s would need to be timed to be at a location where rapid charging is available.

But given that the charging network is getting better all the time, and EV ranges are climbing all the time, your assertion that EVs will NEVER work for some people actually boils down to this: it’s not that you cannot change to an EV in current circumstances; it is that you don’t want to.

And in answer to your other question, I easily drove 500 miles twice in the space of 4 days, stopping to charge our long range 82kWh Polestar 2 only during breaks, which I took at normal intervals for normal periods, since I’m not superhuman like you. So whilst I don’t need to do that every week, I certainly could if needs be - I used to drive around 50,000 miles a year for work.

Pro-rata, that makes 55,000 miles per 220 days working year. Satisfied?

Thank you to most of you for the well-reasoned debates!
I have decided that I will go with a self-charging hybrid. And review in a few years.
I may now start a thread on why cars are soooo much bigger now!
Nah, it's bed time

@Ayebrow there is really no need to be rude. I certainly do not see myself as superhuman, I have no idea why you are accusing me of that. And your final "satisfied" remark, what on earth can you possibly mean by that other than to be offensive?

It's really of no interest to me how often you stop when driving. Perhaps you should consider just making your own choices and not trying to control other people 's.

@sleepwouldbenice
It’s almost as though people don’t look into things

It’s actually almost as if at least some of the posters are either paid shills for the fossil fuel industry, or have simply soaked up and are repeating the lies told by said shills in other sources.

There was a point a few years ago when the fossil fuel industry woke up to the fact that EVs were not the joke that Clarkson had infamously made them out to be when Top Gear lied that a Tesla Roadster had run out of charge during their testing of it.

And a wall of misinformation (and some outright lies) began to appear in the media: EVs are heavy; they catch fire; they use metals that children mine; they create more CO2 than ICE cars etc. etc.

To those can be added: they make people sick; they don’t have enough range and the latest one: they depreciate.

Rowan Atkinson caused a huge impact with an opinion piece in the Guardian that was based on a report from Volvo that was already totally debunked, and Aston Martin got into trouble feeding nonsense to various journalists in sympathetic papers.

Clearly, not everyone on MN is a paid shill. My sister repeated some of their garbage though. Specifically the “EVs are heavy though, aren’t we going to have to rebuild all the bridges and car parks?”

I was a bit shocked tbh. I simply said, “but no-one ever mentioned vehicle weights as Range Rovers etc. got ever heavier. And almost all EVs are lighter than the heaviest diesel SUVs.”

Her husband was one of the “I just want to get in my car and drive 500 miles” people you still meet (there’s at least one right here). To him I said, “but surely you take at least one break in that 500 miles,” and explained how fast we had seen an EV charge - too fast to even finish a meal, so it’s wee and a walk territory.

Roll the clock three months after those conversations and they’re the happy owners of a secondhand VW ID.3, with a home charger that means they can drive it for pennies, the lucky bastards people.

Granted, they have had the odd scrape with it, where they’ve been too optimistic about its real-world range, particularly in winter, but they understand there are plenty of EVs out there which would cope better, and they’re not getting rid of it - more likely they’ll upgrade to a better EV.

So fossil fuel misinformation is horribly sticky (some very clever and well resourced people have worked to ensure it is), but it can be overcome when people understand that some of the “common sense” they’ve heard is actually just propaganda.

I’m sorry, maybe I should have said, “I don’t have a superhuman bladder/ constitution/ sleep avoidance mechanism” which is what you seem to claim to have by arguing that you “don’t want to stop every 200 miles” and suggest that you can drive the vast majority of your vast diesel range without a serious break.

I’m not being rude by pointing out that the seeming constraint on your driving desire is actually non-existent if you stick to the legal limits imposed on HGV drivers (and legal speed limits).

You may not be interested in how many times sensible people stop for a break, but your insurance company may take an interest in how little rest you seem to take should you have a lethal accident and kill people. If it comes to a £multi-million claim you might find they have a way to get hold of average speed camera data and other evidence that your driving habits risk lives.

I’m not being rude by pointing out that the logic of your statements proves, as I believe @glowfrog has pointed out, that you are attempting to argue there is a rational case behind your belief that an EV cannot work for you, when in reality it boils down to your personal choice.

I wasn’t being rude by saying, “satisfied?” when I worked out the pro rata annual mileage of the kind of trips an EV can easily do, with very little effort, in direct response to your question about it.

And I’m not in any way trying to control your choice. At all. I have zero idea where you get that idea and challenge you to prove how exactly I am supposed to be controlling “your choice” I am merely pointing out the weak points in your statements.

But I am very happy that you have finally admitted in your “why are you being rude to me” whinge that is exactly what you are doing - making a choice.

All the pseudo rationality in your goalpost shifting replies to @glowfrog is just a smokescreen for the fact that you bloody well like driving a big diesel vehicle that you are perfectly aware produces 24,000 miles a year worth of pollution, and you really don’t care. You will spend hours on MN trying to justify your choice in all kinds of ways, but it’s still a choice, and you’re very welcome to it - no one can stop you. Honestly.

On that note, I shall leave you to continue pumping out pollution by personal choice. I have a long drive in the morning and I need to sleep. Goodnight.

So now my driving habits "risk lives" according to P.C @Ayebrow . You do do not know me or how far or how fast I drive on each journey. I assure you I am extremely law abiding and safe driver. I drive around four or five hundred miles a week. Only in your fevered imagination do I drive all of those miles at once with no break. And yes, I love driving my big diesel vehicle and my small fast petrol vehicle, and I couldn't care less who is provoked by that.

My insurance company seem perfectly happy with my unblemished 40 years of safe driving.

@danij5873

I would take a test drive in a longer range version of the Renault 5, if you’re genuinely interested in a smaller EV.

