chris3234 said:

I'm not

Because that requires the car to but at home plugged in

Ones on the car could keep it topped up anywhere



And for many home charging us not an option

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You can’t keep an electric car “topped up” off a car roof mounted solar panel, the panel only generates a fraction of the power needed to run an electric car even for a few miles. It helps with the economy ok a Prius because it’s more power into the system and so less fuel used, but in a 30+Kw battery pack on an all electric car, it wouldn’t make a dent and also adds weight and expense. In and electric car you don’t keep the battery topped up, to get the most out of the battery you don’t charge it to 100% unless you need to, so keeping it ‘topped up’ could well shorten the life of the battery.

chris3234 said:

That Tesla had 2 new battery packs in its lifetime and they arnt cheep allthrough they were done under warranty
Edit also had its front drive unit replaced

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It did but both where replaced under warranty, the first at 200,000 miles. Tesla also will take the old battery apart and recondition it and reuse it so it doesn’t all just go in the bin. Meanwhile a petrol car doing 60mpg would have used 6600 gallons of fuel dug out of the ground and burned off into the atmosphere never to be seen again. Also you would be very unlikely to do 400,000 miles in any petrol car and avoid expensive engine work, more so have it covered under warranty.

It’s all the same waffle and excuses why electric cars are bad.

Next it will be that electric car batteries catch fire, like no petrol or diesel car has ever caught fire.

People’s attitudes to electric cars at the moment is not that dissimilar to the past having a man walk in front of your car with a red flag to warn people, we find that ridiculous now and all these excuses above will be just as ridiculous in the future.

As for on street parking, I believe there have been grumblings in the government that all street lights in the future will have a car charging point built in so they won’t need any additional room for these things the connection and the thing you plug into, is already there

AndyRKett said:

You seem hung up on the whole battery lease thing but you can buy electric cars without leasing the battery. You can buy the Renault Zoe without releasing the battery, you pay £5k more for the car ~£18k then drive it.

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If you buy outright, the warranty on the battery isn't so good.
18grand for a car is well out of my pocket. Last brand new car we bought was less than 12grand and we kept it for sixteen years and it had done 95,000miles when we sold it. I doubt an 18grand Zoe would last sixteen years with respect to the battery.

At least renting the battery, you get support and a warranty this is good enough, as Renault remain the owners of it so they have a vested interest in it. Buy outright, and that's it. You're stuck with it and subsequent owners would be too. Once sold outright, Renault won't revert to rental. Ditto vice versa.

Things may have changed since I looked all this up a year or so ago. I was in personal contact with Renault and the chap I was speaking to basically agreed with me over all this subject. He told me that the only way they can make sense is if you drive somewhere with congestion charges as well as get free electricity. He added the zero rate VED to the mix .......... but my Fiat 500 was zero rated and so is our present Yaris Hybrid. That situation won't last forever, but it does cloud the issue somewhat.

As for a Fiat500 EV, I remain to be convinced, let alone any EV car until the incentives become MUCH better.
We did consider buying a milk-float once to use locally to the shops ......... but it was more of a silly thought really.

Mick.

And what about when the car is a few years old and out of warranty? A replacement battery will effectively write many cars off
Sure electric cars will be coming in the future
But today they are years from being practicle for the masses battery and charging tech needs to improve
The national grid need to increase in capacity to come with the higher demand more power generation is needed to charge finally more changing points are needed

Perhaps in 5 years time things will have changed enough that they will be practicle for a lot of people but today they just aren't

chris3234 said:

And what about when the car is a few years old and out of warranty? A replacement battery will effectively write many cars off

Sure electric cars will be coming in the future

But today they are years from being practicle for the masses battery and charging tech needs to improve

The national grid need to increase in capacity to come with the higher demand more power generation is needed to charge finally more changing points are needed



Perhaps in 5 years time things will have changed enough that they will be practicle for a lot of people but today they just aren't

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As an example the 400,000 mile Tesla had been super charged every day to 95-100% capacity which you shouldn’t really do for longevity and it still managed nearly 200k miles with out any problem and was only changed by Tesla because of the damage done by charging it in that way, rather than the battery becoming weak, it had only lost 6% of its capacity at 200k seeing that most people don’t do 100k in a car let alone 200k for the majority of people the battery won’t be a problem, but again these batteries have an 8 year warranty, what car do you get an 8 year warranty that covers major engine failure ? (Renault Zoe battery is also 8 year warranty if purchased outright)

Your average 8 year old car these days has lost most of its value and needed a clutch, cam belt, spark plugs ht leads, might need a new exhaust, might need gear box oil change, the list of things that a petrol car would have needed in 8 years is huge compared to a battery and a motor, a Tesla has 2 moving parts in its ‘engine’ and 17 moving parts in the whole drive train. How many moving parts and points of potential failure does a petrol car have...

