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)

Hydrogen? You won't catch me driving round with a tank full of fuel that explosive. Hindenburg, anyone?

"During an electric vehicle fire, over 100 organic chemicals are generated, including some incredibly toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide – both of which are fatal to humans." Source: Bedfordshire fire service

https://www.bedsfire.gov.uk/safety/electric-vehicles#:~:text=Lithium%2Dion%20batteries%20have%20been,asking%20for%20the%20fire%20service.

Lithium batteries can also spontaneously reignite upto 3 weeks after the initial fire. It takes about 4 hours to put out a lithium battery fire Vs 30 minutes for deadly fossil fuel. It's why laptops etc aren't allowed in the hold on planes anymore. Also that vape shop fire in Glasgow.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-66866327

Don't worry, I get it. I recognise the feel good vibes of being able to carrying on driving as before but be absolved on any guilt over carbon footprints. It's just that there are costs to that too, but in different areas.

Interesting that at the death of the thread, after days of quiet, a burst of fossil fuel myths about EVs appear - the old chestnuts from the early 2020s - the fires, the weight, the batteries won’t last etc.

All of those are debunked endlessly and in detail in the previous 37 pages, but here we go again:

1. ICEVS are far more likely to catch fire, as shown by detailed statistics from Norway. Hybrids are by far the most risky from a fire perspective
2. EV fires when they occur can be nasty, and require different techniques and equipment to extinguish, but that’s why we have fire brigades and not a bunch of amateurs with buckets
3. All cars have become relatively bigger and heavier, mostly in the interest of safety, but also because of the desire of many to drive a hulking SUV (of whatever power train)
4. No-one talked about cars getting heavier until it was in the interests of the fossil fuel industry to push out the message that “EVs are heavy”
5. What damages roads is the failure to repair small holes and much bigger vehicles than cars driving on them - cars (of any size) do little in comparison to trucks and buses weighing 10x as much - think logically people!
6. EV batteries are being built with warranties and expected lifespans that reflect the fact that experience is showing they will outlast the vehicle in most cases
7. Early EVs did have poorer battery thermal management, but that has improved hugely. DS’s BMW i3 is heading towards 100,000 miles at 7 years old, and is showing virtually zero reduction in range
8. Newer EVs are being built with LFP batteries which are not only even less likely to catch fire than earlier chemistries, but have greater longevity still
9. Many EVs in future will be made with sodium-ion batteries, that are virtually fireproof, function at -50°C to +50°C and will last longer still than LFP

Ultimately, the types of EV that were on the road 10 years ago are not going to be the future (remember the OP’s original question) - future EVs will be the future, based on how quickly the technology has improved they will be even better than they already are, and believe me, they are already amazing to drive and live with. We as a family are never going back, and we know many others in the same position.

What I can guarantee is that ICEVs will disappear into the history books, classic car collections and museums (working or otherwise). It will take many decades to happen, and I won’t live to see it, sadly, but it will happen. If China and Norway (and other countries) are any guide it will be quicker than many suspect.

The fossil fuel industry hates that fact but can do little to prevent better technology from dominating, even though it has the money to pump out lies and start endless wars to try and delay the inevitable. The sooner we are shot of that baleful stuff the better.

Don't disagree with much of that.

My contention is that EVs are not the environmental saviour the EV industry would have us all believe, to limit the worst effects of CC, we need to radically change our lifestyles and expectations, 11 billion all flying, driving EVs etc etc is totally unsustainable.

On cars getting heavier, damaging roads etc and more likely to kill other road users, is something of growing concern over many years, ist not an EV recent thing.

But of course its the slashing of road mtce, with very shoddy repairs, far greater car volumes is the real issue.

I don't know why you quoted me in replying to that, especially not with the "hands raised in frustration" emoji. My post made it perfectly clear that I understood all of that. Frankly you would have to be an idiot not to, so thanks for that insult 🤣.

For the present time, my advice to anyone is if you need to repeatedly take journeys that will empty the battery, don't buy an electric car, the fast charge infrastructure is not yet in place.

