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)

@Allergictoironing

what happens with the 1 pedal driving system if a mouse gets in and chews the cable - will the brakes work perfectly?

Single pedal driving doesn’t mean you only have one pedal. You also have a brake pedal with normal friction brakes at the wheels just as capable as in an ICEV. It’s just that you don’t need to use it that often.

In some EVs, in order to start decelerating, you lift your foot from the accelerator and the car doesn’t actually slow down very much (like some automatics) - you have to press the brake pedal to begin the battery regeneration process and put energy back in the battery. If you need to stop more quickly, you press your foot harder on the brake and the friction brakes come in.

With single-pedal driving, you use the accelerator pedal to speed up as normal. When you’re at the desired constant speed you hold your right foot steady (as normal, given you generally have to put some energy in to keep moving against air, mechanical and rolling friction). But if you want to slow down you simply lift your right foot up a little to begin the regen process - you don’t need to press the brake.

At first, it feels a little like engine braking in a manual car, but if you lift your foot further the regen effect strengthens. In a good system, it’s completely progressive - you control the power of braking exactly the same as the power of acceleration, but with just the “accelerator” pedal (it’s really a “power” pedal - positive and negative)

If you lift your foot off completely and suddenly, say to apply an emergency stop, the braking effect of regen hits a maximum and you can stop very quickly, albeit still with the option to hit the actual brake pedal as well if needs be.

Because battery regen delivers next to no braking at low speeds, true single-pedal driving applies the friction brakes at the end, with a parking brake applied once the car is stationary.

As a “belt and braces” type of person myself, I love the fact I have both a high power electrical motor braking the car and a normal friction braking set up. Driven well, an EV does over 90% of its braking with regen, so your friction brakes get worn a lot more slowly (and your wheels stay a lot cleaner)

EV batteries are typically built into the floor of the car and are designed to withstand even quite extreme crashes - bear in mind that the passengers are above them, so that part of the car has to be very strong.

Your worries about electronic vulnerabilities apply to all modern cars. They’re all computers on wheels.

They probably are the future but not for many years, they have to become more convenient, affordable and the infrastructure has to be in place before I would trust having electric. I have seen neighbours buying electric cars then switching back to petrol

Yes, exactly. In fact the government's radio adverts for EVs tell us we can drive from London to Sheffield 'for a fiver'. You can only achieve that economy by charging at home. So the government's admitting that this works best for people who can charge from home and everyone else will just have to suck it up.

Wasn't it the French government's green initiatives that caused the Yellow Vest protests?

Yes, I know people who have switched back to petrol. Even people who are well off and have their own drives.

"putting enough in to get you home to charge at a cheap rate".

So the real economy of EVs is only available to people who can charge at home at a cheap rate.

It's the rural living that puts me off. No street lights, so no chargers in the lamps, live in a terrace house with on street parking, so no ability to charge at home. Opportunities to charge in local car parks very limited. Plus long distances between available chargers, so if all the local ones are unavailable you've got a very long way to go to look for free ones.

I'd like to go electric, I think, but I won't be until there are chargers all over the place and some kind of mechanism to stop people parking on them all day and locking them out of the system.

The mechanism is a parking ticket!

@5MinuteArgument

Even people who are well off and have their own drives.

Any insights as to why they gave them up?

The reason I ask is it’s interesting that the only people on this thread who claim to know lots of people switching back from EVs are those who have been consistently negative about them, and I’m curious about the reasons they’ve been given.

Our experience, and the evidence from surveys (I posted one earlier), is that once people have an EV they don’t typically want to go back, and I don’t think we’re particularly special in that.

@5MinuteArgument

You can only achieve that economy by charging at home

We can drive the 162 miles to Sheffield for around £8-£14, depending on exactly where we charged the car and when. So not a fiver, for sure, but then we haven’t paid for a home charger to be installed, since we don’t have off-street parking and rely 100% on public chargers.

