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General chatter This is the place to talk about anything kit car related that doesn't come under any of the other categories |
18th May 2021, 20:59
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Going all electric, watch this video first !
Just a few reasons to perhaps reconsider before you buy an all electric car !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwevvreoNjE
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12th July 2021, 09:54
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucky@LeMans
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Oh dear, three hours just to end up parked back at home with no more range than you started with when all you wanted to do was 'fill up' ready for a long drive?
Impressive though the Taycan Turbo S definitely is, if you can't charge it up it's a £140,000 paperweight.
Welcome to the future of motoring
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1st January 2022, 23:55
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Another video of a 1000 mile all electric road trip. How many stops to recharge, 5 . 10, 15 or more ? How long to do the 1000 miles, 15 hours, 20, 25 or more ?
Several questions here to ask yourself before you go electric !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vOT4Z3HclM
Last edited by Lucky@LeMans; 1st January 2022 at 23:57..
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2nd January 2022, 13:02
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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...
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2nd January 2022, 15:00
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I can't imagine my French road trips would be viable in an electric car. Maybe in the distant future if battery technology and charging infrastructure improves massively. At the moment your journey would revolve around planning your route from one charger to the next and being prepared to sit and wait for an available charger and waiting again for it to charge ( if the charger is working ).
My Audi A6 will on the other hand do over 600 miles on a tank of diesel and return over 45 mpg. So two fill ups taking 10 minutes and you're on your way. As for the environment it's way better than an EV being charged at a service station via a massive diesel generator which is the case at the moment !
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2nd January 2022, 16:24
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I can only imagine in the next couple of years EV's will be everywhere on our roads. Most of the car ads on TV are for EV's so that's where it's heading. I can also envisage the ques at charging points and the road rage that will go with it ! If every car will need 45 minutes for some juice just how long will the ques get ? How long before we hear about road rage stabbings at the local charging point thanks to a que jumper ?
Our local paper recently featured a smug looking council official showing off TWO charging points on their property ! He really thought he and the council were saving the world the way the story read ! Another local initiative here was the council buying a field near a neighbouring town for £300,000 of tax payers money. They intend to leave the field alone and let it go back to nature, thus off setting the councils CO2 emissions, because they own it ! Meanwhile huge housing developments are being granted planning permission all around the area, you couldn't make it up !!
Rant over !
Last edited by Lucky@LeMans; 2nd January 2022 at 16:39..
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2nd January 2022, 19:35
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Lengthy queues and charger rage were my thinking too, which is why I suggested that a 60 mile round trip will be about the limit for the Honda e. During the video there are a couple of occasions when he has to switch to another charger because the first one he tried wouldn't work. What happens if other people are waiting when you try to move from one to the other? My guess is that wouldn't end well.
Also, the number of charging points needed is going to be phenominal. The college I worked at had over four hundred parking spaces and one charger. My local Tesco has around 200 spaces and two chargers, which always seem to be occupied when the store is open.
There are currently estimated to be 370,000 electric cars on UK roads and their users are already having to wait for a charger. If we replace all of the fossil fueled cars currently registered in the UK, almost thirty-three million of them, with plug in electric cars, the queues will be five miles long in every direction and traffic will come to a complete standstill. We got a good example of that when there was a fuel shortage a couple of months ago. It was chaos with roads blocked by queuing vehicles all over the country. I joined the queue at my local filling station and there was nearly a riot when a staff member came out and told all the 4x4 owners that they were out of diesel. A few minutes later a white van tried to jump the queue by driving in the exit, only to throw a fit when he found that the diesel pumps were dead. How I laughed.
The future of motoring is electric. The future of motoring is dystopian.
Last edited by Mister Towed; 2nd January 2022 at 19:41..
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3rd January 2022, 10:54
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370,000 electric cars on UK roads but only 42,000 public charging points ! Sales of EV's grew by 186% last year too so we can see where this is going !
The horse and cart will be making a come back by the end of the century !
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5th January 2022, 09:32
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There's another issue with running an EV for many people which was created by Tony Blair's Government in the early 2000's, and that is the restriction on parking spaces for new build homes.
In order to reduce the number of vehicles on our roads due to environmental concerns, that administration decided to limit parking on new-build developments built from 2004 onwards to 1.6 spaces per household.
The reasoning was: if the plebian classes had nowhere to park, we'd all give up our cars and use the integrated network of public transport to satisfy our travel needs. Ha ha ha ha ha. Stop it, I'll wet me'self.
That's fine if your idea of public transport is a chauffuer driven Jag on call 24-7 at the taxpayers' expense (I'm looking at you, John Prescott), but it's less convenient if you live in a rural part of the country and work early, late and night shifts in a Hospital or Police Station twelve miles away from your house, which was the position for my wife and I and many of our countryside dwelling neighbours.