But if you’re towing a caravan 7 hours down to Cornwall you’re going to need to make more stops

🤔 realistically, how often do people towe a caravan to Devon. Why not add charging time to the overall journey? If you change your thinking and planning, you'll find an EV will do nicely.

"They catch fire all the time" is another one that's come from the barrage of anti EV PR that's been streaming out of the petrochemical industry for two years now.

It is true that Volvo has a recall of for a design flaw right now, but it's just that, a design flaw. Taken as a percentage of sales most fires take place because of inflammable liquid fuel and hot engines.

Liverpool horse show car park, anyone?

Don't worry, I get it. I recognise the feel good vibes of being able to carrying on driving as before but be absolved on any guilt over carbon footprints. It's just that there are costs to that too, but in different areas.

Oh please stop being so patronising and making dumb assumptions about other people's motives.

I drive one, and have for all the years they've been available, because it cost 2p per mile in fuel to run and is a brilliant driving experience.

The infrastructure change in recent months. is pretty striking. Used a BP mass fast charging station a few weeks ago, clearly brand new. Walked past a Shell Recharge station yesterday, ten chargers, coffee shop etc, no liquid fuel stands there, again brand new. It’s interesting to see. We switched over just after lockdown, things were different then.

@PermanentTemporary

The infrastructure change in recent months. is pretty striking

We have found that too. We were hiring EVs for several years for long trips before we bought our own, and the recent improvement in rapid charging facilities is very noticeable (although I think rural areas, particularly central Wales, aren’t yet so good).

I think that many* people that have been persuaded to get a plug-in hybrid will regret that decision very quickly - why lug an ICE and petrol tank around in town, and an empty (small) battery on the motorway, when more and more EVs have 250-300+ miles real-world range? They will see the rapid charging facilities and realise that this “best of both worlds” nonsense is really “worst of both worlds”.

*not all

And I still live in a house with no drive and free for all onscreen parking near a high street and major employers.

On STREET parking. Although it may as well be onscreen sometimes 😄

This is worth a read for anyone that really wants to understand the future of cars and ignore the fossil fuel propaganda against EVs:

BYD just killed your (anti-) EV arguments

“BYD just destroyed any remaining argument against electric vehicle adoption. At a March 5 launch event in Shenzhen, China, it announced the Blade Battery 2.0, a new battery that can drive more than 621 miles on a single charge
…
According to the official figures announced at the event, high-volume production BYD cars like its new Denza Z9GT now can drive over 621 miles on a single charge, add roughly 250 miles of range in the time it takes to order a coffee, and rely on a battery pack that refuses to die before the car does, with a guaranteed 620,000-mile lifetime unheard of in any EV.”

And it’s only 2026. Anyone who believes that ICEVs have much of a future beyond the next replacement cycle is drinking the fossil fuel Kool Aid, given the pace of evolution that electric vehicles are undergoing.

So by all means drive your ICEV until it needs scrapping, and perhaps buy a new ICEV (or hybrid) for a few years longer - just know that by the time that new vehicle needs to be scrapped (2040-2050) you will likely be struggling to find a filling station for such ancient technology.

You may have changed my mind...

A range of plus 500 is pretty amazing, with 5min charge!

ATM a new car is out of the question, but perhaps when the time comes to scrap the car, i always run my cars into the ground, much more environmentally friendly.
An EV like the BYD but a European car, will be a realistic option? (i'm not keen on our increasing reliance on Chinese tech)

@Alexandra2001

An EV like the BYD but a European car, will be a realistic option? (i'm not keen on our increasing reliance on Chinese tech)

Apologies for the long answer, but it’s not an easy question to answer in just a few words - the Europeans and UK are just in the middle of a huge tussle about what counts as a “European car”, so it’s a highly pertinent question.

The precise mix of Chinese tech in EVs (and indeed anything) is going to be an interesting thing to watch in the next few years. The Europeans and Americans took the decision to facilitate China’s rapid entrance into the global economy and greedily took advantage of very low labour rates (and environmental/ethical standards) to shut down a lot of manufacturing here and to make more money there.

And at the same time China saw the opportunity to dominate in the “new energy” sector, when we were still reliant on fossil fuels.