How many 3+ year old fiat twinair and multiair engine’s are now being hit with solenoid failures, out of warranty costing £1200 to repair....

In years to come, whole industries will pop up taking old car batteries and combining all the good cells in the battery to make a new good battery, all the duff cells will be put together to build home made power-walls (which is already happening in places)

Battery charging tech already allows a 100Kw battery to charge in under an hour (300+ miles of driving)

Due to the uptake of LED lighting in homes and on streets as well and the improvements in energy efficiency of almost all devices, the national grid had electricity to spare buy the bucket load, even with the current uptake of electric cars. We have in he uk gone long periods without using any fossil fuels to make electricity and In other countries like Germany they have had days where the electricity price has become negative because renewables have created too much power that wasn’t being used.

They are practical for a large amount of people already, it’s just people are not receptive to the change and come up with excuses as to why they can’t change.

Major change will only come once it’s enforced, ie no more sales of internal combustion engine.

chris3234 said:

And what about when the car is a few years old and out of warranty? A replacement battery will effectively write many cars off
Sure electric cars will be coming in the future
But today they are years from being practicle for the masses battery and charging tech needs to improve
The national grid need to increase in capacity to come with the higher demand more power generation is needed to charge finally more changing points are needed

Perhaps in 5 years time things will have changed enough that they will be practicle for a lot of people but today they just aren't

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I’m bound by non-disclosure agreements and the like, but let me just say that people on here are finding 20th century issues with these cars which will exist in the 21st century.

The grid is going to become smarter, charging won’t even be done in the same way and cars are going to become even more connected than they currently are. Do Fiat even do connected car yet?

The Renault battery rental scheme has some merit, in fact it's a good idea ......... but way too expensive at the moment.

Imagine a time in not too distant future when the car maker owns the battery and you pay a small mileage charge for it. Instead of charging it up yourself all the time, you could go into kwikfit or somewhere and swap the battery for a fully charged one. Motorway service areas too. In and out in a jiffy, and as much time as it take to fill a petrol tank.

I do the same with my hand-held Garmin and my torches using rechargeable batteries. I don't sit the thing down and charge it and wait a couple of hours, I fit pre-charged batteries and put the ones I've taken out on charge to wait their turn. Swap and go. Simple.

Imagine opening up the boot, lifting up the boot floor and unplugging the battery and lifting it out like a cassette sort of thing. All car batteries would be compatible rather than company-specific, just different sizes for differently sized cars.

How long should this take? Minutes I reckon, and you could probably do it yourself. All it would need is having sufficient batteries available.

Mick.

Tesla have already demonstrated that technology, but no one seems to be going for it at the moment. It was years ago as well. As batteries improve, charging is going to be less and less of an issue.

Mick F said:

The Renault battery rental scheme has some merit, in fact it's a good idea ......... but way too expensive at the moment.



Imagine a time in not too distant future when the car maker owns the battery and you pay a small mileage charge for it. Instead of charging it up yourself all the time, you could go into kwikfit or somewhere and swap the battery for a fully charged one. Motorway service areas too. In and out in a jiffy, and as much time as it take to fill a petrol tank.



I do the same with my hand-held Garmin and my torches using rechargeable batteries. I don't sit the thing down and charge it and wait a couple of hours, I fit pre-charged batteries and put the ones I've taken out on charge to wait their turn. Swap and go. Simple.



Imagine opening up the boot, lifting up the boot floor and unplugging the battery and lifting it out like a cassette sort of thing. All car batteries would be compatible rather than company-specific, just different sizes for differently sized cars.



How long should this take? Minutes I reckon, and you could probably do it yourself. All it would need is having sufficient batteries available.



Mick.

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Have you seen the size of the battery in something like a Tesla or a leaf, and that’s lot even considering the weight,

The whole floor pan of a Model S is a battery and to meet safety standards the floor is heavily armoured against damage from everyday things such as grounding out the car on a speed bump to hitting some debris on the road, to being able to survive a high speed accident without rupturing the battery.

I’ve seen on YouTube the lengths needed to get the battery out of something like a Nissan Leaf and the lifting equipment and the amount of work involved.

Swapping batteries is never going to be a practical real-world solution. It’s one thing to have someone siphon off a few gallons of petrol from your tank, but if batteries were easily removable then it’s highly likely that people would be steeling them which would cost thousands of pounds a time and both write off perfectly serviceable cars and put insurance prices through the roof.

Having the battery built in allows you to shape the battery to the car, you can tuck extra cells all over the place and keep the car balanced, if you had a 50kw battery in the boot, it would be more unbalanced than a 1980s porsche 911, and have equally murderous handling capabilities.

It is doable.

[ame]https://youtu.be/H5V0vL3nnHY[/ame]

306maxi said:

It is doable.



https://youtu.be/H5V0vL3nnHY

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It is but this video was 2013, Tesla even built stations that would swap your battery for about be same cost as filling a tank of fuel, however it didn’t really work and they have since shut down all their battery swapping stations.

