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)

But I don't want to have to think about having to do something else whilst the car is charging. I don't want to have to go and collect it after 3 hoursor drag the kids out late to some distant charging facility when it has charged and find somewhere else to park it and hope that it's close to home. I have better things to do.

I don't want to sit around for half an hour paying for an overpriced coffee and electric in a random service station when I could be actually going somewhere or being able to choose to have a nice coffee in a pretty non chain coffee shop with a pretty view instead.

"I don't want to have to think about having to do something else whilst the car is charging"

That makes no sense.

If you are driving and parking somewhere, unless you just randomly drive your car around for no reason you are already doing something. So you just charge the car while you ... do it.

If you are on the motorway but prefer to sit at a nice coffee shop, you just use one of the many charging map apps, or google maps, to find a charger nearby.

And the idea that charging facilities are "distant" - where I live if I'd have to drive past at least 10 EV charging points to get to a petrol station!

It really is funny how hard it is for people to let go of the idea that charging has to be as inconvenient as petrol.

There can be chargers in every street because unlike petrol we don't have to build a special facility because the stuff is so flamable that it can only be kept in a few places. You can set it to charge while you shop or meet a friend or have a meal so see a movie because unlike petrol you don't have to stand out in the cold holding a pump waiting for it to be done. And while not everyone can have a home charger, unlike petrol it's actually possible for a fair number of people to refuel at home! 😂

I guarantee that 95% of the people who have all the reasons EVs are worse than petrol have never actually tried living with one. (For the 5% who have tried it and for some reason it wasn't for them - fair play)

Isn't that why they're talking about pay per mile tax?

By not charging different amounts for the same exact thing depending on whether you have a drive or not?

Exactly

The cost of charging an EV at home is about 8p per mile - even cheaper if on an advantageous tariff or using solar panels; the cost using public rapid chargers is about 15 to 20p per mile.

No driveway = far more expensive.

It may get you a secondhand EV. We got our 5 year old secondhand EV for around that price last year. Brand new EVs are coming down in price too depending on what you need.

A fair number of drivers ignore the below 20% thing, my DH certainly does XD

At public chargers, charging about 80% makes no sense because after 80% the rate of charge slows down significantly. At we charge the car fully but the extra time it takes to charge doesn't matter and some trips we do actually need the full battery due to distance.

The point about a rest stop is valid. We needed a rest stop before we needed to charge and by the time we needed to charge we needed a nother rest stop anyway. The point is, that it doesn't tend to add much extra time to the journey.

I really like my EV. I am lucky enough to have a driveway, but I charge from a regular power point, not an expensive, specially installed outlet. I have saved a heap of money compared to petrol.

It is a mindset change remembering to charge overnight but now that I’m used to it, I rarely need to find a charging point when I’m out and about.

On a recent holiday, by the time we’d been to the loo and bought snacks the car was already charged. It really doesn’t take long to get from 20% to 80% at a service station, and I do the occasional balancing charge to 100% at home.

The main surprise has been how much grunt it has. I thought I would be toddling along, but on the motorway, even on max eco/regeneration mode, I easily maintain speed up hills and when overtaking.

For the OP, why not a hybrid?

EVs have more torque than an ICE engine, so yes, they're much better at hills and overtaking.

Guessing you’ve not checked the price of replacement batteries then 😂

Evs use literally a tiny bit of battery while at a stand still. 🤔

I wouldn't get one if you can't have a home charger. Public charging regularly would become very expensive.

Here here

Never understood them myself.

Yep, this is my view too!

Unless you really want an electric car I would go for a second hand petrol/diesel one for now.

Yeah, probably still around the price of running a petrol car taking into account each mile being cheaper but the batteries being ludicrously expensive!

We have one on our street in South London!

Still driving an old ford focus mind.

In practice, individual bad experiences notwithstanding, batteries seem to be outlasting the cars though. People expected useful EV battery life to be 8-10 years, but it's turned out to be much, much more.

In most streets unless you coukd have a dozen attached to easy and manage the cables that isn’t going to help. My street has lots of terraced houses and very few streetlights due to the brightness of the new style lights.

I’ve had an EV for 6 years now. Mine is the equivalent of the Nokia 3310 of electric cars, a 2015 reg Nissan leaf.

Compared to newer models it has a tiny range - 80 miles in summer.

But as a second car it’s been bloody brilliant. In 5 years we recouped its (comparatively expensive) purchase price in savings on fuel.

Yes, if we go on long journeys we often use DH’s old diesel, but that happens just a few times per year. Otherwise it is perfectly suited for usual school runs/visiting friends/kids activities/shopping trips etc.

We have a drive and every evening I plug it into the ‘granny charger’ which is plugged into an outside 3 point socket. It charges overnight and is good to go again come morning. I don’t need to think about it. I’m so relieved not to have the ‘oh bollocks!’ moments I had in my old car when you realised you needed to detour to get fuel but were already short on time (live in a village and going to a petrol station is a 15 min detour).

We’ll run this one into the ground and when it dies get a new to us model that dies 250ish miles a pop and it’ll then meet all our needs.

Where I live all the houses were built in the 1700s-1800s (pre cars!) the lanes are narrow and a lot of the cottages front straight onto the street. Barely anyone has a drive. I’m all for saving the planet but cannot see how any of us could have electric charging points without compromising pavement or road space. Hybrid is probably the best bet for many but I’ll be sticking with petrol until I can’t.

@MittensTheKittens

i regularly travel 250 miles + between breaks, unfortunately electric motorcycles have at best 100 mile ranges and can’t carry both of us plus luggage so we will stick with petrol. Car has to be petrol as no charging here due to the estate layout and rules, public charging is £££

I think we’ve a way to go yet, after I sat, opposite the charging points at Cherwell Valley service station the other evening for about 20 min (eating dinner in my car), watching the drivers queue and jostle for space at the chargers. It just seemed like such an inconvenience if you regularly drive on longer journeys (although I see the appeal more if used locally)

That's not the only advantage. When the lights went off in Storm Goretti, the neighbours over the road with the solar panels and battery storage stayed lit up.

Some local early adopters managed to run their house electricity off their EVs.

To be fair, I think the balance will tip enormously in favour of EVs for most people once wireless charging has been brought in. It will be especially appreciated once people can charge whilst on the move, on motorways and other major routes.

We're just not there yet!

I'm not sure that wireless charging like that will ever be realistic. The costs involved in installing the charging infrastructure, and the inefficiencies of that kind of wireless power transmission, are both serious impediments.

There's a reason why wirelessly charging your phone takes so much longer than using a cable, and that's with your phone's charging coil less than a millimetre away from the coils in the charging mat. There'll be a much bigger gap between your car's charging coils and the road's, plus a lot more power required. The basic physics involved aren't on your side for this sadly.