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)

@Elbowpatch

Have you any idea of the noise a 7kW genset makes at full load?

Actually I do. I was at the 24h Mountain biking race in Inverness, as pit crew for a friend, and we had parked up just up the hill from the British Army team, who ran a genset all night to power their lighting and heating rigs. Which was nice 😀

I wasn’t seriously suggesting you get an EV now, but I was assuming that you are surviving off grid in winter with a genset anyway. Maybe a smaller one for sure, just for the small stuff, with propane, oil or wood for heating (the same friend’s parents in the Lake District burned wood and then oil, but always had grid electricity)

And my point about “range extender” EVs was serious. In your situation, assuming you need to stop and pick up stuff to take home, and someone decides to put in rapid charging facilities close by at some point (which is increasingly happening in other parts of the UK), you can plug-in, go do that, and keep enough litres in the tank to drive the kind of 500 miles or so you want to do.

There won’t be many people in the UK like you, since grid electricity extends to almost all homes, but I’m guessing that you can also have solar panels and a storage battery during the summer from what you posted before.

And finally, you’ll be able to buy a brand new diesel until at least 2030, and a hybrid one until 2035, and a secondhand one after that until 2050 - no one is saying you have to stop driving a diesel now. By the time EVs are ready to cover your needs with no more effort than you’re prepared to put in now they will do 500 miles on an 80% charge that they will pick up in less than 10 minutes - that kind of tech is already available, it’ll just take a bit of time to become more widely available.

@glowfrog @CactusSwoonedEnding

Missing the point, EVs aren't going to make a smidgeon of difference, they are extremely damaging, maybe less so than an ICE car but not enough to make any difference to the outcomes of climate change.

We have Governments pushing EVs whilst building more and more airports, building more freighters, more military capacity, more re arming... more tourism... more housing on green fields (so more concrete)

Its around 70k kilometers before an EV breaks even on its carbon foot print, so for most people, 5 or 6 years, with bigger EVs (batteries) its longer

Its utterly bonkers that anyone thinks driving a Tesla is "Saving the Planet"

Want to make a real difference, sure, reduce driving but we all want to have our 2 or 3 hols in the sun plus a city break or 4.... so buy a nice EV to make ourselves feel good.

@Ayebrow

Food for thought. I am not anti EV. It’s just that owning one currently requires too many compromises. Plus, for full mobility year round we need 4x4 and that really restricts the choice to a handful of vehicles, most of which are way outside our budget anyway. That may change, but I’m not holding my breath.

That said, no 4x4 could be worked around as long as we have an alternative second vehicle with 4x4 available when needed, and that almost certainly wouldn’t be electric. Expecting one vehicle to do everything is unrealistic.

@Alexandra2001 pls re-read my post. Nowhere do I make the claim EVs will save the planet. I was pointing out that your “giving up” is exactly what the fossil fuel interests want you to do. Because then we’ll stop even trying to curb the worst of their excesses and they can carry on doing whatever they like. That’s what I was talking about.

Fair enough.

You're quite rare, though .......

I appreciate that, although certainly not unique in this locality.

Yes, I agree. Also, the disappearance of little cars (VW Up, Toyota Aygo etc) will lead to more congestion and competition for parking space. EVs only seem to come in two sizes: large and enormous. Yes, petrol cars are also getting bigger, but the little petrol cars available at the moment will be phased out and that will be a loss in the long run for people living in congested areas.

I know they are making electric versions of some of these, but they are quite a bit bigger.

Aygo isn't that much bigger, and they have just made a hybrid version. Toyota have been the only dealer to not make their small cars fully electric yet.

I have been eying up the Hyundai Inster or a BYD Dolphin Surf - we don't need a second car though, even a little one.

@5MinuteArgument I’ve seen electric Mini, Renault 5 and Fiat Puntos, plus there’s the Nissan Leaf, the VW ID3 and many others. Tesla made a success out of selling luxury EV cars and I think many manufacturers went the way of larger cars initially. But that’s changing fast, like many other things about EVs. It’s absurd to say they only to come “in large and enormous.”

Yes apart from i never said i was "giving up" did i...

I'm saying that EVs are a sop so that those who really can make a difference, keep building airports, shipping goods around the world, having their wars... etc etc build power & water/resource hungry data centres for the next climate destroying project - AI... and all we care about is job losses...

You couldn't make it up....

@Alexandra2001 you wrote this:

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.

Sure sounds like giving up to me.