As a result, nearly all the development of advanced battery manufacturing is done in China, although we still carry out a lot of basic research into battery chemistry (the Nobel prize for the development of Lithium-ion batteries was shared between the UK, US and Japan).

It is a Chinese company (Envision) that makes the batteries for Nissan in Sunderland and for Renault in Doui, and I believe CATL and BYD are setting up factories in Hungary, although not sure whether they’ll bring their battery cells from China to build into packs there, or complete packs just to assemble into cars - a lot depends on those decisions around “local content” that are still in flux.

BMW and Volvo build their cars in Europe, but I believe still bring the battery cells (and possibly packs) from China. Ford has entered into a partnership with Renault to build EVs in Europe, so most likely will use the Envision tech, but in the US Ford is partnering with CATL to make the LFP batteries in Michigan, which are the same sort of batteries that Tesla uses in many of their cars (standard range Model 3)

BYD and CATL are now so far ahead of the everyone else that I suspect their core cell chemistry and manufacturing will become dominant, but that is just relatively passive electrochemistry and mechanical engineering - European car manufacturers will want to own (or at least control) all the systems and software that makes up the overall vehicle management systems where they can, and I believe the strongest companies will manage to do that.

So I believe that the approach Renault, Nissan and BMW are following will mean they will create “European cars” with some Chinese battery tech underpinning them, and it will be a “watch this space” to see how successful they are at keeping ownership of their vehicle designs.

It’s all happening astonishingly quickly. When we bought the secondhand Leaf back in 2018 it was only as a daily local runaround with never any intention to take it on trips longer than 40-50 miles or so, and only to destinations where a top-up charge was guaranteed so we could get home.

The fact that cars with 500+ mile ranges are now being launched, with very long battery lifespans being proven in the real world, suggests that by the time you need to replace your vehicle you may find a lot of attractive options in the new or secondhand markets, and we’ll all know more about how the geo-politics has panned out - I’m beginning to trust China a little more than I trust other countries that are nominally our allies but seek openly to undermine us.

Recent events are beginning to sharpen the focus in other countries around what EVs can do to help remove dependence on highly volatile global oil markets:

Replacing 1m petrol cars with EVs could cut Australia’s reliance on foreign fuel by 1bn litres a year

And this is a reminder that renewable energy in the UK is helping to keep wholesale electricity costs low, whatever the lies being told by various mendacious politicians against moves towards “Net Zero”.

With wind power dominating in the UK the last few days, wholesale electricity prices are being held well below £100/MWh at off-peak times (that’s 10p/kWh) - at the moment it’s less than £70/MWh because we’re generating the equivalent of around 20 nuclear reactor’s worth of electricity from wind power.

When gas generators get to set the price, typically at peak times or when renewables aren’t generating enough to be the marginal producer, the wholesale price rockets towards £200/MWh, and in the period when Russian gas was being shut out of European markets it frequently reached £300-400/MWh.

Drax Electric Insights

As long as we keep expanding our use of wind, solar and energy storage we will see increasing amounts of locally generated clean energy keeping costs lower, whereas oil & gas prices are set in global markets, even if drilled domestically. You only have to see the recent announcements of Shell’s share price going up to see who benefits from the global oil price heading up again.

Electric cars last longer than expected, and are getting better and cheaper. They typically last around 10 years with the one battery, and service costs are typically up to 50% less across the lifetime. Battery designs are improving rapidly, and modular designs mean only the faulty cells can be replaced, massively reducing costs and meaning that 10 years is going to increase as time goes on.

Lithium mining is not amazing, but a fraction of the co2 production that oil extraction has still. And lithium mining is and will continue to get better. Lower range cars will have new options with batteries that don't even need lithium coming, reducing the need on top of this.

Battery recycling is pretty efficient, up to 95% of the main metals from the battery can be reused. And that's just what we can do today.

Also we are hovering around 50% or just below of electricity generation from renewables per year not including nuclear. With nuclear, we are well past 50% not coming from fossil fuels, so not most. And that is now, it is only going to get better.