LIke many rural Towns and villages, we have no bus services at all and, although we have a railway station, the trains don't run if you start or finish your shift during unsocial hours, which is common.
We live in a house on a medium sized housing estate which was built between 2002 and 2005. We're lucky, our house was completed in September 2003 before the parking restriction was applied and every house in our street, ranging from two-bed semis to four bed detached, has at least two off-road parking spaces and most have a garage. We have six spaces - a double garage takes two and our double width drive can comfortably accommodate four more.
That means we could all plug at least two EV's into an outside wall socket for an overnight charge without having to trail the leads across public rights of way.
For many of us, then, an EV might make sense once the price comes down. If your daily commute is only 40 to 60 miles round trip and you can charge up at home, you don't need a charger en-route or at your workplace, you just top up when you get home and everything is rosy.
100 metres further into the estate, however, the houses were constructed under the new regulations, so 1.6 spaces per household on average. The issue is that the developer carried on building the same styles of property as in our phase, so there are lots more four and five bed houses with four or more parking spaces. That means for each one of those, at least two properties couldn't have a space, and there are indeed rows and rows of terraced houses with no off-street parking at all. The result is that every inch of the pavement through most of the estate has cars and vans parked on it on both sides of the road (which is very narrow by design as a 'traffic calming' measure). This makes it extremely hazardous for pedestrians and vehicles alike to navigate through the jam of parked vehicles and looks extremely unsightly.
How the hell are all those vehicles going to get charged up at home if they have to trail a lead across the pavement? How many law suits will be launched for injuries caused by trips and falls over the cables? How many times will people get up in the morning and find that their cable has been unplugged by mischievous young scallywags, or serruptitiously plugged into someone else's EV overnight leaving insufficient range in their car to get to work?
Is the future is electric? Not round here it isn't.
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5th January 2022, 17:58
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If you Google Public Transport, your home postcode and work postcode, it will give you the best options.
For me that would equate to a 4 1/2 hour bus ride arriving at midday. We start at 07.00 and finish at 15.30 so it doesn't really work for me ! I'll drive myself, it takes 25 minutes for the 18 miles.
Lots of new housing developments are going up in my area as part of the Governments, "South Worcestershire Development Plan".
That's fine but most of the villages where they are building are remote and have no public transport and no work. Malvern Hills Council declared a " Climate change Emergency" a couple of years ago and appointed a team of volunteers to look into it and resolve the problem !!
Last edited by Lucky@LeMans; 5th January 2022 at 18:21..
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5th January 2022, 20:46
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Coincidentally I've had two relevant 'incidents' today:
My car broke down. Well, more precisely, it wouldn't start. I'd driven it to a place about half a mile from home to pick up some stuff and when I came back to it, it turned over really slowly a couple of times without firing before stopping, then just clicked when I turned the key. With no hint of irony, the battery was completely dead. It wasn't completely unexpected as it's now five years old and the stop start had stopped stopping a few days ago, so I knew the battery was on the way out.
Short story even shorter, I walked home, ordered a new battery from Halfords (£160), had some lunch then took my wife's car to collect it half an hour later. The battery took less than ten minutes to replace (thank you Nissan for not hiding it under a bulkhead) and I was back on the road about 2hrs after my 'breakdown'. I wonder how much/how long to replace a Tesla battery?
My second 'incident' was this evening at about 7pm when I drove to my local Tesco for a few essentials (well, bottles of wine). As I slowly drove into the car park watching out for pedestrians crossing to the store, I was suddenly both distracted and dazzled by a bright white laser light show akin to the type of thing you see lighting up public buildings at Christmas. The road ahead of me was flooded with swooshing patterns which rose up and down like the special effects in a panto. If a child had run into the road in front of me I'd have squashed them flat it was so distracting.
Only this wasn't coming from the Town Hall. No, this was coming from the front of the most stupidly enormous Mercedes suv, whose owner had just unplugged it from one of the electric charging points. Presumably the flashing light display is designed to alert everyone else that this complete tw*t has bought himself a three tonne, £100k behemoth that's going to save the planet (yeah, right).
In reality, it is just about the most pointless, unnecesary and potentially dangerous 'feature' I have seen on a car since they started putting 'infotainment' centres in the dashboard where the wireless should be.
And why the blinking flip does anyone need to plug in their EV when all they're doing is popping to Tesco for a packet of fags and a pint of milk? After all, nobody fills up with petrol every time they stop at a store with a filling station, just when their tank is getting low.
I suppose it's because an EV's range is crap.
Last edited by Mister Towed; 5th January 2022 at 20:49..
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6th January 2022, 00:46
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Big Cheese
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Just to counter the negativity around electric cars posted so far I just wanted to say that I love mine
I leased the cheapest, slowest 5 seater I could get hold of 3 and a half years ago, a KIA Soul EV, and its fab.