@Alexandra2001 you are still being weirdly ranting and accusing me of random mad stuff that you have no basis for and not actually registering the point I'm making. You have no information about my holidaying (it's irrelevant but I generally don't fly) and I already said that this is not about "saving the planet" - you are arguing against a fantasy that isn't what either myself or @glowfrog are saying so please only tag people if you actually have the capacity to read what was actually said, not a strawman of what you want to pretend was said.

@Alexandra2001

Missing the point, EVs aren't going to make a smidgeon of difference, they are extremely damaging

All cars are damaging, for sure. But we cannot wish away the car. You will have seen on this thread plenty of people that won’t even consider giving up their existing car for the sake of a few extra minutes of time in their lives spent charging rather than filling up.

The car represents freedom for nearly everyone that owns one, so if we want to rescue the planet from global warming we need a solution that allows people that same freedom but with zero carbon cost.

You quote a figure of 70,000 miles for the breakeven point for an EV, but that figure was published in a debunked Volvo paper from several years ago. Rowan Atkinson made it famous in the Guardian, but it was a lie even then. The true figure at that time was something like 15,000 miles, and even that has dropped a lot since China has been building out renewable energy at such a pace that their grid is significantly cleaner.

EVs are marginally more energy (and therefore carbon) intensive to manufacture than convenience cars, but as we increasingly use energy from the sun directly, rather than burning its fossilised form, that carbon pollution will reduce.

And we already know how to decarbonise steel, using green hydrogen rather than coking coal. And metal miners around the world are learning that it is easier to power their (usually very remote) activities with solar power and batteries rather than diesel engines. Increasing numbers of giant mining trucks are fully electric, since regenerative braking makes even more sense when you have a load of several 100 tonnes of ore in the back.

An EV can therefore be made (in the bottom too distant future) 100% carbon free, whereas an ICEV never can be (except in minuscule numbers, burning E-fuels)

Yet EVs on their own solve nothing, and your cynicism is about them is quite justified. But EVs as part of a systemic solution with renewable energy, grid storage, green hydrogen & steel etc. etc. is the route to first stopping the growth of carbon emissions and then bringing them back down.

China is doing a lot in that direction, but not just China. Pakistan has installed so much solar power that they are using their new coal-fired power stations barely enough to service the debts incurred in building them. Ethiopia has banned the import of fossil fuelled cars entirely. Australia rolled out a programme where 200,000 home battery storage units were installed in a just a few months, and has now mandated 3 hours of free electricity each day, with so much rooftop solar power coming online.

And flight? Yes, aeroplanes produce a lot of carbon pollution, but that is just an energy problem - we know how to make E-fuels, they’re just a bit expensive right now. Energy from the sun is free, and the cost of converting that energy to useable electricity is coming down relentlessly. The more EVs are made, the cheaper batteries become. The cheaper batteries become, the cheaper renewable energy becomes because energy storage is what gets us through the night and windless days. So EVs help there too.

I will say it again and again, because fossil-fuelled lies are posted again and again, but individuals will be able to drive ICEVs for decades from now, given how slowly we can convert the vehicle parc. And that doesn’t really matter - what matters for the future is that China and Europe keep working to make EVs cheaper and better so that they become a no-brainer for more and more people, shifting the economics away from fossil fuels and towards a new energy world. Much more rapidly than you fear.

@Ayebrow

convenience cars?!? I missed the edit window.

conventional cars, obvs.

ah yes the classic MN "You re mad/ranting etc etc" when you run out of argument.

You know i'm right.

@Ayebrow I said 70,000 kilometres, not miles.... on the evidence, cannot find anything thats says 15,000miles, the closest was 41,000km approx 3 years driving, in China, this figure was around 10 years.

Yes of course new tech becomes cheaper as there is more uptake.

On flights, newer fuels reduce emissions by around 50% without engine modification... but flight travel is set to increase by 300%, so emissions keep increasing, as they are right now.

We in Western Europe, cannot rely on the sun, ironically, made worse because of climate change.

On Hydrogen, yes, this may well be the future.

But as i ve said, we are problem, we refuse point blank to change our ways, even a little, Govt and Industry need to lead but they refuse, because they too wish to do as they like eg cutting back WFH... surely a fantastic environmental choice? but nope, you must travel by car to work....

On "Giving up" nope, i try and make small differences, so i stopped flying for one, turn back heating and wear a fleece, not because i can't afford it but because "every little helps" as they say.... but EV's? no, they are not a practical alternative for the way we live or work

Whereas “you know I’m right” is a debating master stroke 👌

@Alexandra2001 But as i ve said, we are problem, we refuse point blank to change our ways

If you mean we, people in the UK, we are not the problem. Nothing we can do will have any measurable impact against the rising greenhouse gas emissions of the rest of the world, in particular those with huge populations developing western lifestyles like India and China, and then there's also the USA.

