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)

Thanks for the apology. It may have seemed shocking to you as an EV driver, but as someone who has never owned, nor planned to own an EV, I openly admit to having no researched knowledge on the costs, and have just heard in passing that charging costs are very low/negligible/pence etc. It didn’t matter to me to check, as it was irrelevant to me.

Perhaps, as you say, that’s people meaning partial charges for short journeys? I don’t know. It’s just the impression I’ve been given over the years, so was similarly shocked by some of the prices quoted on here, as it’s higher than I’d expected.

I’m fortunate to have a drive, but there’s simply no other infrastructure round here at all…. definitely nothing on the street, and even our fuel stations don’t have chargers yet. That’s why my impression of EVs is one of inconvenience, but I imagine that’s quite different in other areas.

My car is way past warranty now! It has cost me money in maintenance but still works out very cheap over the years. It’s special, which is why I’ve kept it, and it’s worked out to be an absolute bargain as far as motoring is concerned. If I was someone who had a lease plan and changed car every few years then I’d be far more likely to look into EVs, but for me, any change of car will cost me wildly more than motoring currently costs me and it’s not something I’m considering doing at this time.

There have definitely been some undertones in this thread (and some less subtle!) trying to insult those who don’t have an EV and aren’t considering one (for whatever reason) which doesn’t sit well, but the main concern for me is the government, who are well known for forcing people’s hands. Pushing diesels, then changing their mind and pushing for them to be scrapped, pushing EVs, then coming up with a way to tax them. All they will do is make ICE vehicles too expensive to justify, and ban them from travelling into certain areas and then people will be forced to fork out. That genuinely does worry me.

There seems to be a misconception then anyone who doesn’t own and EV and is sceptical of how well this will work out is actively against them. That’s not the case. As I said earlier, maybe the concerns I have won’t come to pass, but based on what I can see and hear about it all right at this moment, it doesn’t seem like the best option for me and many others. If you guys are willing to take the hit and test it all out, find out the flaws, provide the funding for improvements then great - maybe it will get better.

I have been shocked by how fast things have already changed. And I don’t see them slowing down.

From being the object of (misleading) ridicule on Top Gear, there will be over 2 million of them on UK roads soon. And even if their relative popularity as new cars stagnates for a while, it is a mathematical certainty that their share of the vehicle parc will tend towards 1 in 5 (so around 8 million vehicles by 2035. That’s because EVs are lasting at least as long as their ICEV counterparts, and there is every sign they will last longer.

Faced with those numbers, the fuel supply business will have to shrink, and selling fuel is a very marginal and competitive business. So it will become harder to get it in remoter parts of the country, and those who have to drive to reach a petrol station will find that is more expensive and inconvenient.

I suspect there will be loud and angry voices demanding that supplying fuel in rural areas be subsidised by the government, but by that point there may be a different response - we may copy the Chinese and offer a scrappage scheme to get older ICEVs off the road, as happened in London when the ULEZ was extended.

But I don’t think EV adoption will stagnate at 20-25% of the market. I already know one person who has upgraded from a plug-in hybrid to an EV now he’s seen the benefits of driving with a battery, and another person who is thinking of getting an EV because her father has a plug-in too.

And in this thread, the number of people saying they love their EV and won’t go back is heartening. It aligns with the people we know who say the same.

Even if things do slow down in the UK, EV adoption is exploding in other parts of the world as China begins to take advantage of the enormous lead it now has in battery technology and Trump’s handicapping of US manufacturing. Ethiopia has already banned the import of new ICE cars, and will not be the last country to do so. In Norway only tiny numbers of ICE cars are now sold.

I am an engineer who witnessed at first hand the impact Japanese car manufacturing had on the world in the 1980s. My parents first brand new car was a Nissan Sunny, when all we’d had before were lousy European cars secondhand, and the Chinese are now following suit.

The Japanese caused a very rapid sea change in manufacturing better and cheaper versions of what were still conventional cars, so the public didn’t get to see what we were having to do in the European and American factories to learn from them.

The Chinese are driving a very rapid sea change in the cars themselves, and any company that doesn’t go with it will risk irrelevance in the future.

I think it was eight years ago that we had a community eco day and somebody knew someone who had an EV (a Nissan Leaf I think) and got them to bring it so we could all stand round and marvel 😆

Ten years ago I was in Amsterdam and took a photo of an EV using an on- street charger and put a photo of it on Facebook with the caption "One day this will be so normal we won't notice it any more". Well the EVs are, the on- street chargers still have a little way to go in the UK eh....

On the rural infrastructure thing, I spent last week in a tiny hamlet and at least half the houses have an EV, a charger and solar panels.

The nearest petrol station is 15 minutes drive away and even if you include it in another journey the extra time to get there and fill up it on the way to the main road adds 10 to 15 mins to the journey, so you can see why those who can afford it have switched to an EV.

