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)

Agreed
Lots of people have posted again and again explaining how the supply will be changing to match the demand
But whatever the ideas its not good enough for @cardibachand its true that if, in the end, they dont accept the changes, paid for by others, then they will be left behind

That's not the comparator though. The point is that charging overnight on a EV tariff or cheap o/n rate is cheaper than a public charger, so people who don't have offstreet parking can't install a home charger will pay more to charge.

I can confirm that we do not have on street or lamp post charging in my area, my local fuel stations don’t have them, nearby towns also don’t. Hence my point about infrastructure. your area may have it, but please don’t assume that’s the case across the country. It just isn’t.

I never at any point said the infrastructure was “fixed” and wouldn’t improve? You made that part up, which is bizarre. I said as it stands it’s not here, and along with other concerns I have, I’m not on board yet.

As it stands I’m happy with my current vehicle and no need or desire to throw cash at a car needlessly (ICE or EV, which is another reason I’m concerned about the pushing of EVs on people - not everyone can afford one).

I’m not against them, if they can make it work and not be as impractical as they currently are, and there be an affordable market of long lived vehicles, then great. But we aren’t there yet and I’m not buying in until we are.

My car is 20 years old this year, yet you’d never know it to drive it. It’s been well maintained and looked after and is a great little car that still turns heads. It’s cost me a pittance over the 20 years I’ve owned it, I have no desire or need to buy another car now or in the near future. It would cost me vastly more to have buy another car and I don’t want to do that.

The batteries may last a long time, but I highly doubt I could get the value and longevity from an EV that I have from my current car.

Perhaps you should have jumped on the planning departments a long time ago to stop the inequality of anyone with a larger house than you
Anyone with a drive to park on when you don’t have one and have to park on a public road
Anyone whose Paid more than you
Or has a bigger car than you and of course I’m assuming you pay towards all those people who can’t afford a car

You see. It’s not privilege in the way you are using the term almost as if people have no right and ‘ how dare they’
We are not all the same and don’t live in a communist country

@sleepwouldbenice you cannot just contradict @OooPourUsACupLove without actually addressing the examples given. There are loads of contexts where having savings and capital allow wealthy people to access cheaper overall costs of living than people who don't. That's not how rational discussions work. You can't dismiss facts that don't fit your assertions.

The famous "Vimes" illustration is repeated for numerous other kinds of goods and services : a rich man can afford to spend £200 on a really good quality pair of shoes which will keep his feet comfortable and dry for 15+ years. A poor man can scrape together £25 for a crap pair of shoes which soon develop leaks but he has to carry on making-do and putting up with his feet getting wet through the holes every time it rains, until such time as he can scrape together another £25, so over the period of 15 years he spends over £300 on shoes and still has wet feet half the time.

One of my work colleagues is in exactly the position. Can't get a home charger so he sometimes uses public ones plus the very cheap and convenient work charger...
I think that more and more work places will have changers for their employees and maintaining a fleet of EV's. It will soon be one of the perks of working for a specific company.

I will have paid for the solar panels and battery
And the onstreet ones are coming down in price
That being supply and demand.

We are talking about EVs and charging and how provision and costs are changing

Never Heard of onscreen solar panels
Just googled … love them!
Thanks for the heads up

We've been electric since 2015. Although we did have an ICE tow car for the caravan at that point. Once we sold the caravan, we went fully electric and haven't looked back. (Our son has bought an EV as well so we are a 3 EV household) We are lucky that we have a drive and home charger and the cheap overnight electric tariff, so we just plug in and charge overnight - it's so easy. I do 200 miles for work on one charge. But it doesn't suit everyone - you need to work out where and when you could charge. I do around 9000 miles a year, DH does 12000 - DC does around 15000 - despite working at home - he does all over the country on weekends and has never had an issue - just needs a bit of planning/checking the area going to - plenty of apps to enable this.

It requires a slight change in habits. But it’s fine. I use a different supermarket which has a charger or drive to the gym instead of walk once a week so I can charge. It’s really no drama. And means I never have to go to a stinky petrol station ever again which is a plus.

Its the changing of habits that is a problem for so many

@Sunsetseascape

I never at any point said the infrastructure was "fixed" and wouldn't improve? You made that part up, which is bizarre.

You said:

“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.”

That seems like a pretty final assessment to me.

