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)

@LupinLou

So entirely an economical decision.

And totally understandable. And that was certainly true a few years ago when EVs cost significantly more than ICEVs.

But batteries are now dramatically cheaper than they were then, and can store much more energy per unit mass and volume, so the new Nissan Leaf, for example, can do almost 4x the miles of the first one and yet costs much less than the original.

That’s not to say that we’re anywhere near the point where the economics work for everyone - they’re not. But things are moving very fast to improve them. And in the meantime, for those that find an EV fits their needs, they are simply much better cars. We will not go back.

I think it’s time to post why EVs are the future.

We can debate the relative cost and convenience for days and days (as we have), but the truth is the only way to stop global warming is to stop burning stuff.

And it’s not that any one individual can impact that, but governments can. And mostly they have realised that for the sake of the future, it needs to be electric.

Trump can delay things in the US because of his promise to reward the oil companies that helped him get elected, but America is threatened more than most countries by what we have baked in already. Hurricane Sandy was 1,150 miles in diameter, and since 2012 the ocean has risen by 3mm/year as Greenland has melted and the oceans have expanded (they have sucked up 90% of the excess heat)

If you do the maths, if a Sandy sized hurricane were to strike Florida or New York now, it would carry 112 billion tonnes more water in its storm surge. And that is non-trivial.

And the Chinese can do maths, and as another country exceptionally exposed to global warming are working extremely hard to bring the cost of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines down, and making twice as much money selling them to the world than America is making selling fossil fuels.

So let’s not kid ourselves that our personal preferences have much to do with it. The future is electric because without it there won’t be a future. Simple as.

My RAV4 is averaging 49.9 across it's lifetime. It's a big car. On a motorway journey it actually gets slightly higher than that. My previous car was an auris touring sports (not hybrid) and would get 48 on a motorway journey.

Of course this is also based on current petrol prices, round here that's around 1.26 a litre. There was a time when petrol was quite a bit more expensive and electricity quite a bit cheaper which alters the balance quite significantly.

@LupinLou

Of course this is also based on current petrol prices, round here that's around 1.26 a litre. There was a time when petrol was quite a bit more expensive and electricity quite a bit cheaper which alters the balance quite significantly.

Very true. And your 50mpg at typical Belgium/London fuel prices works out at 13p/mile.

So the 11p/mile I was quoting as based on that Belgium car park @ 50p/kWh would still be cheaper 😀(not much, admittedly, although it’s kind of splitting hairs)

And all of that is kind of moot. We typically pay 39p/kWh locally, and as low as 20p/kWh for Tesla public charging - that Belgium car park was at the upper end of what we’ve paid for public charging. All of which is to only explain (yet again) that it is not just people who charge at home that can do ok with EVs.

I understand that Toyota hybrids are good cars (my best friend has one, as well as 2 EVs in his family), and no-one is making people change - but if and when you choose to buy a new car, please give an EV a fair test drive - you may be surprised.

In my brief exploration of individual and public reaction to the early motorcars, one thing that did surprise me is that many people thought motorcars would never be practical because of the
the roads. Iron rimmed carts coped fine with mud, nails and stones but rubber tyred and heavier cars got stuck. There was a big infrastructure change needed then as well.

Furthermore, roads at the time were very much pedestrian thoroughfares and gathering places, which horses and horse drawn vehicles made their way through. The idea that this way of using public spaces, which had been the way ever since people came together for long enough to need streets and markets, would be replaced by one where peple just kept to the sides and got out of the way, seemed very unlikely.

Yes, I agree. It was the high-handed attitude of the French government when they introduced their green initiatives that kick started the gilet jaune movement. Which took a massive toll on the French economy.

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

Not true.

In my (home counties) area the vast majority of cat parks are council owned with (council employed) traffic wardens checking them. In my town out of the 4 car parks only the biggest one has ANPR and barriers, same for just about all the other nearby towns. Naturally the handful of charger spaces are at the back of the car park, nowhere near the disabled bays and therefore furthest away from the shops by a significant difference which means you'll tend to not get people parking there if they aren't charging, but also means that a) crap for disabled people with an EV and b) the ones who park there tend to be there all day whatever the state of their charge.

There's some people on here looking towards EVs as the future but realising that there has to be significant change to the infrastructure for it to work for most people - unlikely in the near future with the current state of they country's finances. And there's others who are nit picking and dismissive of anything people say that doesn't fit their personal world view where you can charge cheaply anywhere and we all have good access to charging points, and that everyone can afford either a new car or a good quality second hand one easily,

Our housing estate car parks are owned by a housing association. They can barely fix a toilet or a leaking roof. I don't have any faith they will a) install the necessary 100+ EV chargers and b) ensure non EV's don't hog the spaces.

And then there's some people who will seize on any reason to justify a fundamentally emotional decision. You can tell by the number of unrelated objections they raise and their tendency to jump on and agree with any objection that comes up.

They've taken their position and nothing is going to shift it.

@OooPourUsACupLove

They've taken their position and nothing is going to shift it.