And at the other end of the scale, in London it's noticeable over the last two years or so that the big roads have got quieter and cleaner. They are still just as traffic clogged, but the traffic itself is quiet(er) and clean(er).

I think hybrids are probably more popular than pure EVs right now, but there are more and more pure EVs as well.

@Sunsetseascape

My car is way past warranty now! It has cost me money in maintenance but still works out very cheap over the years. It’s special, which is why I’ve kept it, and it’s worked out to be an absolute bargain as far as motoring is concerned.

That is exactly how we were with our old Volvo estate. It was 18 years old when it died, and only had 120,000 miles on the clock. It had a perfect service history (we’d had it since it was a year old) so I had hopes it would keep going for many years, but it had spent too many years with lowish local mileage journeys, which is never good for an ICEV.

And it has taken 8 years to get to a point where having an EV replacement for the Volvo makes sense to us for the kinds of long distance trips we used to make in it. I suspect it will take another 8 years for EVs to get to a place where the vast majority of people will be able to feel they can manage with one.

In the intervening years we have hired Tesla model 3 and Polestar 2s when we’ve needed to go on those longer trips, and that has allowed us to learn a lot about them. We did have to hire a petrol Audi to go to Belgium, which was rather lovely, because we got an upgrade from Sixt, but that only underlined how much nicer the EVs are to drive.

No matter how smooth and powerful an ICE engine is, it doesn’t come close to an electric motor, and single pedal driving is impossible in a petrol car (and even plug-in hybrids can’t manage the same braking intensity for long periods as Tesla/Polestar regen can, because they can’t accept a very high charging current as their batteries are so small.

I have been open about my long history of excessive carbon emissions, so I’m the last EV owner to ever imply that owning an EV makes me somehow special on the environment front, and I apologise on behalf of others that may come across that way. I have written in a post how EVs in aggregate will change the world, but on their own they are just less dirty than ICE cars.

Forward planning is the thing.

There is a very nice EV charging stop off near Banbury with a Hotel Chocolat, a Costa and a Miller and Carter and 32 high powered chargers.

We even found some in a car park Withypool on Exmoor and the National Trust seems to be installing quite a few

We have solar panels and it costs very little to charge the car

@OooPourUsACupLove absolutely re: London. Back before Christmas I spent 24hrs in Bristol and I was shocked by the pollution and ICE smells on the 15mn walk from the station to my hotel. You’d think London would surely be dirtier but it was a real pleasure to come back on that front.

I also noticed when I started cycling to work again into central London 2 years ago after a very long break (hadn’t done so since 2005!) that I would get to my office without having to blow black snot out of my nose anymore.

High density housing is often found in cities where fewer own cars

@crackofdoom

“Well the EVs are, the on- street chargers still have a little way to go in the UK eh....”

That’s possibly because they’re so well hidden. The Shell Ubitricity ones are just a covered black socket + LED + QR code on a lamppost.

Attached is the Electroverse map of parts of London with every dot being an Ubitricity charger. The photo is our Polestar 2 plugged into one 😀

That’s London, of course, but now various regulatory hurdles have been overcome, lamppost chargers will get rolled out much more widely - I think Char.gy are rolling out 1,000s more and according to Electroverse Ubitricity has a lot in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester as well (although they may not be lamppost ones)

My car is approaching 19 now, and you’d never know it to drive it. I’ve been fortunate. Our other vehicle is 20 this year, automatic and drives like a dream too (that one is a large vehicle for towing and load space). If my car should fail on me, I’ll have some thinking to do! If I have to buy a new car then it’s a cost that I’ll be suffering regardless.

I know how great EVs are to drive, and the smooth speed etc, I’m quite sure I’d love the driving experience! If and when the time comes, I’ll have to see if there’s anything suitable for me, associated costs of chargers, along with what vehicles are available at what price etc. just hoping my car lasts me another 20 years as this point as I don’t need the stress 😂

@Sunsetseascape

I think towing capacity and range is one of the things that is being improved a lot, as batteries are improving, but that won’t feed into secondhand vehicles (and suitable charging facilities) for several years.

This is of the new Volvo EX60 which has a claimed 500 odd mile range (so might be good for 250/300 miles or something towing its 2,400 kg maximum trailer load):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nU88Ub9BMLc

https://www.volvocars.com/uk/cars/ex60-electric/specifications/

But there are comparatively few rapid chargers with “drive-through” bays at the moment, so I suspect that will be one of the things holding back EV adoption for people that want to tow but cannot unhitch the load mid-journey so easily,

Having said that, the smooth and quiet power/torque output of an EV makes them excellent towing vehicles, if the range/charging can be made to work.

I need to head to bed now - sorry again for being rude, and good luck with your cars lasting beyond their current maturity.