I’m delighted you’ve had such good use out of your car and I hope you can keep using it for many more years to come. But you’ve thrown at me all the bullet points on your list of Reasons Why EVs Are Not The Future until you’ve arrived at the last one: “I don’t want an EV and you can’t make me have one”.

Not one single person on this thread has suggested such a thing. But your response is not untypical - it often seems like ICE drivers take it very personally when EV drivers speak enthusiastically about their own choices, as though they are being judged. They’re re really not.

Ha ha sorry I misspelt!

No, that’s just my observation at the current time. The infrastructure is not there…. I’ve not seen or heard any real plans to sort this out in the not too distant future. I didn’t say it never will, but over this timescale whereby they want to make EVs the only choice, I’ve not been shown a real, reliable plan. Simple as that.

Comparing it to fuel stations not being as commonplace at the start of ICE vehicles is never going to wash, as the step from no car at all to any kind of car was progress. Stepping from convenience to inconvenience is not.

If you’d read what I said rather than what you wanted to see, I never said I don’t like the vehicles themselves, or the premise. But at this point I’m genuinely not sure it will work. I may, of course, be proven completely wrong, hence saying it will be interesting to have the same discussion in 15+ years to find out.

Your comebacks are no more concrete than my concerns, as at this point, none of them have truly been addressed by the reality. They haven’t even existed long enough to answer some of my questions.

And yes, at this stage, I’m not in the market for spending any cash on a car. That would be a waste for me, so to be forced to do so would be pretty despicable. And even worse for those in a worse financial position than I am.

I read it as onscreen anyway 😁
You got away with the wrong spelling. Clearly I’d be a crap English teacher

Yes we are. And that's yet another example of the same thing, where wealthy people get to buy their EV charging wnergy cheaper than poorer people and you just want to dismiss that inconvenient fact. Public charging point energy is more expensive than energy drawn from domestic supply and less wealthy people are less likely to be able to access the cheaper options. You asserted at 18:21 'Its not cheaper for those who are better off' which is delusionarily untrue.

I understand why low income people would hang onto their car as long as possible makes good sense. I’m not commenting on anyone else’s choices.

We had our last car since 2011! But when it came to get a new (albeit second hand but 2 years old) one it made sense to us to get an EV. We can afford to and we can change our habits. So that’s one less diesel car on the road. Broadest shoulders and all that. I admit I don’t understand friends who are wealthy and actually have drives but buy new ICE cars. I don’t say anything but I wonder why. That said most of our friends have EVs now.

You are so right and it gets worse.

Much like a high percentage of BMWs and Audi's were sold to leasing companies for those senior enough to have a company car in the naughties, a high percentage of EVs are via salary sacrifice and company car schemes. Again geared towards the wealthier.

However this does create an infux of 3 year old EVs that are at a more accessible price point. As always, it's like a hand me down culture.

I get my cheaper rate after buying solar panels and battery. So I am not delusional as to how much this has cost me..
Also as I have said, under the investment schemes being rolled out by the government (paid for by taxes, for those who dont have easy access eg LEVI ) the charging rate for these will fall, due to the economics of supply and demand.
So your delusional comment is wrong...never mind though hey?

Shock, horror. I haven't ever bought a new car in my life.

No-one has to go to the expense of buying solar panels. If you buy your electricity from a supplier you can get cheaper electricity to charge your EV - with Octopus it's as little as 7.5p/kWh. Provided you have off-road parking.

If you don't have off-road parking, the very cheapest rate is 45p/kWh. If you can't / don't want to leave your car for hours at a charger a distance from your home, and so use a rapid/ultra rapid charger, the rate is 80p/kWh.

You are conflating something irrelevant. Solar panels and battery are a way to get your electricity in an environmentally friendly way by investing heavily in upfront costs which often take a long time to break even but the "cheaper domestic energy" that everyone apart from you is talking about is the fact that for people without solar panels, domestic electricity costs about 28p per kWh so a 60kwh charge to an electric car costs just under £17 whereas someone who can't afford a house with a private electricity point for their vehicle would have to use a public charging point would pay about 50p per kwh so £30 for the same electricity amount at a basic charge point supplying c22kw charge rate (so taking up to 3h to fully charge) or about 85p per kwh (£50 for a full charge) at an ultra-rapid point (taking less than an hour). If you thought we were talking about solar panels that's a bit of a "let them eat cake" moment from you.