I don’t know. My Daily Mail reading BIL (“I just want to get in my car and drive 500 miles”) traded in a lovely Mercedes 2 seater convertible and came home with a VW ID.3 for an extended test drive with an option to swap back after a week. He loved driving the EV so much they kept it. It’s mostly my sister that drives it because he’s retired, and they still have a petrol convertible “for fun”, but I don’t think they’ll go back.

DS was met with scepticism by petrol-head colleagues when he rocked up at work in a BMW i3, and all the same anti-EV misinformation we’ve seen here ($multi-billion propaganda goes a long way), but being able to simply get in his (preheated) car and drive away when others were still scraping ice off their ICE cars sent quite the signal. One colleague had a plug-in hybrid and after learning a bit more has now got an EV.

And finally, this is the game changer for me. The misinformation about fires, child labour in cobalt mines, weight, winter range, charging speeds, battery longevity and cost etc. are all based in part on “elements of truth” - enough that plausible lies can be pushed out. And all of those are being addressed by a China that is working incredibly hard to tackle global warming and at the same time reduce its dependence on foreign oil, whilst building industries (and military tech, like drones) for the 21st Century.

This video demonstrates how far they have come in only a few years in productionising the sodium-ion battery. Na-ion tech has no expensive ingredients, can function -50°C to 50°C, is virtually fire proof, has much greater cycle-life and can sustain higher charging speeds. It has poorer energy density than less capable chemistries at the moment, but I wouldn’t bet against the Chinese failing to improve that too.

CATL Sodium-ion launch in -30°C Inner Mongolia

And as 10s of millions of cheaper Na-ion cars begin to made, predominately for poorer countries at first, but soon for richer ones too, the economics of ICEVs will change rapidly for the worse - VW and GM are already reeling from the loss of lucrative sales in China.

So people might be quite rigid in their thinking at the moment, but part of that is not having actually driven an EV and part of that is having needs and circumstances that mean an EV cannot work for them right now. And both of those are likely to change for the better in the coming years as the future arrives in more and more places.

Can't read all 33 pages sorry. Has anyone mentioned yet how flipping awesome EVs are to drive?

How well they drive is irrelevant if you have no practical means to charge one. The nearest charging point to where I am now is a 16 mile round trip on unclassified roads.

I am doubtful that this will improve due to lack of potential customers. It is a sparsely populated area.

@Allergictoironing

unlikely in the near future with the current state of they country's finances

This country is (still) one of the richest on Earth, and with 38m fossil fuelled cars on the road imports vast amounts of fossil fuel for them (the UK side of the North Sea is close to economic-exhaustion, particularly at current oil prices). It’s not about the amount of money available (which is mind-boggling).

EV charging infrastructure is mostly privately funded, on the basis that EV sales have grown quickly from 1% to ca. 20%, and the number of EVs is guaranteed to go from ca. 2m to ca. 8m even if sales stagnate.

The reason why the infrastructure is poor in many places is those are the places where brand-new ICEVs were comparatively rarely bought, and the charging companies have mostly focussed on places (and routes) where more EVs are expected to be, so it’s a chicken-and-egg situation.

But with increasing numbers of excellent 2023 and later models hitting the secondhand market, many people like DS and his girlfriend will decide they can benefit (particularly if, like them, they can charge at home), and the charging companies will see it’s economically viable to expand (and deepen) their network.

And the government has realised that some pump-priming is necessary, and is providing some more money to local authorities to help them provide more charging facilities, on the basis of “build it and they will come”, but it will only ever be a small fraction of the amount that private companies will invest. Tesla alone has poured £billions into the UK market, and is expanding rapidly.

This country can afford to transition to EVs, but it cannot do it ahead of the market. 38m ICE cars will only leave the roads in a steady trickle over 40 odd years, since new ones will be bought until (at least) 2035. EVs are the future, but that future will only arrive everywhere over that kind of timescale.

The algorithm is now doing its thing and I'm being pushed stories about people getting parking fines for charging their electric cars in store car parks when the stores are closed!

Why can't you charge it at home?

Contrary to popular opinion, by the way, they can, except things like Teslas, be charge from a 3 pin socket and a granny cable from an ordinary house supply, it just takes a long time.

@Elbowpatch

It is a sparsely populated area.

I’d forgotten that it’s typical in the UK that all sparsely populated areas have petrol stations within a 5 minute drive of everyone ^

My friend’s parents lived in a remote Lake District valley, who had a minimum 30 minute drive to the nearest petrol station so just filled their car when they were in the local town doing something else (grocery shopping, mostly).

I met the people who now live in their old house when I was in the valley at my friend’s mum’s memorial service.

They have an EV. And love it.

Now I get that not everyone in every sparsely populated area will be able to charge at home, and there won’t be good, cheap rapid charging facilities at all supermarkets or other places that people can plan to use at the moment, but that doesn’t rule EVs out for the future. As people have posted several times - petrol was not always so easily obtained either.

