EV are they worth it?

[Ollyfp]

100 miles a day, assuming it's for work is 22,000 miles a year.

That's around £3-4k of diesel. You'd cut that by half with an EV. Lower if you get a specific EV charging tariff.

That age Quashqai is 6-8k? Bump it up to a 62kWh 2020 leaf (ral world range 200 miles or more) for £11-12k and you'll break even after 3 years and not be driving a bloody Quashqai.

Thanks! We did consider an EV, but with so much work to do on the house, we're on a tight budget. We'd also have to pay a sparky to sort out a charging point etc.

 

[Brigadier]

We'd also have to pay a sparky to sort out a charging point etc

£1500 for my Wallbox, which included a new consumer unit ( I had previously earmarked replacement of the old one, so it made sense to have then done at the same time).

At current usage rates, it will have paid for itself in c. 6 months in "fuel" terms alone.

If I'd only had the Wallbox - £1200 - payoff in c. 4-5 months.

 

[carmanmemoranda]

My wife is currently looking to change her car. She's going to be driving 100 miles every day through winter and beyond. The tractors, trucks, flash-floods, mud and hills up our way make driving her little Ford Fiesta quite a frightening experience, so we're currently looking at a 2015 diesel Nissan Qashqai. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!

If she is doing 100 miles a day across country terrain like that, subaru would be my choice.

Enough power, comfort, grip and safety..

But that mileage makes ev sense

 

[bernardgreen]

When calculating ( guessing ? ) the range of an EV in winter compared to summer take into account the heating of the vehicle and the demisting of the windows.

In an EV that heating will be a direct drain on the battery.

In a petrol or diesel powered vehicle that essential heating is achieved using "waste" heat from the vehicle's engine.

 

[ReganAndCarter]

It's such a nice blue though! Lol

More of a purple.

 

[ReganAndCarter]

Therefore, is there a general consensus here that EVs are not necessarily suitable for occasional drivers?

Then there's the faff of not charging the batteries more than 80% or letting them drop below 20% charge to get the longest life out of them. Who has the time or patience to juggle that?

 

[Brigadier]

When calculating ( guessing ? ) the range of an EV in winter compared to summer take into account the heating of the vehicle and the demisting of the windows.

In an EV that heating will be a direct drain on the battery.

In a petrol or diesel powered vehicle that essential heating is achieved using "waste" heat from the vehicle's engine.

While correct, I won't be guessing achievable range - and winging it - any more than I'd wing it until the next diesel stop.

And, turning your "waste heat" point around, the corollary is that, much of the time, the waste heat isn't scavenged.

Therefore, completely wasted.

 

[Brigadier]

Then there's the faff of not charging the batteries more than 80% or letting them drop below 20% charge to get the longest life out of them. Who has the time or patience to juggle that?

App

 

[flameport]

Then there's the faff of not charging the batteries more than 80%

If people want to do that, it's an option in the vehicle settings. A one time item.

In normal circumstances charging to 100% makes very little difference to anything.

Charging to 100% and then leaving the car in that state for days/weeks/months will increase the rate of battery degradation.
So will leaving it below 20% for an extended time.

However as people generally have cars to actually drive to places, such things are irrelevant unless you are the type that buys a car and then leaves it in the garage on blocks for months at a time.

 

[JohnD]

It's such a nice blue though! Lol

My cars do not burn oil.

 

[JohnD]

When calculating ( guessing ? ) the range of an EV in winter compared to summer take into account the heating of the vehicle and the demisting of the windows.

In an EV that heating will be a direct drain on the battery.

In a petrol or diesel powered vehicle that essential heating is achieved using "waste" heat from the vehicle's engine.

Some EVs can be remotely warmed up.

ICEs have waste heat because they are very inefficient thermal engines.

 

[Avocet]

I always thought it was a shame that engineers spent almost a century and a half perfecting the petrol engine engine to what it is today - incredibly reliable, clean, efficient, convenient, powerful, etc, etc, etc. Now we're to throw all that development away on untried, untested and unwieldly technology without sufficient infrastructure for widespread use. No doubt if the writing wasn't on the wall for ICEs until we come to our senses, the petrol and even diesel engine development could continue apace to make emmissions negligible.

But remember the EV fanatics are being encouraged and aided by politicians. Like other politicians who were, until very recently, imploring us all to buy diesels. And still EV fanatics blindly trust politicians while driving up the cost and inconvenience of personal transport massively for all of us.

Dummies and rattles incomming!!!!!

Well that makes a pleasant change from old curmudgeons moaning about how complicated modern engines are, and how impossible to work on, and how they'll all end up being scrapped before 50,000 miles because of an "ECU fault"!

I'm afraid the ICE is, after 100+ years of development, very much on the flat bit of the improvements curve. Already, manufacturers are looking at the new "Euro 7" emissions regulations and saying "sod this, we're going EV"! There really is very little left to be had out of the ICE. Gains these days are small numbers of percentage points - sometimes, fractions of a percentage.

You can't have it both ways on electric motor development either. You're currently claiming it's "untried and untested", yet the anti-EV brigade love to tell us that EVs were tried 100 years ago and abandoned!

 

[Avocet]

Only advantage of EVs I can see is no blue haze from the tailpipe.

It's the advantages you CAN'T see that make an even bigger difference - CO2, energy security, NOx...

 

[Avocet]

I get it. So, my wife has a 1L (3 cylinder) Eco-Boost Fiesta. She's no hyper-miler, but she does drive it quite sedately. Anyway, I recently read that it's capable of circa 120mph, which begs the question; Why does any new petrol engine (for smaller vehicles at least) need to be any bigger than 1L?
Surely, limiting the engine size of new vehicles would serve to reduce fuel consumption and emissions in the short-term, whilst also allowing more time for the infrastructure for EVs to be developed?

It would limit fuel consumption (and therefore CO2 emissions) but engine size doesn't have much to do with toxic emissions. The 600cc Citroen 2CV was a tiny engine, but famously filthy in terms of tailpipe pollutants.

The other problem is that the EV infrastructure won't BE developed if people don't buy EVs. The government has left it largely to the private sector to come up with the infrastructure. They won't do anything if there isn't a business case.

 

[Avocet]

The internal combustion engine is one of the most inefficient devices on the planet. 75% of the energy from the fuel is wasted as heat.
That won't be changing today, tomorrow, or ever.

To be fair, in efficiency terms, it knocked the spots off the external combustion engine!

That won't be happening either - any actual advances in ICE technology ended in the 1990s. That's why more recently there have been vehicle manufacturers installing cheat-o-matic software to fake emissions testing - they can't make engines any better so have to resort to other dubious methods. Also why modern engines feature super high compression ratios, nonsense such as 3 cylinders, deals where one or more cylinders is switched off in some circumstances, multiple turbochargers and all the other crap which is making modern engines less reliable and have much shorter lifespans than those from a couple of decades ago.

The average mileage at scrappage has steady increased over the last couple of decades.