Going Electric.. present small car options.. confusing

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Going Electric.. present small car options.. confusing

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Looked at the Renault Zoe again today.. online

Carwow : starting at £30k ..8k pa then 8 pence a mile what happened to 12k pa?

Top gear article says £20k/£24k.. has the profiteering got that bad already..?

Auto trader.. used older cars from £5k..( but £10k with a battery) :confused:

Then looked at a 2018 at a Renault dealer.. through autotrader £11.5k.. no mention of battery.. none of the 'spec' options open

Other sites suggest the drivers seat isnt height adjustable :(

Other info gleaned..
A top.up charge .. giving 80 miles range
Supermarket as their example TWO AND A HALF HOURS..!!
I Could have cycled there in that time - 4.5 hours :eek:
 
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There's an awful lot of variation depending on the spec of the car and charger.

Which to me is one of the current issues, you plug the latest ZOE into a wall socket that'll take 24 hours + from exhausted to full but if you plug it into a fast charger you'll see 30% to 80% in much more reasonable 42 minutes. That would be ample time to do a weekly shop or whatever.

The issue for me at the moment is that there's so many different specs kicking about for battery, charger and onboard charging that coming at it as layman is very difficult. Two identical looking cars can have wildly varying charging times depending on what options boxes were ticked at purchase and the charger they are hooked to.

The way I see it, I'll get a 7kw wall box at home that'll be ample to charge over night and my annual mileage would actually mean I could probably just charge once a week at a public point without any home charging most weeks.

The other issue I have with it currently is the technology is moving at an incredible rate and I want it to settle before I put money in. Because there'd be nowt worse than buying in just to find they've perfected a solid state battery rendering all the current ones pretty much obsolete when you've just pumped 30 grand into one. Hence why I've delayed my new car purchase, didn't want to put a chunk of money into an ice car for the government to put it on borrowed time, and electric while getting there for my circumstances is still not mature enough for my liking.

But the whole charge time thing is a bit of minefield as the speed of the charger, the size of your battery, the charge level of your battery, whether your car can accept the rate of charging offered and a few other things all affect it.
 
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I spend £100 a month in diesel.. 10p per mile travelled..
So on paper the £172 cost on a new car works.. but its a nonesense

There will all kinds of hidden charges Im sure.. and what happens at 2.5 years of its PCP when battery capacity drops off and range is 90 miles.. not 140

Do I get a new one under warranty ?

( I think I will add info to original post )
 
All far too stressful and confusing for me. Now 5 years old (with approx 25,000 miles on the clock) the Ibiza has already dropped a large "chunk" of it's monetary value and I'm expecting it to rapidly become worth less as the powers that be "whip up" hysteria trying to get everyone to go out and buy electric it's probably going to be worth considerably less sooner rather than later. Think I'll just hang onto the Ibiza until the "high heid yins" decide to start issuing punishment (high road taxes, even higher fuel prices, etc) as I'm sure they will, by which time a lot of the variables we are now talking about may have been resolved and purchase prices will hopefully have dropped. Unlike with most of the cars I've owned where I've bought used and "fiddled" with it 'till I've got a car I can keep for years, I feel that buying new will be the only "safe" option. Regardless of what is said I still feel very "nervous" about battery life.
 
If you have a bit free time it's worth watching Fully Charged on YouTube. Rob Llewellyn is starting to get a bit frothy at the mouth these days but the content is quite good.

Jonny Smiths late brake show/car pervert YouTube also has some decent stuff on regards a lot of different things actually but he's done a few different electric conversions and tested some more and regardless of what he puts up it tends to be worth watching as well.

I see me Leasing in future...that way it's someone else problem if tech moves on.
 
Battery warranty on any car is usually a lot longer than the car it’s self so if the capacity did drop off beyond a normal level which isn’t much, then you’d be covered for a new battery. Just check the terms as the expected normal degeneration is likely to vary from one manufacturer to another. Plenty of used ev’s about now so I’d look at something a bit older.

High on my list right now would be the ID3 but there are plenty of other new options coming out all the time now so Fully charged on YouTube I agree is a good place to look
 
There is no small electric car on the market today that's worth having. They all have awful range and cost silly money. But they do allow 50KW fast charging.

You'd be far better with another engine car and look again in five years time. By then you might even find a Tesla Model 3 at reasonable cost.

Saying that, if you want a commuter/shopper, this looks pretty good. 50KW Fast charging port gets 85% battery capacity in about 40 mins. Less if its still got charge in the battery. 13 Amp plug will take about 10 hours - at home (obviously).
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Kia-Soul-EV/203186083731?hash=item2f4ed59793:g:zh0AAOSw7wdfjAta
 
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Cannot charge at home..

