Electric cars

gzoom

AdrianC wrote: »

EVs are not quite (but it's close) ready to replace ICVs yet, for many people's primary-use vehicles..

What a load of BS. I started driving EVs in March 2015, I've now covered 36K miles in EVs since. We are on the verge of replacing our remaining petrol hybrid with an EV, and soon we will be 100% electric.

Some people just cannot get their head around the idea of change, for everyone else its simply called progress .

gzoom

AdrianC wrote: »

Tesla are closest to having the range sorted, but only because they are quite lazily happy to lob a metric shedload of the exact same generic cells as everybody else at each and every vehicle,

You really have no idea what EVs do you? If your going to make up BS at least do some research first!! You can critique Tesla on lots of points but their battery packs/cells are not one of them, but given your total lack of understanding of EVs am not surprised you don't get the importance of cell/battery design .

https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-battery-pack-in-depth/

AnotherJoe

Stoke wrote: »

We all want the cheapest motoring possible. I would still say bangernomics offers that, but there's a whole middle ground where it's EV vs Second Hand IC.

Self evidently, that statement is wholly untrue.

Car_54

gzoom wrote: »

What a load of BS. I started driving EVs in March 2015, I've now covered 36K miles in EVs since. We are on the verge of replacing our remaining petrol hybrid with an EV, and soon we will be 100% electric.

Some people just cannot get their head around the idea of change, for everyone else its simply called progress .

What part of Adrians statement "EVs are not quite (but it's close) ready to replace ICVs yet, for many people's primary-use vehicles" is not true?



'Many people' includes me. I'd be happy to use an EV if I could find a convenient way of charging it.

AdrianC

gzoom wrote: »

AdrianC wrote:

Tesla are closest to having the range sorted, but only because they are quite lazily happy to lob a metric shedload of the exact same generic cells as everybody else at each and every vehicle,

You really have no idea what EVs do you? If your going to make up BS at least do some research first!! You can critique Tesla on lots of points but their battery packs/cells are not one of them, but given your total lack of understanding of EVs am not surprised you don't get the importance of cell/battery design .

https://insideevs.com/tesla-model-3-battery-pack-in-depth/

Yes, we've done the 2170 LiIon cells before. Several times.

BTW, that article falls down on the very first sentence - "Tesla's next generation 2170 cells". They aren't. They're Panasonic cells (the "gigafactory" is a Panasonic/Tesla JV, remember), and Samsung announced production within a week of Panasonic at the start of last year. The Model S and Model X still use the ubiquitous 18650, though.

B'sides, the only difference is a minor one of cell dimensions - 21mm diameter x 70mm long, rather than 18mm diameter x 65mm long - there's a clue in the naming convention. The chemistry is the same, as is the nominal voltage (3.7v). The battery pack itself is just, as I said, a shedload of cells packaged.

AnotherJoe

EVs are not quite (but it's close) ready to replace ICVs yet, for many people's primary-use vehicles..
Originally posted by AdrianC

That of course is incorrect, unless the comma was misadvertently placed, and you meant to say something like EVs are not quite (but it's close) ready to replace ICVs yet for many people's primary-use vehicles whilst for others, they are already more than capable of doing that.

I moved from the "almost" to the "yep" camp when i retired, but that was purely a side effect of not needing to take regular long distance drives, not the commute to work, so anyone else already in that position with local commutes only and infrequent to zero long range (lets say, in excess of 150 miles) drives is already able to replace their ICE with an EV. Many of those people will move into the "yep" camp over the next couple of years as 200 mile+ range becomes the norm.

Speaking of which, one factor thats often missed is that once range gets above a certain threshold, then the paucity / unreliability of chargers becomes a non issue since you will only ever charge at home or at your destination and never en-route. That will be me late next year in a 250 mile range EV for example.

There are of course segments of the population at all places along the "is it doable" spectrum, from "already" to "not for a considerable time" with the 25% or so with no at home charging the most problematic segment to cater for (IMNSHO).

But rather than use those as an excuse to pretend that therefore EVs dont work for anyone, lets take the low hanging fruit.

Of which, the literally multiple dozens of cars every weekday morning outside every school in the country spewing out carcinogens right into the kids lungs would be a good starting point, many of those will only be doing local mileage every day. You said "second cars dont contribute much to pollution so they dont count" but you must have been thinking of CO2 only, i suspect they contribute the vast majority of local NOx and particulate poisons than your road warrior car traipsing up the motorway, or the large lorries (for which announcements about electrification are coming thick and fast now.

There's more than enough cars that can be replaced right now that could have a massive effect reducing local pollution, to soak up far more than the planned production of EVs for the next 4 or 5 years before worrying about edge cases of people who drive 500 miles a day or cant charge at home (as i said i think thats the more difficult problem to solve, i wouldn't have an EV if I couldn't charge at home)

Indout96

I would love an EV and would be an ideal candidate driving 40 miles per day and with off road parking but at the moment the cost is the problem.
I am not interested in PCP / PCH and with the battery life of 8 years quoted all over the place buying one around 5 years old is not really worth the risk.
At the moment I have a Volvo C30 D2 (1.6 d) with just about every option fitted, it is 6 years old and just passed MOT with not a single fault. I have owned it 12 months and fully expect to run it for the next 6/7 years until I semi retire and we go down to 1 car.
My wife has a PCH (New Volvo V40 T2) and we may look at an EV when that is up in 2.5 years as she only does 5,000 miles a year but wants to buy on the look of the car and did not like the Nissan Leaf which would have been about the same cost.
Hopefully when hers is replaced Volvo will have their EV out and she may look again.

NigeWick

AdrianC wrote: »

The chemistry is the same

I thought the chemistry of EV batteries was evolving all the time. Young Master Musk was trying to do away with Cobalt in the, hopefully not too distant, future.

NigeWick

AnotherJoe wrote: »

I moved from the "almost" to the "yep" camp when i retired, but that was purely a side effect of not needing to take regular long distance drives,

I'm the opposite. I bought my 40kWh Nissan Leaf with the intention of taking some long continental vacation drives. The idea was to stop every 120 or so miles for a comfort break and charge, travelling some 500 miles in a long day. But #rapidgate has put paid to that idea.

Martyn1981

NigeWick wrote: »

I'm the opposite. I bought my 40kWh Nissan Leaf with the intention of taking some long continental vacation drives. The idea was to stop every 120 or so miles for a comfort break and charge, travelling some 500 miles in a long day. But #rapidgate has put paid to that idea.

Apologies for laziness, and possible wild goose chase, but I thought something had happened recently about rapidgate - possibly the car's computer over-reacting and thus causing the slower charge rate.

So it might (you'll need to news hunt) be a software issue that can be easily(?) resolved.

Best of luck.

[Edit - Hiya Nige, found a couple of things. Firstly the simplest fix was for the 30kWh degradation, which seemed to be down to computer confusion. Then suggestions that the safe operating temp of the 40kWh batts is higher than 'they' are using, so a software fix might be possible ...... assuming operating at a higher temp is really safe.

But most promising is a comment from the speakEV forum, who promised (but then forgot) to report on a 400 mile trip in a Leaf40. This was the reply when promoted for an update:

oh sorry! I completely forgot to come back. It all went so smoothly that I'd forgotten I was even testing it to be honest. We did a 'small and often' technique. Drove 100 miles, 10-15 min top up and so on. Rather than 0-80/100% Charges. Absolutely no issues. In fact I found it worked a lot better than the 30kWh which on long motorway journeys overheated the battery rather quickly and became a bit of a pain.

So the 20-80% rule (is that a rule?) seems sensible to allow repeated rapid charging. M.]