Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
A good start but not nearly enough.
Electric cars
- Thread starter ch750536
- Start date
That is wonderfully (embarrassingly) amateurish. Basing taxation policy of people sending in photos. It's like our government's covid passes which basically rely on people promising they don't have covid.
A timely article on the BBC website today - Electric car charging prices 'must be fair' say MPs
It appears our MP's are waking from their slumber and beginning to realise what a deregulated mess public charging is.
I've been doing quite a lot of research into this recently and the differences in what you can pay for your charge is massive. Using some very broad stroke averages you will pay around 4p per mile if you can charge at home on an average tariff. If you have a good tariff (usually one which gives cheap energy overnight when you are likely to be charging) than you can pay as little as 3p per mile.
The cheapest public charging I can find around me is about 7p per mile but you need to pay a monthly subscription for that (£4 per month). The cost of rapid charging varies between 11p and 20p which is roughly in-line with petrol / diesel cars depending on how thirsty they are.
Frankly its all over the shop and there is a very real risk that one of the great incentives of getting an electric car (very low running costs) is being nullified if you can't charge at home which a huge amount of people can't. Yes there are some free chargers about in places like shopping centres and supermarkets but you'll only ever use them for a short while and get a small amount of juice from.
At a time when the government is dishing out massive cash incentives for people to buy electric cars its really quite stupid that they have let the public charging infrastructure become such a mess.
It appears our MP's are waking from their slumber and beginning to realise what a deregulated mess public charging is.
I've been doing quite a lot of research into this recently and the differences in what you can pay for your charge is massive. Using some very broad stroke averages you will pay around 4p per mile if you can charge at home on an average tariff. If you have a good tariff (usually one which gives cheap energy overnight when you are likely to be charging) than you can pay as little as 3p per mile.
The cheapest public charging I can find around me is about 7p per mile but you need to pay a monthly subscription for that (£4 per month). The cost of rapid charging varies between 11p and 20p which is roughly in-line with petrol / diesel cars depending on how thirsty they are.
Frankly its all over the shop and there is a very real risk that one of the great incentives of getting an electric car (very low running costs) is being nullified if you can't charge at home which a huge amount of people can't. Yes there are some free chargers about in places like shopping centres and supermarkets but you'll only ever use them for a short while and get a small amount of juice from.
At a time when the government is dishing out massive cash incentives for people to buy electric cars its really quite stupid that they have let the public charging infrastructure become such a mess.
hash tag
Books, not bombs
I thought you were going to link to this Teaboy Leading the charge! Can I make it from Land’s End to John o’Groats in an electric car?
If everything goes to plan, we will not be able to provide enough renewable energy to supply all these cars. Does this mean we will
get the Chinese to invest in our nuclear power stations?
If everything goes to plan, we will not be able to provide enough renewable energy to supply all these cars. Does this mean we will
get the Chinese to invest in our nuclear power stations?
Nuclear has always been part of the UK's long term energy plan and I don't have an issue with that. When Germany took all its reactors off line after Fukushima their grid pretty much overnight became one of the dirtiest in Europe and its likely to be that way for another decade, maybe decades yet.
The UK already has a relatively clean grid but we are too reliant on gas. Given the opportunities we have in renewables and nuclear I don't see any reason to panic about the future and our ability to cope in a post ICE car world.
Dovydaitis
Official fishco fish groupie
Mr dovy got his electric kona for exactly the same reasons. His tax dropped from £287 to £8 plus he gets 80 quid off his company for going down a grade and going green. With numbers like that, it’s daft not at least seriously consider it
hash tag
Books, not bombs
I caught a bit of You and Yours on R4 this morning.
More charging points in Westminster than the entire West Midlands.
More charging points per head of population in Scotland than anywhere else in the country.
Charging points frequently broken and unable to find out when they are being fixed.
Costs for charging between I thing they said about £2 per hour at home to £82 at a public one somewhere .
More charging points in Westminster than the entire West Midlands.
More charging points per head of population in Scotland than anywhere else in the country.
Charging points frequently broken and unable to find out when they are being fixed.
Costs for charging between I thing they said about £2 per hour at home to £82 at a public one somewhere .
Signal 11
also programmed for conversational english
Either you misheard them or they were just talking bollocks.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
The whole thing is a clusterfuck, but no surprise when capitalism is in charge (pun intended)
MrCurry
right after this urgent rest
At least with an electric car you have the potential to build your own free charging infrastructure at home, if you want to invest enough in solar power. My attempts to dig for crude oil in the garden and refine it into petrol have so far come to naught.
It will be fun to see how the early adopters feel if it turns out the cost of charging from public fast charging points in the longer term is no cheaper than filling with petrol. I can see a few peoples ROI calculations going out the window.
It will be fun to see how the early adopters feel if it turns out the cost of charging from public fast charging points in the longer term is no cheaper than filling with petrol. I can see a few peoples ROI calculations going out the window.
MickiQ
In My Defence I was left Unsupervised
Average cost of a kwh is about 17p, if you plug them into a domestic socket they should charge at 2kwh or about 35p an hour whereas these dedicated home charge points run at about 7kwh so about £1.20 per hour.
£82 an hour is about half a megawatt you could run a small factory on that.
We're still at early adopter stage clearly. The public charging situation is a mess entirely because of the free market economy and the government are already stepping in to make all charging points accept credit / debit cards which they currently don't.
The broken charging points is another big problem and there have been some main offenders such as Electric Highway. This is why you buy a Tesla if you can afford it because their chargers are numerous and actually work.