Hence the concerns over range and daft top.up charge times.

Still not convinced anybody can make a SMALL EV with 200mile all year range..

Packaging is just too tight..

It would be interesting to discover the correct range of the SMART they are now plugging..
it might be measured in yards.. rather than miles
 
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At the moment I almost feel that it would be beneficial to buy some old £5k Nissan Leaf to “play with” along side other cars and see how it works in practice.

The main issue it the older cars don’t have fast charging or very good range.

In all honestly the low range of the smaller cars coming out now (100-150miles on a charge) are perfect for the every day commuter even doing 40-50 miles each way to work is perfectly feasible but you really need to be able to put the car on charge when you get home.

What makes electric cars so useful is the ability to charge it at home and have a full battery (tank) when you are ready to go. Charging stations only really being useful for longer journeys when you want to stop for a charge and maybe a comfort stop. If they could crack that for most people then it makes electric cars a no brainier. However at the moment getting home chargers to the masses just isn’t possible.

This is my opinion of how it would best work but I know that doesn’t work in practice for everyone, myself included at the moment
 
would solar panels and a wind turbine on the roof cause more power loss through weight and drag than they would provide?

Wind turbine..
My current ECO car is bad enough in crosswinds ;)

Youve seen the cars that cross deserts under the power of the sun..

Yes perfectly doable.. but they probably cost more than £20k to build


Im sure you COULD build PV capacity into bonnet and roof.. ( Germeny and Japan use PV Rooftiles on newbuild houses)

But weight and COST will probably mean its
pointless.


Range is the killer for most people..
NEEDING to plug it in every day isnt on anybodys wish list

A manager at our workplace doesnt live that far from work..around a 50 minute journey in peak traffic.. but is the first to admit his BWM is a nightmare if his main route is closed.. doesnt have the range to take alternative A roads

I want to try an EV for a few days.. just to gauge it for myself

PHEV might work better.. but currently I believe thats a 'BIG CAR thing'
 
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Well, what about the Times article (in yesterdays issue I think - I don't buy the Times) which seemed to be an in depth investigation into manufacture and pollution etc with regard to electric car production and use. The article is headed "Electric cars only greener than petrol after 50,000 miles". So by that measure most of my elderly friends, who just run around the town and renew their car when around 5 years old, are never going to reach the point where their car becomes more green than their little old IC engined one!
 
Well, what about the Times article (in yesterdays issue I think - I don't buy the Times) which seemed to be an in depth investigation into manufacture and pollution etc with regard to electric car production and use. The article is headed "Electric cars only greener than petrol after 50,000 miles". So by that measure most of my elderly friends, who just run around the town and renew their car when around 5 years old, are never going to reach the point where their car becomes more green than their little old IC engined one!

It really does depend who you read. A similar exercise was done on the Tesla Model 3 in comparison with a similar sized Toyota Hybrid. They said the CO2 repayment was about 3 years and the Tesla would have a much longer service life than the Toyota. The Tesla also depreciates at a much slower rate so less money lost on that front.

The supply chain mileage around the world for materials is still an issue. That is changing but really has been silly. Lithium mines are opening in USA and there's even one in line for Cornwall. Cobalt is being removed but Nickel will always be an issue. Very little is used in today's cars and batteries need lots of it. Then what about copper? It's used in motors, the heavy power cables and the battery cells. It's another finite resource.

Tesla has stirred things up and being vertically integrated have changed the dynamics. They want to own the whole system end to end. That's going back to Henry Ford's ways of the early 1900s. He even owned the rubber plantations for tyres. Today's car makers are just assembly shops that put together stuff bought in from expert suppliers. By the time it reaches the customers BigCarInc has little profit to allow innovations.

Edit - Just found this which shows how you can't just compare one country to another and assume it will all fit.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/no-tesla-batteries-are-not-a-global-warming-disaster

Quote from Greenwich -
"Under the assumptions above, the CO2 payback for a 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla battery comes out to just under three years in the best case and six years in the worst case."

That applies to Tesla who are working hard to minimise fossil fuels. The other makers, especially those using Chinese batteries (that's all of them), would not be that good. And we all know that China pretty much ignores any attempt to be green.
 
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Well, what about the Times article (in yesterdays issue I think - I don't buy the Times) which seemed to be an in depth investigation into manufacture and pollution etc with regard to electric car production and use. The article is headed "Electric cars only greener than petrol after 50,000 miles". So by that measure most of my elderly friends, who just run around the town and renew their car when around 5 years old, are never going to reach the point where their car becomes more green than their little old IC engined one!

I saw that, they were comparing a Polestar to an XC40 as well. You would imagine the gap gets bigger in a smaller vehicle where fewer materials are used in the construction and the battery will represent a bigger chunk of the footprint. However as the rest of the article was behind a pay wall so no idea what the source was.

