View Single Post
  #4  
Old 2nd January 2022, 12:02
Mister Towed's Avatar
Mister Towed Mister Towed is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Posts: 5,328
Mister Towed is on a distinguished road
Default

Fascinating video which really shows that EV battery range and both charger availability and reliability will need to improve massively before you can realistically undertake a lengthy road trip in a (budget???) electric car.

The Honda e looks good and clearly drives nicely, but it's really only a small supermini, and at £31k it's a mighty expensive one.

At 120 Euro's worth of top ups for the 1,000 miles covered, it's also not much cheaper than a conventional supermini would have cost for the same journey.

As an example, my 2016 Nissan Pulsar (Golf class but was just under £12k brand new from a Nissan dealer), has a 115bhp 1.2 petrol turbo motor, cost £30 a year in road tax and returns a genuine low 50's mpg on long motorway runs, so would use about 20 gallons on the same journey. At current fuel prices in my neck of the woods, that would cost around £130 to £140 to cover 1,000 miles.

It does have a stupidly small fuel tank, however, so I would have to stop twice to fill up, which takes ten minutes if you factor in a leg stretch and a wee. So, given the empty motorways driven in the 1,000 mile EV test, I could do that journey in about 15 hours without breaking the speed limit.

I can see it working if you simply must have an EV because of your environmental concerns and have a home charger installed, but even then your daily commute could only be up to a 60 mile round trip. You'd also probably need to keep a fossil fueled vehicle handy in case you needed to dash from London to Inverness in a day, so hey, here's an idea: why not help save the planet by only buying the one car that can do both short and long journeys?

Imagine how many resources would be saved and how much pollution from the manufacturing process would not be released into the atmosphere if millions of us keep our old cars and don't switch to electric...
Reply With Quote