I haven’t tried one, because we were constrained to getting a bigger car, but all the feedback I’ve seen suggests it’s a good car for those that want a little fun in their driving.

And brands/names definitely make a big difference, and will show up in the depreciation numbers just as they do in the ICE world. BMW’s new range of vehicles out this year are going to be interesting - they finally got the memo about single pedal driving, which Polestar has had since the beginning.

Some people think that single pedal driving is the same as driving an auto, but it’s not. Aside from being able to preheat/cool the car before you get in it, single pedal driving is one of the revelations that drew me into how fantastic EV’s can be. Driving a rented Polestar over 20km of twisty mountain roads in France without touching the brake pedal even once convinced me that it was the primary candidate to own.

Good luck in your test drive!

Bloody love ours even though we can’t charge at home.

Do find it odd that they seem inspire such strong negative feelings! I have an over active conscience and as someone that does a lot of city driving I felt guilty sitting there pumping out fumes by primary schools where I know air quality is an issue. I enjoy not feeling that.

On balance for us anyway that’s worth sitting on my phone for 20 mins or driving to charge at the gym. If you can’t afford it that’s the end of it but we can so it feels right we use an EV.

People hate change, but as humans we have to adapt

@Ayebrow my personal range is just a bit longer than most EV's. I stop when I want to, not frequently when the car wants to.

You seem a bit over invested in proving me wrong, even to the point of inventing things and implying that I want to cause accidents. I will leave you to it, the company of zealots is always boring.

Scotia is a good example of the weirdly aggressive ICE driver. Very rude to the other poster.

@Scotiasdarling

I stop when I want to.

Do you though? I think you stop only when you have to, because in truth you dislike filling up like all sensible people - diesel is a disgusting substance that stinks and sticks to your skin. In the rare times I’ve had to do it, I’ve been pissed off that the garage has nearly always run out of the disposable gloves that they (sometimes) supply to protect your hands from it.

So you value the long range between fill ups precisely because filling a car with liquid fuel is objectively unpleasant. It’s taken all kinds of nonsense from you, but it boils down to: “I don’t like to fill up my car very often, so choose a long range diesel so I don’t have to.”

And that’s fine. No-one is going to stop you. Or try and control you. You’re in a safe space here. You’re welcome to your choice, and perfectly free to make it.

There is no point trying to persuade someone who is contributing hugely to pollution that is helping to kill 30,000 odd people in the UK every year, but has made clear that they really don’t care about that. What matters is them, and what they want. Which is fine. You do you.

this chain is a combination of excruciating to read and very gratifying seeing how many people can robustly debunk the insane misinformation we are fed every day by the news industry that is largely controlled by the fossil fuel industry!

for what it’s worth, I have a Tesla y long range. I am lucky enough to have off road parking - which I agree is a huge challenge for EVs. But I don’t have a fast charge, I plug and get 10 amps due to my 1960s electrics. And I only have power about 12 hours of the day also due to said ancient electrics so I have to plan charging carefully. I drive 3-500 miles a week on my commute. I almost never charge out of home, only on holidays eg to Cornwall where I have got to know Exeter service station well! It’s just a small change in mindset and occasional planning. But the range stated n the car at any point is super accurate and it’s insanely efficient when stuck on m25 in traffic!

and car fires, as mentioned before?! 10x more likely in a ICE car. Just misreported by fossil fuel owned papers.

and the pp who mentioned Evs “littered” down the side of a motorway after it was shut for hours…highly unlikely given how insanely efficient they are when not moving…my ev uses about 1% per hour if I’m just sat in it, not moving. So that would be a lot of drivers planning very poorly to litter the roads like that!!!

i get that if you don’t have a huge budget it’s hard to find a cheap EV. But……ICE cars are laps insanely expensive!!! I used to drive a jazz and they’re over £20k new! cars full stop are crazy expensive.

.

@JuliettaCaeser

Thank you. I only engaged with him because he was being utterly condescending to @glowfrog and kept changing his arguments with her.

Do find it odd that they seem inspire such strong negative feelings!

People (like Scotia) have sucked up a lot of misinformation, and happily repeat it on threads like this. One misunderstanding is that the EV mandate somehow applies to people’s current car, or secondhand cars. So they feel their personal choice is threatened. In reality it is only brand new pure petrol/diesel vehicles that cannot be sold past 2030. People can buy a diesel in December 2029 and it might happily run until 2050.

And cars are emotive in a way that other tech isn’t. No-one started ranting on MN when they took analogue TV away. Or maybe they did but it was ignored.

👏👏👏

Everyone we know that has an EV loves it and won’t go back. DS was on his own at work, but now has a colleague with one - DS walking out and driving off in his preheated BMW i3 made a big impact with all the ICE-heads he works with still scraping ice off their cars.

There’s an awful lot of guff that is just washed away as soon as people realise that they’re just far more pleasant to own, drive and live with. I don’t miss the brake dust manking up the wheels of our car - we hardly use the brakes with regen doing almost all the stopping work (only the occasional dab to keep the disks clean).

A PP is correct. The ban on new ICE cars by 2035 will go the way of the ban on gas boilers.

It will be postponed and watered down for the same reason - the alternatives are not currently practicable for a large proportion of the population.

In areas like mine the cars are nose to nose along the street, and you just have to park where you can; there are only a small number of street lamps. So whatever the type of lamp, I don't see how anyone could rely on this as a method of charging.

@Sarahi1234re: EVs littering the motorway - just like with those who keep banging on about the batteries needing replacing, I think people who say that think that EVs basically work like mobile phones. Before I got a new phone recently, my previous one certainly burnt a lot of charge just sitting there. Our EV - not so much 😂