Sorry but its not possible to debate with anyone who accuses the other of being mad/ranting etc

Note, that myself and @Ayebrow have debated without insults or accusations.....

Electric cars are a PITA, bit then the Straits of Hormuz gets blocked and petrol prices start rising so... Meh

@Alexandra2001

cannot find anything thats says 15,000miles

Firstly, apologies for the mile/km mixup, and thank you for adjust the 70,000km figure downwards anyway 😀

I searched afresh this morning, and as I expected, the latest figures I’m finding seem to be better still than 15,000 miles. Multiple sources suggest it’s below 12,000 now, since electricity has in general become cleaner in the last few years, but this source aggregates and links to multiple sources itself, so has done the work for me:

According to multiple lifecycle assessments (including work by Transport & Environment), a medium-sized EV emits around 16.9 tons of CO₂ over its lifetime, compared to 54.3 tons for a gasoline vehicle. That's nearly a 70% reduction. And while EVs start with a slightly higher carbon cost due to battery production, they hit the break-even point after just 11,335 mi/18,243 km of driving (sources: ICCT, Transport & Environment, BloombergNEF, and IEA).

EV Break-even point

But whether it’s 41,000km or 11,335 miles it’s very dependent on assumptions, and it’s still only a measure of relative cleanliness. An EV is still, in its current form, a climate villain, as you’re pointing out.

But as I said, there is no way we can reach a world where private cars are removed from the picture, and as you also point out there are lots of other sources of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, so even tackling private cars is just a fraction of what’s needed.

You may not know this, but the whole idea of people taking individual responsibility for their “carbon footprint” was a creation of BP’s PR agency - they wanted to deflect political attention from the fact that oil & gas companies might be held accountable for their actions in promoting a product that they knew since the 1960s was causing the greenhouse effect to strengthen.

And it has to be said that as a stroke of marketing genius it’s right up there with Toyota’s “self-charging” hybrid. But within the concept is a cunning trap - even if every person on Earth stops flying and driving cars and everything they can possibly do individually they cannot hope to shift the dial far enough, since there are vast areas of the energy economy they have no impact on. And the oil, gas and coal companies know this.

They know that the only thing that will slow, stop and then reverse the damage done by burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels for 200 years is a rapid and wholesale shift away from burning stuff entirely. And that is not something individuals can do. The cleanest living person in the West already has a personal carbon footprint so big that if everyone on the planet matched it we would have no future.

Only governments have the power to effect change at the scale that is needed, and even though Trump has swung his behind fossil fuels, he and his fossil fuel buddies have an uphill struggle against the economics.

In order to replace fossil fuels everywhere we have to find ways to use the Sun’s abundant free energy in every activity where we currently burn fossil fuels. And in order to do that we need batteries to be as cheap as possible, because we already have enough wind and solar power to cover all of our energy needs multiple times over, if we can only store it for use during Dunkelflaute (look it up).

So the EV isn’t just a car. It is a vehicle for accelerating the manufacturing of batteries, and a mechanism to bring down their cost, and in that role it is performing miracles - battery costs are already down 75% in less than 10 years and are way below the $100/kWh benchmark that was set as the point when EVs could be made more cheaply than ICE cars, as China is proving daily (Europe is still playing catch-up)

What I find delightfully ironic is the fossil fuel industry (and Toyota) have succeeded in reducing the rate of uptake of EVs a little since 2022, with a wall of misinformation that we are seeing still echoed on this thread. But the impact of that is there is now spare battery factory capacity that needs to find new customers, and what is happening is some of those batteries are now ending up in grid-scale storage at much lower cost (and home battery products that Australia is rapidly taking advantage of).

And that cheaper battery storage will enable ever lower solar energy costs - Saudi Arabia is now building capacity at less than $20/MWh, which translates to less than 2p/kWh. Saudi Aramco, the world’s richest oil company, now manages 50GW of solar generation around the world, with plans to expand much more. At least some oilmen can see what’s coming at them.

It’s true that the EV cannot solve the global heating crisis on its own, but there is no way to achieve a solution without it. As the Saudi oil minister once said (although he didn’t coin the idea) - “the Stone Age didn’t end because of a lack of stones, and the oil age will not end because of a lack of oil”

@Imdunfer

Nothing we can do will have any measurable impact against the rising greenhouse gas emissions of the rest of the world

It’s true that we only produce a fraction of the greenhouse emissions of India, China and the US, but if all the little counties decide to do nothing on that basis we have lost before the battle has even started.