@Ayebrow apart from the lack of infrastructure near me this 100% my biggest issue. I need my car to tow and i need a decent range and ideally i need the two combined as whilst i don’t tow everyday i do tow 1/2 a month. I looked into the Tesla Y model before and whilst it can physically tow the range dropped to 99 miles which makes it totally impractical. Therefore opted for the trusty diesel, maybe in a few years there will be better options. I feel the EV market does need to address this as many people do have caravans, horse boxes, trailers etc.

This.

There’s no doubt at all that towing loads is the thing that needs a lot of work to electrify more of.

Even if cars like the big Volvos and BMWs can begin to fill some of the gap, they won’t be around on the secondhand market for a while and only in small numbers. Diesel is going to do the grunt work for a long while yet.

And it seems to me that many more drive-through charging bays will need to be provided too, particularly for those with bigger loads. Fastned are installing them up in the NorthEast, apparently, but I haven’t seen any in our journeys (mostly up the west side of England, Scotland and Wales).

But mass produced batteries have almost quadrupled in energy density in just the time since the Nissan Leaf was launched - the new Leaf has nearly 4x the range of the original, with the same weight of pack, and there is much room for improvement still.

And there has been steady improvement in other things like thermal management, motor/inverter efficiencies, and system voltage - 800V is the norm for many vehicles and 1,000V is coming. Which makes even faster charging more straightforward.

CATL has just launched sodium-ion batteries, which are not as energy dense but are very cheap and have many times the cycle life and operating temperature range of Li-ion, so much bigger capacity packs will become much more economical over time too.

The game changer is that EV HGVs and buses, and static grid storage systems, with their much bigger batteries is driving the production of billions of individual cells, and every doubling of installed capacity drives costs down further.

So I‘m 100% certain that EV towing of larger loads for longer distances will be seen, it’s just a question of when.

There will still be traffic jams. Emissions are only one problem. Other problems include congestion, parking etc which the government's move to EVs do nothing to solve.

Yes, of course. But EVs are being presented to us by the government and the green lobby as an environmentally beneficial solution to the problems caused by mass car ownership. They are not being presented as an entirely neutral money making opportunity.

That might be true of London, but the city where I live is crammed with cars, all parked bumper to bumper.

One of the issues with on-street charging is that, once you've plugged in, you've taken that space.

If I had an electric car and drive home from work to an on-street charging point, I'd park there and plug in. Then I'd go home. Presumably if leave my car there all night, so when a neighbour comes back from work and wants to do the same thing, they can't because my car would be in the space. It would only work if you have as many chargers as you have electric cars.

Not everyone would
need to charge every night or
use on street charging
others would plug in at work or
plug in whilst shopping or at the gym

@AnnaQuayRules

It would only work if you have as many chargers as you have electric cars.

It’s fascinating to me that those without EVs are seemingly so confident in saying things like “it would only work if…” and “it cannot work because…” and invariably then say something which a small amount of thought (or RTFT) would show is wrong. I and others have already explained why we need many fewer on-street chargers than EVs

Our Polestar 2 has an 82kWh battery, which is more than big enough to swallow 10 hours worth of AC charging at 5kW from one of our local on-street chargers (more powerful ones are available, but slightly further away). But it can then be driven for over 200 miles.

We only do short trips locally (4 - 20 miles), so a single overnight charge covers us for maybe 20-30 trips, or anything from a couple of weeks to a month. Now maybe others use their EV a bit more or less, but there is no way on this Earth that every EV needs its own charger when the average daily journey of all drivers in the UK is a small fraction of the average range of an EV.

I think people imagine that just because they plug their phone in every day, they need to plug an EV in every day and that is just not true.

And whilst it is lovely to be able to have our EV charge overnight so we can leave on longer journeys with a full or near full battery and preheated (or cooled) whilst on the charger, it is also possible to preheat/cool the car as it sits parked anywhere, and charge the car at some other location while doing something else.

I've yet to see an EV charging point in a disabled bay, which in itself means I would have issues using one. There's a handful of EV charging bays at work, but none close to the building and they are pretty expensive according to my work mate with an EV car.

I don't have a driveway at my house, and cars are parked all along the roadway so they would have to put in LOADS of points in my road - many more than 1 per house as most households here have at least 2 cars. Plus I know full well that certain of my neighbours would hog one charger for every second they were parked up at home.

And until the cost of them drops significantly.... about £10k difference between the cheapest EV and cheapest petrol car

Never mind EVs, the whole carbon Neutral programme is not the future!

2010 called and asked for it’s global warming denial back😂

Round my neck of the woods there's an EV/Disabled bay combo in most car parks. It's usually the only one available and of course Im reluctant to use it

Eg..We need gas drilling and domestic steel production…too-fast a transition risks deindustrialising the UK and increasing reliance on foreign imports.
Just look at the cost of the energy we have to buy in!