0-60 in 10 seconds but feels so much quicker with the instant torque.
I was curious. I'm partial to an auto, just don't see the point of a manual gearbox in an everyday commuter, family mover shed, so an electric car seemed like the perfect auto to me. Man maths showed me I could lease, maintain, run, insure etc the EV for £1000 less per year than it was costing me to run my then current car, Saab 93 2.0L. No maintenance or MOT for 3 years either, it was a no brainer for the dad taxi.
135 mile range in the summer, 95 miles in the winter. Sounds terrible but I managed to continue doing my normal 12k miles per year no problem at all (until Covid then it went down drastically and threw my man maths out!). Smooth, quiet, instant torque, easy life in traffic jams (lots in the South East), instant torque, programmable cabin warm up in winter, lifted the bonnet once just to take a look, otherwise just tyres replaced, so reliable, oh and instant torque.
Most of our journeys are local, with weekend trips of 100 miles or less generally, and we have a 1 car driveway so charging is not a problem.
Longest trip was 220miles return, a couple of fast charge stops at around 25 mins each was all that was needed to ensure I got home with plenty spare.
Public fast charging needs to catch up, I've never been stranded but you have to plan ahead (a 5 min check on zap map if you are going on a long journey you've not done before) as your plan A could well be hogged by other cars charging. The whole charging network needs standardising, there's currently too many different networks you have to sign up to and have an app for.
EVs are not going to be a fit for everyone just yet but its still early days for the current incarnation (pun intended), I would assume as the government have set goals then the public charging network WILL get better, range is getting better all the time. They are expensive, and could well be the undoing for me personally as the lease cost has gone up a lot for new cars and currently my mileage has gone down drastically since WFH full time since the start of Covid and really only need a shed runaround. We'll see, have it for another 6 months.
Horses for courses, I love it, suites me down to the ground. Would love another one with double the range to take it on longer journeys in quiet comfort.
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6th January 2022, 09:26
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Morning JG, I should probably come clean and admit that I really like the idea of running an EV and something like a Renault Zoe would definitely work for both my wife and I if the charging infrastructure worked, which it doesn't yet. I have even bought a manual which explains how to convert a classic to electric as that's something I've been considering for years.
The main thing I have against the actual EV cars currently available is the price, whether bought or leased, which is currently not economically viable for anyone in my household.
There are three adults living in my household (20y/o son still at home) and between us we have five roadworthy cars: two bought new (50mpg Nissan Pulsar and 55mpg Vauxhall Viva), two secondhand (50mpg Peugeot 107 and 35mpg R53 Mini Cooper S) and one classic (40mpg MG Midget).
Across those five cars we typically cover 15,000 miles per year so by my calculations our annual running costs, excluding insurance (which I believe is higher for an EV?), are as follows:
Fuel £2,200 (approx.)
Road Tax £230 - Mini £180 (6 months as SORN during winter) Nissan £30, Vauxhall £20, Peugeot £0, MG £0
Servicing £400 (approx.) - Nissan & Vauxhall garage serviced every 18 months at @£180 each, MG, Mini and Peugeot serviced by me at cost of parts.
MOT's £116 (a local garage charges £29.00)
Grand total to run five petrol powered cars for a year: £2,950
Divide that by twelve, and we have a monthly cost of £245.83 or £49.17 per car per month on average.
So, how much to lease one Renault Zoe, with servicing, between us and cover 15,000 miles?
An initial payment of £3,600 and then £378.98 per month.
https://www.gogreenleasing.co.uk/car...5dr-auto-20215
Ignoring the initial payment, that's £133 per month, or £1,596 per year more than what it costs us to run five petrol cars, and that's before we add the cost of charging it up (and battery lease another £50 to £100 on top? The terms don't make that clear).
And if we each leased a Zoe on a 5,000 mile contract? That would be £995 per month, which is £749.00 per month more than our current motoring expenditure. That's almost £9,000 per year more to run cars that will give us range anxiety when the weather's cold.
Once the price comes down and the charging infrastructure works I'll take another look at EV's. Until then, it's going to be Vroom! Vroom! rather than whirrr whirrr all the way for me
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6th January 2022, 11:13
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Big Cheese
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lease prices have gone a bit mental for EVs right now (and a large section of non EVs it would seem)
You could have had a Zoe on lease for around £200 per month all in not so long ago.
My Soul EV was £270 per month all in for 15k miles, now £220 per month because of the reduced mileage. You don't pay for a battery lease either, that was something Nissan/Renault did in the early days.
You wouldn't of course swap 5 cars for 1, there's a reason you have 5 cars and that can't be replaced by 1 EV. Similarly we have 5 cars at home, kids have their own each, wife has hers and I have mine, along with the TVR. They all serve their own purpose but when we are together the EV gets used (and the wife is using it more)
Your calculations also missed out the capital depreciation of each of the cars which is something I factored in when doing my man maths of overall cost of ownership. Mine was far simpler though, as it was just replacing 1 car with another.