And in truth, you need to do a certain amount of local mileage to justify the standing charge and peak rate costs of having a super-cheap EV tariff. No-one we know with an EV bothers with one, so they would be paying roughly the same order as we do.

Since the fuel costs alone would be north of £20 for an ICEV, to say nothing of the extra maintenance costs per mile of one, I believe we’re doing ok.

So the argument that EVs are only financially rewarding if they’re charged at home doesn’t hold water I’m afraid.

I realise that not everyone has got access to economical public charging yet, but we didn’t either until recently, so things can change very fast. It’s only in the last few months that some of the rapid charging networks have brought prices down to be closer to Tesla’s public rates for example.

Back in the 1900s, the choice was walk, cycle, horse or a car... (if you could afford it)
So the car really was an upgrade to any of the alternatives.

Not the case now.

For me to chop in my Diesel for an EV with a decent range and carrying capacity, means, even 2nd hand, finding 25k plus, new 35k, then i need a home charger, so another 2k, probably more as i suspect my Consumer Unit would need upgrading.
Then there is accident damage costs, battery failure, hacking esp with the Chinese models, wear on roads.

OR i can stick with an ICE car, replacing it with another for around 12k in a few years.

Where is the incentive to do this?

We are so rural that our parking inspectors have to cover a big area, so if it's not their 'day' you can pretty much park with impunity!

Well although we won't actually run out of fossi fuels for another 50 years or so, by which time I hope to be safely dead, the latter half of that time is going to be really unpleasant to live through if we don't make a start on converting the world economy to be less dependant on them. Carrying on as we are until the last drop that formed and then having civilisation crumble because no one made plans for how the human race might thrive without oil is not the future I want my children and grandchildren to live through. The new technologies are expensive but will become cheaper as more people adopt them, so converting away from an ICE car to an EV helps to build a world that is tolerably ok (I am not naïve enough to hope for any kind of utopia) rather than a dystopian hellscape nightmare, for those future generations.

Nb it takes 60 million years to make fossil fuels, and the conditions on earth stopped being conducive to their formation about 300 million years ago. Only an idiot thinks the supply is infinite.

So is crowded parking a big issue in your large remote area then?

I don't understand. There is one electric charger per car park here. If someone has carelessly parked to block it or has left their car on charge and gone off for the day, then anyone would have to drive to the next car park with a charger, which also might not be available.

I live there, it's a reality at the moment. Why would you nit pick my answer?

The provision for public charging is sooo variable. We are in a small city and it’s pretty lame. My sister in a much smaller market town with a brilliant free car park with 8 barely used chargers!

Because this thread is all about nit pickers extrapolating possible occasional inconveniences to insist that EVs as a whole are unworkable, while ignoring the many issues with ICEVs because they are so inured to them.

Car parks, being private land, aren't managed by traffic wardens anyway. These days it's typically cameras, signs and automated fines.

Which is exactly what the charging companies will do to discourage selfish parking. They know from the charger if the car parked in the space is charging o not, trivially easy to send a bill to an unauthorised car owner.

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/467412.html

Ah I see. You are overestimating our car parks! No electronic plate recognition here (at least, there is in the cities but not out here). Most of the cameras aren't operational. And the parking tickets are still issued by wardens who patrol the car parks.

I think you are underestimating how behind the times some places are. My local market town has only two chargers for the entire town and the district. It's five miles each way to the next towns, and they only have a couple of chargers there too. It almost needs to be one charger per parking space, plus loads available at any roadside parking too, because I wouldn't stand a chance of getting a car charged up.

It’s unfair to declare anyone pointing out the reasons it doesn’t work for them yet, at the moment, as “nit pickers extrapolating occasional inconveniences”. @Vroomfondleswaistcoat was specifically and only talking about her situation. She wasn’t one of the people saying “this is my experience and it’s the same for everyone therefore it’ll never work”. She said why it would be really hard for her, where she lives, right now, and what would need to change. She didn’t say that change was impossible - she said she’d like to go electric and described how the infrastructure would need to work. It’s not an impossible change that she requires, but until it happens, it won’t work for her.