Its got a long way to go but given how far its come in three years things are really changing. Its always very telling of a mind set when someone is constantly trying to find fault instead of seeing the progress and the massive benefits it could bring,
Yeah its clearly still early adopter time at the moment. They'll work for some people and not for others depending on their individual circumstances. I do think though having looked into this a lot they'd probably work fine for a lot of people, they just don't know it yet and its hard to make a big change like this.
Also the press coverage (non-motoring press) of electric cars is pretty much universally dreadful. Just utter nonsense.
I know someone who's had an electric car for over 5 years, he does a lot of miles and can charge at home. He reckons it's saved him £20k in fuel costs alone in that time. For me it will likely save me £12k over 4 years. That's just in tax alone. Its a bonkers amount of money.
Also the press coverage (non-motoring press) of electric cars is pretty much universally dreadful. Just utter nonsense.
I know someone who's had an electric car for over 5 years, he does a lot of miles and can charge at home. He reckons it's saved him £20k in fuel costs alone in that time. For me it will likely save me £12k over 4 years. That's just in tax alone. Its a bonkers amount of money.
Leafster
.
I agree, as they are better for the environment we should switch to EVs but the financial costs need to be considered.
At the moment, most EVs are more expensive to buy than the equivalent ICEs and although the running costs may be lower, it's the up-front cost which is the limiting factor for most people.
There's also the one-off cost/hassle of switching for those of us who could have home charging but need to buy a charger have and have one installed.
To encourage the uptake of EVs I think it's the right approach to take to offer grants and/or tax breaks.
Sorry was that aimed at me?
These tax breaks are available to all. I had a company car when I was earning 16K a year and I'm not that old. Its about the job you do. I keep saying this buit company cars as a perk went away fucking ages ago, its like the last decade and a half didn't happen.
Oh and fuck your presumptuous crap.
Elpenor
Dancing as fast as I can
No, it wasn’t aimed at you. I am very aware of how company cars are taxed as it’s part of my job.
My view is that electric cars are unaffordable to those who have to arrange their own vehicles - high entry cost compared to a new car, very little second hand market, problematic charging infrastructure.
I’ve never lived anywhere where I could charge at home, and have never owned a car less than 7 years old. So I stand by my opinion that the vast majority of electric vehicle owners are wealthy people benefitting from incentives unavailable to ordinary people.
hash tag
Books, not bombs
The second half of this is about ev's and is interesting. 5 Live Science - Are we ready for the electric vehicle revolution? - BBC Sounds
BigTom
Well-Known Member
The various 2030-2040 bans on new ICE vehicle sales is the best thing on this score.
All the mass manufacturers will have EVs in the same price ranges around this time as ICE vehicles because this is the price the market will bear. Even if they have to lower their margins to get there, that is more profit than none at all by failing to supply that sector of the market.
Second hand sales will follow in time and really only time can bring EVs to the second hand market. There is also trust to be gained regarding battery life or replacement cost of course.
UnderOpenSky
baseline neural therapy
Knowing that you can get a replacement battery for an ten year old car without having to payout as much as you paid for the car will also help.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
Good luck with that.
UnderOpenSky
baseline neural therapy
Well yes.
That's not how its going to work. Batteries are cells so can be replaced individually. You don't need to replace the whole engine on an ICE car every 8-10 years just components of it. Besides over those 10 years the general servicing costs and maintenance should theoretically be significantly cheaper because there are so many less points of failure. It doesn't have all those cogs, belts, plugs, oil, filters etc that need constant monitoring and changing.
I just paid £600+ for the annual service (yeah I know main dealer service / not my money don't care etc) and that car is 4 years old and there was nothing wrong with it apart from new brake pads.
How EV's are going to be serviced in the future is an interesting question because most people seem to think that beyond the brakes and a battery health check they don't really need much servicing. I think the industry will find a way to keep extracting money from us all somehow though.
I appreciate I'm sounding like an evangelist but I don't see it that way. Its more a case of embracing the inevitable rather than pushing back on something that is only travelling in one direction.
The EV manufacturers themselves are saying they expect to reach price parity with ICE cars in 5 or 6 years. The best way we can make the second half market more affordable is to get as many new EV's into circulation as possible. This is why incentives are so important because if the last 25 years should have taught us anything its that for us humans environmental benefits alone are not enough to convince us to make major lifestyle changes.
In general I do think a lot of the barriers are perceived rather than actual. There is a list of them on this thread and a lot of them are simply not true but the perception is there partly due to the way the press present them but partly due to everyday resistance to change. A few months back I was also parroting similar lines and it was only when I actually started to do some proper in depth research that I realised how wrong I was. I have no doubt that when jet engines first came in there were people saying a plane should have propellers goddammit.
It was only a few years ago (4 or 5 maybe) that the choice in EV's was tiny and the range on most was below a 100 miles. There was also very little in the way of public charging infrastructure. When you see how much has changed since then in such a short period of time its clear that something big is happening and landscape will again look very different in just a few more years.
The last point I'll make is that I don't think we can see EV's as an environmentally friendly option. They are not. Regardless of how you power them private cars are not environmentally friendly. We are dealing with degrees of bad and in that regard they are less bad than ICE cars. They are part of the solution which also needs a significant reduction in private cars. As shitty as that is, its the way it is.
UnderOpenSky
baseline neural therapy
Fair enough, but in my experience with Li-Ion batteries, they do start to hold less charge at a similar time, so it's not unreasonable to expect that to get the range back on a car that you'll need to replace the lot.