You points are a bit odd. We are at the beginning of the journey for the technology still really in every single area related to it. Not only is it not as bad as you are claiming right now, and is better for the environment, but it is going to get massively better again over the coming decades. What exactly do you expect to happen even if you were completely right? It's not completely perfect now, so we should stop and go back to fossil fuels?

Have you looked at the subsidies?

Wind energy subsidy to the wind farm owners was £1.9 billion in 2025, £15 billion being spent on getting people to go solar, I can't easily find a figure on how much the solar farms are being subsidised.

I love it when people quote how low the price for wind power is per unit when the wind is blowing and the power is needed, and completely leave out of the figures that wind generators are paid to turn off the turbines when there's a ton of wind but low demand.

I am not against renewables, I'm all for them with proper planning, not on the basis of net zero zealotry. And I'm violently against covering thousands of acres of countryside with solar panels when we're still allowing builders to sell houses with none and there are so many suitable roofs on big buildings and barns without them.

As far as I can see, subsidies for oil and gas are vastly higher than subsidies for renewables, like about 10 x higher in the UK. Am I wrong @imdunfer ? And personally I would see subsidies for renewals as more like investment - particularly as the oil wars over the past 20/50/150 years (depending on your perspective) aren’t exactly likely to stop.

@Imdunfer

Wind energy subsidy to the wind farm owners was £1.9 billion in 2025

That number is utterly dwarfed by the £100 billion fossil-fuel related costs of the energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine:

Reaching net zero by 2050 ‘cheaper for UK than one fossil fuel crisis’

“Reaching net zero would cost about £4bn a year, the CCC found, or close to £100bn by 2050, which was roughly equivalent to the energy-related costs of the fossil fuel shocks that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

It is also dwarfed by the amount of money wind power has cut from the UK’s energy costs since 2010:

Wind power has cut £104bn from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds

“from 2010 to 2023, energy from windfarms resulted in electricity bills being lower by about £14.2bn than they would have been if gas had been needed to generate the same amount of power.
^^
However, the reduction in the cost of gas that could be attributed to wind generation – owing to the cut in demand and not needing to build new infrastructure – was much greater, at about £133.3bn.
^^
Over the same period, consumers paid about £43.2bn in green subsidies, levied on electricity bills rather than gas bills. The net result was a reduction of £104.3bn in UK energy bills over the 13-year period, according to the researchers.”

It is true that wind farm operators are paid constraint payments, but those are at times when there is insufficient grid capacity, not insufficient demand, so it’s a temporary issue as additional grid capacity is constructed (including 4 undersea links between Scotland and England)

The vast majority of wind capacity in the UK is working under Contracts for Difference rather than the older schemes involving direct subsidies, so when wholesale prices rise above the CfD strike price windfarm operators pay the difference into a pool which is used to provide the money to pay them when the price falls below the strike price. The net effect of that is that in 2022-2024, as fossil fuel companies were minting unconstrained profits, CfD windfarm operators paid around £1billion into reducing bills.

I agree that house builders should be installing solar panels on every new house, and they would have done since 2015 had Cameron not cancelled the regulations that were in place for 10 years to allow the industry to adjust.

The cost of energy is going to be high regardless of what we do, since we will need to replace very old gas and nuclear power stations in the next 10 years or so. The facts are, however, that going with renewables + storage is going to be a lower cost option, deliver far greater energy security, and avoid being held to ransom by rapacious fossil fuel companies keen to milk every £ of profit from crises like the one we’re in the middle of now.

I think I might be a bit confused about wholesale electricity costs. I thought any use of gas- even 1%- caused all electricity to be charged at the cost of gas generated electricity- is that not right?

Not everyone is eligible for subsidies. We paid for our solar panels ourselves.

For the last two days we have not paid for any electricity, the standing charge has been covered by our exports to the grid. The washing machine, dishwasher and tumble dryer have all been used each day.

I do agree that solar panels need to go on the rooftops. Look at all the supermarkets with their enormous roofs and car parks. I have seen supermarket car parks in other countries where they have solar panels over the cars - so energy is produced when it's sunny and you don't get wet when it rains - win win. The power used by supermarkets to keep them artic inside must be horrendous and what about hospitals, they have large roofs and I am sure they would benefit from reduced bills as they normally keep the temperature on the wards akin to the Sahara.