Don’t dismiss people’s individual issues and assume they’re talking for everyone. Some are, but lots are just saying how their local infrastructure falls short right now.

Fascinating first person account of the challenges of early motor cars.

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americas-skepticism-toward-first-automobiles/

@Talipesmum

lots are just saying how their local infrastructure falls short right now.

^ This

It’s totally clear that there are many for whom EV driving right now is impossible, even if they would like to switch, and they need to be listened to.

It only works for us because we can charge locally very easily and economically, and we could afford to get an EV that can comfortably manage 300+ miles mid-winter (with a heat pump) AND has superb single-pedal driving. But I’m not kidding myself that it’s possible for everyone at the moment.

The charging network in the UK is good for some, but woeful still for others, and there are far too many EVs where the manufacturer has dialled it in, and launched cars that feel like they’re not trying very hard, with a product barely good enough for 2016, let alone 2026 (looking at you, Toyota and Stellantis), and then whinge that no-one wants them (whilst pushing hybrids as hard as they can as the solution to “range anxiety”).

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat is right about having more chargers in car parks. We need to do what the Dutch are doing, and install AC destination chargers in every space in as many car parks as possible, so that people can feel as confident as they currently are with petrol and diesel supply.

When we charged our car in Belgium recently (using the Electroverse card to kick the charge off, so super easy), there were 72 chargers available in the car park. Not 1 or 2. 72

And I appreciate that local charging may be a virtual impossibility for some people forever, in which case the government needs to do more to ensure that public rapid charging hubs are available that are not controlled by oil companies who deliberately ensure that it costs more than diesel to charge your car.

That is beginning to happen, as Tesla changes the game, but every large supermarket needs to follow Sainsbury’s and build proper facilities in the same way as many started selling fuel in the 80s, and Sainsbury’s needs to bring their prices down to match Tesla’s and Arnold Clark’s

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat

It almost needs to be one charger per parking space

Just to illustrate that is an excellent idea, and not impossible to imagine in the future, we saw something like that in Belgium. And in case people are sceptical, this is a screenshot from the Electroverse app.

We could easily have filled the car overnight, but in the end just picked up a 2 hour charge in the morning while doing touristy things. €57 is 50p/kWh, so for our car on a long trip works out at 11p/mile - not super cheap, but much cheaper than petrol.

The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed - Arthur C Clarke

We could easily have filled the car overnight, but in the end just picked up a 2 hour charge in the morning while doing touristy things. €57 is 50p/kWh, so for our car on a long trip works out at 11p/mile - not super cheap, but much cheaper than petrol.

My car is a hybrid so petrol cost works out around 10p a mile, my car before that which wasn't hybrid was still only about 11p a mile. So I'm not sure you can say it's much cheaper than petrol.

@Ayebrow - the person I know who switched back to an ice car after having an electric couldn't justify the higher upfront cost when their mileage reduced during/post COVID. Basically, their initial calculations had relied on spending more on the car but making savings on spending less on fuel but that only worked when they were doing more mileage per year. So entirely an economical decision.

@LupinLou

So I'm not sure you can say it's much cheaper than petrol.

The only person I know who gets anything close to that kind of mileage from a hybrid drives a small Toyota thing, and then only in urban driving, where the battery actually does something to help recover energy when braking (“self-charging” 😀)

At sustained motorway speeds (which you have to do to reach Belgium), so no regen, it’s just a normal petrol car.

The idea that you get close to 11p/mile in a hybrid at motorway speeds in a vehicle the size of the Polestar 2 is a little difficult to believe - someone else posted much more realistic figures of 15-16p/mile for petrol/diesel. Our petrol Volvo estate, so similar to the Polestar in size and weight, could manage around 40mpg in sustained motorway driving, so 16p/mile - bang on what that PP quoted. If we drove it at 50mph it could manage 50mpg, and 12p/mile, but who drives at those speeds? If we drove the Polestar at 50mph it would cost around 9p/mile with electricity at 50p/kWh.