gazz_bee said:

As above it isn't quite that simple. Where I work, there is no staff parking. A Council parking permit is circa £90/month for combustion engined vehicles but is free for EV's. Charging points at car parks are also free. Taking these incentives into account an EV like a Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe or possibly BMW i3 would be cheaper per month than my current 1 Series BMW on a daily commute.

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:yeahthat:


The economic justification for running an EV will likely be based on fiscal considerations, not technical ones. Remove all the incentives and, on a level playing field, operating a new EV will cost you far more than operating a new fossil fuelled vehicle.

So the folks who will benefit from an early uptake will be those who can secure the greatest fiscal benefits. If you need to drive every day into the central London congestion charge zone, you could be almost £3kpa better off with an EV before you even start considering the purchase subsidies and parking discounts. An electric 500 could make a lot of sense in that market.

OTOH if, like Mick, you're living in a rural area and doing 6000 miles/yr, running a new EV will be way more expensive than running a new petrol car. (If you're doing 6000 miles/yr and are even considering buying a new diesel car, then you need therapy.)

For most folks buying new and keeping for 3-4 yrs, depreciation will be your biggest cost and will dwarf your fuel bill. A 3yr 10000 mile/yr pcp on a Leaf, returning the car at the end of the agreement, will set you back a total of £16092.64 net of incentives. That's just a shade under 54p/mile. When I last looked, the equivalent figure for a 500TA (when you could still order one) was about 40p/mile. Both figures exclude fuel, RFL, insurance and servicing.

However, the canny secondhand buyer can do much better than this. If you can live with an old Leaf with degraded range, then there are some good used deals to be had.

Ok.
I accept that all people aren't like us, but I would suggest that all people aren't like all people, so we aren't unusual in this regard.

We do 5,500miles a year, or that's the way it's been for some years. We are retired, we don't commute, we live in a rural location, and our miles are only social domestic and pleasure. If we didn't live in a rural location, we may not even need a car.

It would therefore seem ideal for us to have an EV as we wouldn't be concerned about range or finding somewhere to charge. Drive the EV car, come home, plug it in and leave it plugged in until we need the car again. We perhaps drive the car three times a week. Sometimes less.

How can the price of an EV car be so high?
What is the reason for having such a cost?
I was in touch with Renault a year or two ago and asked them those questions, and was told that the technology was the cost.
You can buy a Renault Zoe outright but it costs 18grand or thereabouts, or buy one with a battery lease at quite a reasonable 12grand but you have to pay a minimum of £50 a month on top of the cost of the lecky and you are mileage limited.

You get a couple of hundred miles on a full charge, but much less in a rural and hilly area. Lets say 150miles.
It costs about £3 to fill the battery I am told ......... to do 150miles.
£3 in petrol would get us 20miles - instead of 150miles if we were EV.
Saving of 130miles, but we'd still have to pay £50 for the privilege per month, which would mean £4 every time we went out for our three times a week.

I'd rather have an economical petrol car.

Mick.

jrkitching said:

The economic justification for running an EV will likely be based on fiscal considerations, not technical ones. Remove all the incentives and, on a level playing field, operating an EV will cost you far more than operating a fossil fuelled vehicle.

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Despite me pointing out above that running an Ev on a like for like mileage actually worked out a lot cheaper, even factoring in battery lease charges....

AndyRKett said:

Despite me pointing out above that running an Ev on a like for like mileage actually worked out a lot cheaper, even factoring in battery lease charges....

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It doesn't; the battery lease rates work out around 8p/mile, with another 2-3p/mile for the cost of the electricity. I run a petrol Panda for a similar fuel cost (10.2p/mile over the past 85k).

Also on a new car, the extra depreciation on an EV will dwarf any savings you might make on direct running costs.

The pcp rates tell the story; even on a 6000pa contract, I can't find an EV that isn't a Tonka toy for under about £300/month, with another 8-10p/mile battery lease on top of that. You can get an equivalent petrol car for about half the monthly payment, and the battery lease wipes out most if not all of the fuel saving.

As Mick says, it's an expensive way to go down to the shops.

Remember also there's currently a huge fuel duty saving on EV use; if you were to tax electricity for EV use at the same rate as is currently levied on fossil fuels, the relative fuel costs would look very different. Once EV use becomes mainstream, then the government will surely raise that revenue from EV users, one way or another.

Don't get me wrong; I do think the future is electric - but right now, a new EV will only make economic sense if you can secure a fiscal subsidy in one form or another. Secondhand may be a different story, as I've already said.

And beware the small print in battery lease agreements; if you sell the car, you may still be liable for the lease payment unless the new owner agrees to take over your contract. You have to make the monthly payment whether you drive the car or not. At least with a petrol car, you don't have to put fuel in it if you're not using it for awhile.

2p per mile?

That works out at what?
£5.90 per imperial gallon considering we do 50mpg.
We do (say) 12p per mile.
At (lets say) 6,000miles per year we spend £720pa on petrol as opposed to £120pa on electricity.
Saving of (only) £600pa minus the battery rental or the excess purchase cost and/or depreciation.

Sorry, no deal thank you very much. Not worth it at all, sadly.

Mick F said:

Not worth it at all, sadly.

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Note my word "sadly".

It is sad that we have to burn all this fossil fuel because the alternative is so expensive. It all comes down to running costs. There is sky-high taxation on fuel, but it is still cheaper to run a petrol or diesel car than use electricity.

If we didn't need a car, we wouldn't have one. Considering the WE in this means we in the world, using an EV makes sense instead of all the pollution and CO2 pumping out. Billions of fossil fuelled cars on the planet and we're all using them.

Give us electric vehicles powered by clean energy ....... but most of all make it economical for us to use them, because if you don't, we won't use them.