Plus they are the experts developing their own specific technology for swapping their own batteries. I don’t see them letting anyone else loose on their battery swapping tech any time soon, they have terminated warranties on their cars for repair work being done for slight bumps and scrapes so letting the fast fit YTS boy with a bag of Halfords spanner’s lose on a £70,000 car with a £15k battery isn’t going to happen soon.

Fast chargers can charge a Tesla to 100% in under an hour, which is enough to get you 350ish miles. And will get faster still, they are capable of charging faster but currently the cars are not.

306maxi said:

It is doable.

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Youtube notwithstanding or even 2013 notwithstanding, but it WILL happen soon.
It has to.

Yes, of course it's doable.
Under an hour? That's way too long.
I reckon it should - and will be - under five minutes to swap the battery rather than charge it, and would take to swap it no longer as it takes to fill a petrol tank.

Mick.

Mick F said:

Youtube notwithstanding or even 2013 notwithstanding, but it WILL happen soon.

It has to.



Yes, of course it's doable.

Under an hour? That's way too long.

I reckon it should - and will be - under five minutes to swap the battery rather than charge it,

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Tesla tried it, it didn’t work, they have binned the whole battery swapping program.....

It’s not happening.

Mick F said:

Youtube notwithstanding or even 2013 notwithstanding, but it WILL happen soon.
It has to.

Yes, of course it's doable.
Under an hour? That's way too long.
I reckon it should - and will be - under five minutes to swap the battery rather than charge it, and would take to swap it no longer as it takes to fill a petrol tank.

Mick.

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Did you not watch the video?

Sadly as said, it’s dead. No one wants to standardise on batteries, bolt patterns, quick release connectors etc etc.

Mick F said:

I reckon it should - and will be - under five minutes to swap the battery rather than charge it, and would take to swap it no longer as it takes to fill a petrol tank.

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The problem is that petrol when burnt in an IC engine has about 30 times the effective energy density of the best current battery technology, and that's when the batteries are new. The numbers get worse as the battery ages.

Mick, the sheer weight of EV batteries is staggering. An i3 has 450lb of batteries and will do perhaps 80 miles before you'd need to swap them; a similarly sized fossil fuelled car will do the same mileage on about 15lb of petrol.

A leaf carries about 600lb of batteries; a Tesla 3 is more like 1200lb. You simply cannot swap half a ton of batteries on a garage forecourt in the time it takes to fill a petrol tank.

The charge to 100% is largely irrelevant, tesla build in a 5% minimum overcapacity. The diagnostic on each one can show full capacity but it won't allow it to charge more.

The numbers for a 75kW tesla battery add up to 81kWh assuming no crystalline damage.

Personally I think a combination of batteries and supercapacitors is the best. You use the supercapacitors from regeneration but any remaining charge is then used to charge the batteries.

306maxi said:

I’m bound by non-disclosure agreements and the like, but let me just say that people on here are finding 20th century issues with these cars which will exist in the 21st century.

The grid is going to become smarter, charging won’t even be done in the same way and cars are going to become even more connected than they currently are. Do Fiat even do connected car yet?

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Exactly they will
Not they are now and that's the point I'm getting at currently electric cars arnt ready for the mass market in a few years it will almost certainly change but today to many little issue's are in the way

chris3234 said:

Exactly they will
Not they are now and that's the point I'm getting at currently electric cars arnt ready for the mass market in a few years it will almost certainly change but today to many little issue's are in the way

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My point is that there are easy solutions to pretty much all of these issues.

People are scared of EVs so it’s for that reason that the things you mention aren’t going to be as much of an issue as you think they will be.

As mentioned above, my employers are putting in solar panel covered parking and if they put in free charge points in then I will be jumping all over that. Obviously not all will be that lucky, but there are easy solutions to all these issues

And if EVs went mass market, then changes would be made to accommodate them. Charge points aren’t difficult or particularly expensive to put in.

306maxi said:

My point is that there are easy solutions to pretty much all of these issues.

People are scared of EVs so it’s for that reason that the things you mention aren’t going to be as much of an issue as you think they will be.

As mentioned above, my employers are putting in solar panel covered parking and if they put in free charge points in then I will be jumping all over that. Obviously not all will be that lucky, but there are easy solutions to all these issues

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But the Solutions need to be in place before people can use the cars
If I bought one tomorrow (which I can't because a car with enough range would be out my price range)
If wouldn't be any good as I can change it at home or at work nor my local supermarket town centre ect most of the places I go don't have charging facilities so unless I went out of my way for the day just to charge the car up

Issue's like that need to be sorted before mass adoption can begin and that's what hold many back from getting them
When they are affordable to me and there's enough changing points that don't require 6-8 hours a time to charge I'd get one