@crackofdoom

I think I might be a bit confused about wholesale electricity costs. I thought any use of gas- even 1%- caused all electricity to be charged at the cost of gas generated electricity- is that not right?

It’s true that gas generation drives the price a lot of the time in the UK, and certainly more than in the rest of Europe, but it’s not a straightforward process.

Some electricity is bought on long term supply contracts, but what is left of the demand has to be supplied at a price set via various auction markets run by the network system operator to hold the system in balance (and attempt to maintain competition). This is a pretty good source to explain the various markets that are run

Wholesale trading: what are the different markets and how do they work?

Put simply, suppliers bid for each hour and half hour slot, based on forecast demand and renewable energy supply on a day-ahead, intraday and continuous basis, and they clear each time slot at the price of the lowest marginal offer in the day ahead and intraday markets and on a bid-by-bid basis in the continuous one.

So say the day ahead forecast demand 01:00 to 01:30 is 32GW, and there is forecast to be 18.5GW of wind power and 3.5GW of nuclear available during that period. The wind and nuclear power generators know that there is 25GW of gas-fired and other capacity competing to satisfy the remaining 10GW, so they bid lower than the marginal cost of gas, which is perhaps £70/MWh, so they bid £50/MWh for their 22GW total capacity.

The gas generators might bid a range of prices, say:

5GW: £50/MWh
5GW: £67/MWh <- 32GW reached
5GW: £90/MWh
5GW: £120/MWh
5GW: £150/MWh

The auction closes at £67, which is the lowest price that can clear the whole 32GW, and all bidders receive that price. So it is gas generation that has set the price, even though it is a little lower than the marginal cost of gas.

What if things are tighter? If renewables are much lower, then the much more expensive gas bidders will set the price, which is what we normally see at peak periods, since we still don’t have excess wind power at those times. And since the gas generators know they hold all the cards they don’t muck around with low prices - they’ll all bid well north of their marginal costs.

Why does any gas generator bid at lower than marginal cost? Or even at negative prices? That is complex - a combined cycle gas turbine generating set takes a lot of time to heat up, so they can’t just be switched on and off. Their market power derives precisely because they can be controlled, but that has limits. Typically they can “hot start” within an hour or something, but only if they have been running within the last few hours.

So sometimes, you can see that gas capacity has bid negative prices into the market to guarantee that their energy is sellable, and they are running the turbines with only 10% of their nominal output (the minimum stable demand), so that they can deliver 100% at a later time at higher prices.

Attached is an excellent example of that, where the wholesale price is negative, and the gas generation is absolutely minimal, with wind and solar delivering nearly all the demand. But it’s most likely that the gas generation has driven the price negative. Solar and wind power generators don’t need to bid at negative prices because they can simply switch off if their energy isn’t needed - they don’t need to keep running and burning fuel just so they can supply future demand as the thermal generators need to.

So gas generation frequently sets the price in the UK, even at minimal levels, but that is a function of the fact it is dispatch-able but not on a minute-by-minute basis, with a need to plan that dispatch over many hours to avoid the turbines going cold.

The reason why gas dominates the price setting process in the UK is we don’t have enough alternatives that are dispatch-able. Which is why there are many battery storage projects coming online in the next few years. Those should enable large amounts of excess wind and solar power to be stored and then bid into the market to compete with gas. And since their marginal energy costs will typically be lower than gas they should pull the peak-level wholesale prices down quite dramatically.

Looks like Pakistan is heading towards the future too…

How Pakistan’s people-led solar boom is easing impact of Middle East energy crisis

Imran said doubling down on investments to roll out electric vehicles, updating the grid and supporting the deployment of batteries that can store excess solar power and discharge it in the evenings would help the country reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

“If anything, the crisis will probably motivate more people to adopt rooftop solar as well as battery storage in the future. For Pakistan, and I think for a lot of other countries, the energy transition towards renewables is no longer just about climate but it’s a matter of energy security,” she added.

The are just south (edited to add, Southwest for pedants) of china and are increasingly dependent on them so it makes sense to hoover up their EV car surpluses