And we’re not doing nothing. In the space of less than 12 years we removed coal burning from the grid entirely, and now generate more electricity from wind and solar than from burning stuff, with steady growth in renewables (and battery/pumped hydro storage) planned. It wasn’t all that long ago that people claimed a renewables heavy grid was just impossible (sound familiar), but British grid engineers prove that wrong every second of every minute of every day.

We have built multi-GW HVDC interconnectors to France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Ireland, so when one is filling an EV, it might be with UK wind powered electrons, French nuclear ones or Norwegian hydro ones. Increasingly, it’s not with gas-powered ones.

Grid stability isn’t easy, as the Australians, Texans and Portuguese/Spanish have found in recent years, and UK expertise in this field is world class - it’s not for nothing that Octopus Energy’s Kraken platform is being used around the world to help utilities balance energy flows, and they expect that business to grow rapidly.

https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies

And of course we now have almost 2m EVs on the roads, with a steady expansion of charging infrastructure to ensure that number can keep climbing as the other 38m cars in the vehicle parc are electrified over the next 36 years or so.

Call me a “techno-optimist”, but I wouldn’t have had children if I believed there was nothing we could do to prevent the worst of climate change within my lifetime, and I have four. I’m not kidding myself that my individual choices (or the UK’s actions) can do anything at all to pull us back from the brink on their own, but having bought a Nissan Leaf in 2018 and then a Polestar 2 more recently I can only say that they feel as if they’re at least part of the solution, as I explained to @Alexandra2001 ; they’re part of a future I want to help create.

All true, of course. The person I was arguing with was saying that it was our fault that climate change isn't stopping and that isn't true.

We also still, until battery storage catches up, still have a serious risk of dunkelflaut power cuts.

I can can top you on the electric cars. We had a little Axam lead acid battery powered car in 2008, then the first available hybrid, then a Renault Kangoo full electric van (with no heating! ) in 2016.

@Alexandra2001

On flights, newer fuels reduce emissions by around 50% without engine modification...

We in Western Europe, cannot rely on the sun, ironically, made worse because of climate change.

On Hydrogen, yes, this may well be the future.

Those are all three fossil fuel talking points, which speaks to me of how pervasive and successful their “Merchants of Doubt” misinformation campaign has been.

There is no possible way fuels alone have contributed more than a tiny amount of the improvement in aeroplane efficiency improvement, just as petrol and diesel engines in cars are barely improved since their invention, as @OooPourUsACupLove has kindly shown us with the history of the motor car posts.

As I explained earlier, I’m an engineer who who has worked in automotive engineering, but I’ve had exposure to enough aero engine technology to say that the biggest jump in fuel efficiency was the creation of the large bypass turbofan engines like Rolls Royce’s RB211 family, GE90 and PW1000.

Those, coupled with aeroplanes designed to use them in twin engine configuration, and made using carbon-fibre, have radically improved efficiencies along the 50% or so number you mention, but they all still burn kerosene.

Some very sophisticated analysis has shown that the UK could generate all its electricity needs on 3% of its land area - around the same as is taken up by golf courses. We have easily enough solar and wind energy available to cover our entire energy needs in Europe, we just need to build out the infrastructure to do so. Anyone that takes a cursory look at the map of pipelines and oil/gas rigs in the North Sea and crossing from Siberia would not doubt our capacity to build such a solution.

Hydrogen will never be the future for transport. The thermodynamics are essentially against it, let alone the practicalities of using it. Those that push for hydrogen are invariably linked to the fossil fuel industry and its need to maintain its Gilette razor approach to making money (sell the capital equipment cheaply, and the consumables forever)

Green hydrogen’s role will be for use in steel making, fertiliser production (via an ammonia precursor) and longer term energy storage. It’s value in those roles will be immense, but its value in transport will be nil. Even after 30 years of trying, the number of Hydrogen powered vehicles on the road is essentially zero, measured to several decimal places.

EVs are not perfect at the moment, but they are perfectable, with development pathways that are already roadmapped and proven at laboratory, pilot and mass production scale. ICEVs are a technology dead-end and will ultimately exist in a museum.

And that’s no mean thing to say. There’s always a lot of dust in the air when I stand next to a Rolls Royce Merlin engine in the science museum or watch them power the Battle of Britain fly-past at Duxford (Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane). This country was made rich burning wood, coal and then oil & gas.

But the only way for us to build a future is as an electric one, and I intend to be a (tiny) part of that. Filling our Polestar 2 on wind power before a 1,000 mile road trip before Christmas gave me that feeling, and I won’t ever give it up.