But even if the car doesn't achieve 50k miles with you...it's highly unlikely it won't over it's lifetime so overall it's probably cleaner.

I view PHEVs as the worst of all worlds.

Solving drivetrain inefficiency by having two them always seemed an odd concept to me. Not to say they can't do ridiculous mpg figures (both good and bad) if used in the right or the wrong way.

Seem to mainly be a way of getting a two tonne petrol brick that'll do 25 mpg in use past WLTP with a few exceptions.
 
So I reluctantly retired my Punto TwimAir in September following a new job which results in me doing ~1000miles a month where I’m paid per mile. As much as I loved the Punto I wasn’t enjoying doing all those miles in a fairly basic car so change was required and the lower cost per mile the better that I can earn from my mileage paid!
So I’ve now owned a PHEV for a little over 2 months, a Vauxhall Ampera to be specific.
Obviously it’s only half way an EV but I am saving a fortune in fuel (averaging 107mpg by fuellys calculations over 3300miles)
Without charging at home it’s worthless especially with a slow charging vehicle (3.4kW is where the Ampera tops out) but it costs me about £24 a month in electric to top it up every night which during winter times gets me about 35miles of battery range (electric heating eats into range a lot) but when I first got it I would see ~43miles to a charge and I’m expecting to get closer to 50 in the summer. This means my 52mile round trip to work on Monday-Wednesdays costs me at worse 17 miles of petrol which I reserve for m’way use so the slow moving traffic which causes the most toll on an ICE cars economy I make the most savings on. As mentioned in the summer I’m hoping to have to use less than 5 petrol miles a day. Honestly I don’t regret making this choice at all as I’m saving enough in fuel costs to offset the price of the car per month (purchased on a loan) and it’s much nicer than the Punto.
I will absolutely go full BEV for my next car but I’m hoping that’ll be in 5 years when the technology has developed substantially.
Battery degradation if managed properly doesn’t concern me, Nissan did it very poorly with the early Leafs with no active battery cooling and very little ‘hidden’ capacity (the part you cant use to keep the battery from fully discharging or charging)
GM really did it right with the Ampera, 16kWh battery but only 10.5 of it is usable and it is actively cooled and heated by coolant flowing through the battery resulting in no noticeable degradation from any cars including one in the US doing over 400,000mi. As the technology improves more I think the only thing holding it back will be the appalling public charging network we have currently.
 
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Looking at this your best option for range is the ZOE both officially and unofficially. (Yes Mat Watson is an acquired taste)

https://youtu.be/wd2ArceiJd0

However the tech spec of the ZOE has changed massively since launch so the newer cars are hugely different to the old ones I think even to the point they use different types of chargers. So not applicable to all ZOEs...

Also this sort of test is of slightly limited benefit as 70mph for long periods is the least efficient way of using an electric car (few regen opportunities more wind resistance) they are much more efficient at town and country speeds. But you can see how they compared to each other on that day. My average speed tends to land between 25-30mph unless I do a big motorway trip south or something so I'd probably find I may achieve more.
 
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Just read the Guardian article where a couple couldnt cope with the range of their Porsche Taycan

130 mile trip.. took 9 hours..as charging network was inconsistent

Article stated public charging is around
£10 for 130 miles

£3 less than my car..

I find I can buy Diesel fuel quite readily
 
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Just read the Guardian article where a couple couldnt cope with the range of their Porsche Taycan

130 mile trip.. took 9 hours..as charging network was inconsistent

Article stated public charging is around
£10 for 130 miles

£3 less than my car..

I find I can buy Diesel fuel quite readily

Saw that too...they were the masters of their own misfortune.

Taycan is an expensive, inefficient, toy. Hopefully the nadir of current electric car thinking. In terms of mpg-e it manages 69mpg-e (most decent electric cars manage about 130+ mpg-e) so is about as efficient as a good diesel but with a 3 gallon fuel tank.

It's advertised as charging 0-80% in 30 mins...however very few chargers in the UK can manage that due to it's behemoth of a battery. 83 kwh (usuable) to get less range than a ZOE with 50kwh battery. Most readily available chargers it's like filling a bucket with a drinking straw.

The sooner car makers get away from loading more and more batteries on to get an acceptable range and look good on the spec sheet and get on to making efficient use of a reasonable sized battery the better.

If they'd bought a Kia e-Niro..would have got both ways no bother without a charge, it's that simple. The car is terrible as a transport device and the owners clearly haven't realised that yet or installed a home charger. Lets face it the chances of them having no off street parking or cash do so are pretty slim and yet they've not bothered then whinged to the press when their lack of foresight and knowledge bit them on the bum.
 
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