Getting off my high horse now,
Mick.

Mick F said:

Give us electric vehicles powered by clean energy

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EV's are still polluting; they just move the pollution to places where (hopefully) the environment is better able to deal with it.

The first step is to get the most polluting vehicles out of the big cities; which (perhaps surprisingly) does seem to be the focus of current policy.

But don't get me started on the environmental issues associated with planet-wide scale rechargeable battery production, because that opens up another whole new can of worms.

Whilst depreciation on EVs might not be great at present, I rather suspect that in the future it’ll be ICE vehicles that suffer the massive depreciation. There will be a crossover point, what that is I don’t know...

306maxi said:

Whilst depreciation on EVs might not be great at present, I rather suspect that in the future it’ll be ICE vehicles that suffer the massive depreciation. There will be a crossover point, what that is I don’t know...

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I think I know what the crossover point will be; it's the point where the overall cost of running an EV becomes less than the overall cost of running a fossil fuelled one.

What I don't know is when it's going to happen, but like yourself, I expect that, one day, it will.

It's going to take some time for the infrastructure to change; if we were starting from scratch, I'd envisage most motorways and trunk routes being something like a powered guided busway where the car becomes self driving, taking power from the road and recharging as it travels, until you're ready to move back onto local roads.

Renault Zoe's are pretty cheap second hand, they are perhaps the only ones that make sense.

saying that a new i3 tried to chase my xsr on a sliproad, it was pretty impressive and whilst it was slower it was still pretty nippy. Mind you I wouldn't want to trust the tyres on the front for any cornering, I have seen wide tyres on a lotus elise.

Gosh, we're onto page 3 and we're still on-topic - is this a forum record? .

lsgraham_uk said:

Renault Zoe's are pretty cheap second hand, they are perhaps the only ones that make sense.

saying that a new i3 tried to chase my xsr on a sliproad, it was pretty impressive and whilst it was slower it was still pretty nippy. Mind you I wouldn't want to trust the tyres on the front for any cornering, I have seen wide tyres on a lotus elise.

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Drive an i3, they corner rather well, the key is that the tyre still has a large contact patch even if it’s not wide.

I was impressed, but frankly the sound of the xsr is just too nice to consider anything else at moment.

I'm not sure where this depreciation nonsense comes from.

Nissan Leaf's hold their value very well, 2011 models still change hands for >£5k

The Tesla Model S in the UK back in 2015 (85KW was about £58,000, where as they are changing hands now with 50k on the clock for £52,000 £6k loss in 3 years on a £60k luxury car is totally unheard of thats less than 3% per year. The model 3 when it eventually gets released in the UK next year will be around £27-30k and because of the vast waiting list for them around the world its likely that any UK cars will be changing hands for well above list price for a few years to come.

The very reason that electric french cars lose money so fast is due to multiple factors, 1 they are cheap cars built cheaply with a very expensive battery on board. 2 French car depreciation in the UK is rapid, you only have to sneeze near a megane out side a dealership for it to lose £5k, they are not well specced cars. They have the complication of having to lease the battery to make them cost efficient which also locks you in to having to pay £50 a month no matter how much you use the car, and have an upper mileage limit that restriction over use, making car ownership highly complicated.

EVs are still polluting is a ridiculous argument against the environmental implications of digging up thousands of gallons of crude oil every day and refining it to make petrol and diesel, ship it all around the world, drive it to petrol stations then drag around a tank of the stuff for a week while you burn it off creating exhaust pipe emissions.

Many EV owners buy them because because they care about the environment, Many owners invest in things like power walls and solar panels and can effectively run their car for free from that point on. The impact on the environment is then almost zero. An electric car really doesn't need servicing, there is no oil to change as such and no filters to change. Next to no moving parts to wear compared to internal combustion.

The only real down side in the context of this forum is that people here are not buying £30 - 60k cars they are buying more often than not, second hand cheap budget cars not grand luxury cars, because that is the nature of fiat's and the nature of a forum.

So £30k is not that much for a car these days but when people are buying a £12k fiat 500, they are not going to stretch to buy even a £25k version of the same fiat 500 with electric drive, but at the moment they can't make EV's any cheaper. MEP on here bought a Kia Soul for not a lot of money and from what I understand gets free charging at work and does most of his miles locally, its likely costing him next to nothing to run, In my (and many others) opinion its a ugly looking car which means second hand they are absolute bargains, with no battery rental or lease. So he's paying nothing to drive about while the rest of us pay through the nose to keep pumping dino juice into the tank.....

There literally is a way round any of the barriers people want to put up, to ev's but they don't like change so will insist there are all manner of problems where non exist.

Don't know if currently exists, could you plug a 12v socket solar panel into a Nissan Leaf on a really warm day and eek out the last few miles home? That would solve daytime charging query as electricity cheaper at night?!

No need, it comes as an option

Al D said:

Don't know if currently exists, could you plug a 12v socket solar panel into a Nissan Leaf on a really warm day and eek out the last few miles home? That would solve daytime charging query as electricity cheaper at night?!

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Definitely not. Please don’t talk about making cars out of solar panels either.

https://understandsolar.com/prius-solar-roof/

I use a solar panel to keep my other cars battery topped up. It produces about 3 watts a day!

I can't find the review but apparently the prius-solar-roof produces enough power to recharge the car in a week.

lsgraham_uk said:

https://understandsolar.com/prius-solar-roof/

I use a solar panel to keep my other cars battery topped up. It produces about 3 watts a day!

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3watts per day! On a Nissan Leaf you’d have to leave it for 31 years to charge the 34,000 watt battery !! It would have decomposed before it had charged.

Your 3watt charger would get you a grand total of 28 meters in a Nissan Leaf.... a quarter of a football pitch, or just over half an Olympic swimming pool