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6th January 2022, 13:24
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Ahh, yes, depreciation. That's traditionally the biggest expense in motoring.
I did leave that out due to my preferred way of keeping it to a minimum for our daily drivers, which is to buy the cheapest possible new car that will do the job, look after it and keep it for its entire useful life.
Thus, I bought our two main cars, the Pulsar in 2016 and Viva in 2017, for a combined total of £20,000 with both PCP'd at 0% interest. The payments were, as I recall £160 per month for the Nissan and £117 for the Vauxhall. I paid off the baloon payments at the end of the PCP so we now own them outright.
It's my expectation that we'll get around twelve years out of each before we need to change either, so the depreciation would add another £138 per month to the equation for those two cars.
Depreciation on my son's Peugeot isn't so much of an issue as it was only about £1,500 to start with, and so long as it still gets through the MOT it won't drop much below that.
The MG and Mini, however, are a different story, as both are now worth rather more than what I paid for them, which is rather nice.
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6th January 2022, 18:24
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Another consideration when we are buying all electric is that most kids stay at home much longer these days until they can afford their own place. So a typical household might have two, three or more EV cars in the near future. Charging at home will be a big problem if the house can only have a single charge point.
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6th January 2022, 19:35
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At the dawn of motoring, in addition to electric, steam and gasoline autocarriages, gas powered machines were also quite popular.
In cities and larger towns, unscrupulous Terry Thomas type owners would stop and fill up their gas bags from the streetlights at the city council's expense.
Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book and install a simple, medium speed charger in every streetlight in the country, with fast chargers built into every streetlight in motorway service areas.
That way there would never be queues for the chargers, people without off-street parking could charge their cars and you would never have far to go if your battery runs low on a long journey and you need a quick top-up to get you to your destination.
City and Town councils could also generate an income stream from the charge, erm charges, which could go towards filling all the potholes which will be made worse by all the heavier EV's using the roads.
It's so simple it might just work...
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6th January 2022, 23:21
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Naa, that won't work either ! Have you wondered why so many cycle lanes are being built ? Its because the Government knows that all cars will have to be phased out because even the best EV's rely on being charged by an antiquated National Grid that is near breaking point thanks to over demand, even now. They can't rely on cheap imported gas, electric and oil because those exporting are fast becoming our enemies eg Russia, China and France. The future transport network will be a utopian cycle path network, so on your bike !
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7th January 2022, 08:11
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Enthusiast
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister Towed
At the dawn of motoring, in addition to electric, steam and gasoline autocarriages, gas powered machines were also quite popular.
In cities and larger towns, unscrupulous Terry Thomas type owners would stop and fill up their gas bags from the streetlights at the city council's expense.
Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book and install a simple, medium speed charger in every streetlight in the country, with fast chargers built into every streetlight in motorway service areas.
That way there would never be queues for the chargers, people without off-street parking could charge their cars and you would never have far to go if your battery runs low on a long journey and you need a quick top-up to get you to your destination.
City and Town councils could also generate an income stream from the charge, erm charges, which could go towards filling all the potholes which will be made worse by all the heavier EV's using the roads.
It's so simple it might just work...
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https://www.ubitricity.com/
According to the website...
Today, there are already more than 4,000 ubitricity charge points installed around the UK, making it the country’s largest public charging network!
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7th January 2022, 08:54
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Quote:
Originally Posted by peterux
https://www.ubitricity.com/
According to the website...
Today, there are already more than 4,000 ubitricity charge points installed around the UK, making it the country’s largest public charging network!
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What a good idea, wish I'd thought of it!
The low power output of a lamp-post charger won't be an issue for most people who can leave their car to charge overnight.
The power supply infrastructure is an issue, though. I was looking at home charger options and it said you could have a fast charger installed so long as you had a 32 amp domestic supply, which is the same as you need for a modern electric range cooker. I live in a rural area and our house was built this century (2003).
When we needed a new cooker I prefer electric over gas, so I ordered a SMEG model that required 32 amps, assuming our supply would be suitable. Unfortunately, the electrician who came to install it told us that, even though our circuit breaker board says '32' on the one for the cooker, the network can't actually give us 32 amps*, so it had to go back and be replaced with a cheaper, less powerful model.
*I'm not a leccie so please feel free to explain that to me if you are wise in the ways of wiggly amps.
That also means we won't be able to have a fast charger installed, and definitely not two or three chargers.
As for getting our energy from our enemies, which brainiac thought that one up? Okay, at least the Russians and the Red Chinese are a long way away, but the French, they're right on our doorstep! I do have my suspicions that they may even be digging a tunnel under the channel...
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