^ 🤣

That story was in the Guardian consumer complaints section. And it was a story of someone being burned by the fact that private car parks are being run by rapacious companies who think nothing of putting unreadably small signs 3m up a pole with the t&cs.

I parked an EV in a cinema car park, and got a similar £50 excess charge. But not because it was an EV, it was because it was a car, and there was nothing to tell me to register it in the cinema foyer.

So of course I was onto social media immediately to tell everyone that Cinemas aren’t the future 😂

No mains electricity. It might just be possible in the summer if we didn’t use it too much but for the rest of the year it would require running a diesel generator to charge the car. Which rather defeats the point.

@Imdunfer

Has anyone mentioned yet how flipping awesome EVs are to drive?

Yes. But I’ll post this again since anyone new will also not read back 🤣

Petrol 2-seater loving BIL was a total sceptic, and between him and my sister all the usual BS from the fossil fuel industry was repeated, and he came out with the clichéd “I just want to get in my car and drive 500 miles”.

Then when offered the option of trying an EV for a week as they were looking to trade in one of their 2-seaters, they found they loved driving it, and my sister uses it as a daily driver. They’ve taken it to remote parts of Ireland and Scotland and although they’ve learned that they should have got an EV with a heat pump to help minimise range loss in winter, they still love it.

And we now own a Polestar 2. I used to love driving in the Welsh and Scottish mountains in various ICEVs over the years, but having driven the Polestar on some of those routes I’m never going back, even though we cannot charge at home.

@Elbowpatch

Which rather defeats the point.

You might be surprised. The reason why ICEVs have appalling thermal efficiency is their engines are rarely run at anything close to their peak efficiency point, so they typically waste 80% of the energy out in.

A diesel genset with a decent load on it (say the 7kW needed to charge an EV) might be capable of far better thermal efficiency, and given the round-trip energy efficiency of an EV can exceed 80%, you might easily break even or do slightly better than burning the diesel in a car.

After all, studies have shown that even with a 100% coal-powered grid, EVs are still cleaner than ICEVs, since coal power stations have thermal efficiencies higher than 40% and grid losses are typically only 10% or so.

One thing that is growing is “range-extender” EVs, where a very small ICE is used at peak efficiency to charge the battery from a small tank, rather than having an ICE not really big enough to power the vehicle properly and a battery too small to be of much use (which is the case in many “plug-in” hybrids - arguably the worst of both worlds)

Only idiot thinks that the highly environmentally damaging production of EVs is going to save the planet...

Whilst encouraging more and more airline travel.... set to treble over the next few years but people like you moan on about fucking cars.

The world is screwed (or rather our part on it) our chance to stop climate change has long gone.

Perhaps if we'd changed our ways in the 80s maybe but not now, CO2 emissions are higher than ever, 2.5'c baked in, probably more, we, as a species, have no desire to really limit our behaviors.

Governments around the world are rolling back even their tiniest changes, led by the USA.

It makes me v angry at our stupidity.

@Ayebrow

Have you any idea of the noise a 7kW genset makes at full load? Enduring hours of that would make the umpteen thousand pounds necessary for a grid connection seem like a bargain.

Yes, I could make an EV work if I really wanted to. At the moment, I value the convenience of a two minute fill up lasting 500 miles and not having to waste time and miles making special trips to charge an EV. I may not have any choice in the future.

@Alexandra2001 you are directing your anger in the wrong direction. I didn't claim EVs were going to save the planet (though there's a hell of a lot of misinformation about them funded by the pro-fossil-fuel lobby so do a bit of fact-checking before you claim they are environmentally damaging). I didn't moan, I didn't say anything at all about air travel either for or against and I certainly didn't imply that any choices we can make now would actually halt climate change. I was specifically replying to your question "Where is the incentive to do this?" when you laid out that it's cheaper and more convenient to use a fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine car at the moment. And yes it is. Swapping to an EV will not save the planet or halt climate change, but what it will do is help build momentum towards restructuring market demands to make the world more survivable once the oil has run out, which will benefit our children and grandchildren.

At some point a tipping point will be reached where it is cheaper to run an EV car than a fossil-fuel car, as EVs get cheaper and cheaper due to the efficiencies that grow as they become more popular and fossil-fuels get more and more expensive as they get more and more difficult to extract and the wars to control the regions that produce them get more extreme. The sooner that tipping point is reached, the less unpleasant the shocks will be as the economy changes away from being fossil-fuel dependent - and that change has to happen at some point within the lifetime of our children.

By all means you are welcome to wait until that time before you consider a move - it may not happen in your lifetime but that just means that things are worse than they might have been for those younger than us. Personally, I prefer to try to be part of the change I want to see, and and the fact that this will unavoidably happen in a world that has been irreparably damaged by climate change doesn't stop this from being an incentive for me.

@Alexandra2001 “the world is screwed… our chance to stop climate change has long gone” is the last bullet point on the fossil fuel lobby propaganda checklist. They want us to give up so we’ll let them make a few more billions before we’re all underwater. But you know what - even if that is true, I’d rather live in a world where the air is better to breathe.