The fact that Vauxhall have announced they're putting diesel engines in models again suggests that EV is not the future....yet anyway
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-15566615/amp/Vauxhall-Stellantis-resurrect-diesel-cars-19bn-hit-EV-sales.html

IMO this EV push is has been a marketing campaign to urge people to buy something they don't really need all wrapped up in a 'it's good for the environment' label. I mean if everyone who bought an EV scrapped their old ICE car then maybe it would help, but if you go and buy an EV and your old ICE car was traded in then someone else is still using it and all you've done was added another car to the road. If we're talking purely environmentally friendly then the best car for that is the one you already own. Just maintain it well and keep it until it needs scrapped.

I work in fleet and our place has a load of EVs, some have been great, they're nice to drive, but some have been off the road with issues that the manufacturer can't fix for a long time. One was with a dealer for nearly two years and they didn't know what was wrong with it. From someone who works in the industry then I wouldn't advise anyone buy a cheap EV, they're pushed out there and they are just rubbish.

Just my opinion of course but I don't think EV is the future, I still think it's ICE but with Hydrogen not fossil. Either way we're a long way off seeing petrol or diesel cars off the road

If you don't have off-road parking, the very cheapest rate is 45p/kWh. If you can't / don't want to leave your car for hours at a charger a distance from your home, and so use a rapid/ultra rapid charger, the rate is 80p/kWh.

That is simply, and demonstrably not true.

As I have posted multiple times, we have to rely 100% on public charging, so I feel our experience is valuable. I’m including some copies of actual charging invoices so neutral lurkers can decide for themselves.

Chargy 5kW AC public chargers cost 39p/kWh from 12am to 7am, and that’s what we use for local mileage and to fill the car before a long journey. I did exactly that last Thursday night (image attached). Chargy are rolling out across the UK, and will help keep the oil companies that own the other AC networks honest (they’re a B Corp)

When we are heading off on a long journey, we join the Tesla scheme for £9.99/month (other networks have a similar deal), which means we can rapid charge for as little 22p/kWh (image attached), up to 41p/kWh, depending on time of day. So far, the Tesla membership fees have amounted to an average of 0.25p/kWh across all the miles we’ve driven, so pretty trivial. If we were doing long journeys every month we would pay £99.99/year and cut that even further.

Tesla suits us because of their locations, but I would join Ionity’s or Be.EV’s or Arnold Clark’s if their locations suited our journey patterns better.

The most we have paid for electricity is 62p/kWh and that is because the Total (oil company) chargers have dedicated (and paid-for) parking. We have sometimes parked up and charged while at the cinema - the 4 hours maximum stay easily fills the car 1/3 full, but we deliberately throttle the current back in the app to add a smaller amount so the overall cost/kWh (taking into account how much the parking would have cost) comes in a lot less.

The most I have paid for rapid (DC) charging is 55p/kWh at Arnold Clark, which would be 39p if I were a member of their scheme. The Be.EV scheme also provides rapid charging at 39p. It’s funny how the major networks have responded to Tesla opening up theirs to non-Tesla drivers like us. Capitalism 101 in action I guess. If you don’t believe me, download the Octopus Electroverse app, apply a filter on a network, and check the discounts for a subscription It’s all public domain stuff and easily verified.

So far, the average we’ve paid is around 36p/kWh, with around a 5:4 AC:DC (overnight:rapid) split, so the cheap Tesla charging is helping bring down the overall rate lower than the Chargy AC one.

Domestic electricity on a standard rate is around 25-28p/kWh, so I really don’t have an issue with public charging prices. We don’t have a driveway, but we also didn’t have to install a home charger (which can cost £400-£1,000 depending on the cable run needed). None of the people we know that have home chargers have bothered with a cheap tariff. Two of the households have multiple EVs and need to charge outside the low cost hours, and one doesn’t do the mileage to justify it.

If we didn’t have the ability to use Chargy chargers, I would either use the Shell ones (at 52p/kWh), and perhaps drive a little further to a Sainsbury’s with rapid chargers at 72p/kWh if needs be.

That would pull our average cost higher than 40p/kWh, but it’s clear to me that what you posted is blatant misinformation, which I will assume is not deliberate.

We are prepared to have to pay a higher rate, if for some reason we end up somewhere where we can’t reach a Tesla or Arnold Clark charger, and need a DC rapid charge, but it would be swallowed up in the average - we haven’t had to do so far in 1,000s of happy EV driving and I expect never to pay the kind of 89p rate that is the norm if you rock up to a Shell garage and pay with a credit card like a journalist wanting to write a “EVs cost more than diesel” horror story.