The big fat Electric Vehicle bashing thread.

prowla

I can't have one since I don't have a charging point.

ComicGeek

Uxb1 said:

Batteries ROTFL
I can pick up an enphase 1.5KW battery unit to add on to an enphase solar install for around £ 1500+
That would enable a house to use batteries overnight - usually about 1KW
So they would save what maybe 30p each night or £100 a year if you assume the battery could be fully charged EACH and every day...which it won't in winter
so that makes the payback period around 15 years.
It's a nonsense.

1.5 kWh battery?? My PV system exported 14-25 kWh each sunny day from April to September (and smaller amounts on cloudier days or sunny winter days) - I fill our 16 kWh battery system almost every day at the moment for free, and then top it up on a low night time tariff while charging the EV if the next day is not going to be sunny. I save about £2k per year at the moment from the battery, and that's without the £2.5k I save each year from the PV FITs and PV generation used directly in the house! There's also another £250 I get against business mileage as I can charge the EV for signficantly cheaper than the mileage rates I get. 

I agree that a 1.5 kWh would be pointless, but I don't see anyone suggesting that particular size is the answer. The whole point of the enphase system is that it's modular - you don't just put one battery in, but you might spread the cost if you need to.

EVs and home energy systems are intrinsically linked. People need to start thinking harder about energy costs and future security of supply - that means not buying inefficient and uninsulated homes, looking at reducing energy demand, installing insulation, thinking about different types of tariffs and energy systems.

Jenni_D

prowla said:

I can't have one since I don't have a charging point.

You don't have any facility to connect to a 13A socket?

Martyn1981

prowla said:

I can't have one since I don't have a charging point.

Hiya, that's obviously not ideal, hope it improves. Other options might be slower chargers at supermarkets, but beware fines if you stay too long. On street chargers being installed (slowly), lamp post chargers, use of a neighbours drive and charger if they are party to the shared use scheme (I forget its name), which charges you to cover the leccy cost, a profit for the householder, and an admin fee for the company. Or just a friendly neighbour if you pay fairly, but I'm sure this would tire over time.

Similar to the above scheme, there are clubs you can join to 'rent' a person's driveway when they are at work, if it's near where you work, but there is little parking. This scheme has some growth into EV charging too, but of course all early days.

I won't include faster chargers since that wouldn't be a long term solution, and the costs of the leccy will be higher (like petrol at the services) negating a lot of the cost savings.

Best of luck though.

[Deleted User]

With EV range increasing all the time, many cars will have minimum 200 mile range particularly by the time we get to 2030. So one rapid charge at a station once a week for people who can’t charge at home will suffice. 

There’s so much negativity from a small number of posters on the forum towards EVs it really is shameful. 

TooManyPoints

There’s so much negativity from a small number of posters on the forum towards EVs it really is shameful. 

It's not shameful. It's called debate where different people have different opinions. Governments have a habit of announcing grandiose policies and strategies without having considered the practicalities. Heat pumps are one, EVs are another. This country cannot possibly achieve "net zero" emissions (not without creative accounting such as considering the felling of thousands of acres of mature trees, processing them into pellets and shipping them 5,000 miles to be burnt in Yorkshire as "renewable"). Efforts to do so will harm the economy immeasurably, will cause widespread inconvenience and possibly suffering and will absolutely diddly squat to tackle climate change. 

To return to EVs, the public infrastructure to support them is barely adequate at present and since the growth in EV ownership seems to be considerably outstripping the growth in such infrastructure, that inadequacy will worsen. Supporters of EVs on this thread seem to be comparing either their own ideal circumstances (with solar panels, off peak energy deals, off road parking where they can charge without queuing, etc.) or inhabiting some ideal world where they rarely drive more than a couple of hundred miles in one go and if they do can consider a lengthy or even an overnight stop in their itinerary. Life's not like that. Huge numbers of car owners have none of these things - particularly off street parking. In London alone there are more than 2 million flats or apartments and enormous numbers of roads where residents are lucky to be able to park at all, let alone get near a charging point (if any are actually provided). The jobs of many car drivers take them up and down the country, often at short notice. They don't have time to plan their journey around charging points and they don't have the luxury of being able to take lengthy breaks to charge up.

In short, life isn't as ideal as some would portray and the compulsory changeover to EVs will cause many people enormous problems. It's not shameful to discuss these potential difficulties (which will inevitably lead to the appearance of "negativity"). What is shameful is to stifle the debate by shaming those who appear not to be "on message".

Ibrahim5

Maybe electric cars don't suit those few people.

Grumpy_chap

I was thinking of this thread today when I was pulling into the services for lunch.  I'd pulled over to the left lane and then had to slow quite sharply as the vehicle in front was going dangerously slow. 

The vehicle in front was a van emblazoned with graphic wrap that it is an all-electric demonstrator.  Not sure what make - it was Transit / Sprinter type van, possibly Citroen or Peugeot.  That is a good thing that this type of EV is now available and I was not aware that such options were in the market.

Anyway, the EV van was crawling along at under 30 mph - hence why I had to slow down abruptly.  I actually thought it was dangerous, and the van did not have any hazard lights or similar to draw attention to the situation.  I suspected that the van was hazardously low on charge and would pull off into the services.  The van did not.

In fact, even if the reason was not low charge, anyone needing to drive that slow on the motorway really should be pulling off into the services as there is either dangerously low energy reserve (can happen to an ICE as well as EV) or some fault.  Simply continuing is not the correct thing to do.

After lunch, I was only a couple of hundred yards down the road again and the same EV demonstrator vehicle was in a coned-off lane with Highways Agency (or Police) in attendance - it was a section of motorway with no hard shoulder.

So, two take-aways:
1. EV light commercial vehicles are a "thing"
2. Whether you drive an EV or an ICE, you need to engage brain and get off the carriage way to a save place if the vehicle is unable to make proper progress for any reason.

Herzlos

EV commercial vehicles have been a thing for a while; lots of courier fleets have them because they save a fortune. 

[Deleted User]

Herzlos said:

EV charging is usually app controlled to happen off peak when there is surplus energy. There will be some peaks when people get home but most people won't be charging at full speed as soon as they get in the door; most people will only need to charge once a week or so. 

We'll definitely need to increase electricity production but even a 25% increase doesn't seem that bad. 

Totally agree, 25% is well within the capacity of the grid and especially if it is managed by smart chargers then we won't see any overload.

My point probably got a bit lost in my long post and was a little exaggerated when I showed 75% of charging between midnight and 5am giving rise to more demand than peak daytime....

However the point was that there won't be such a thing as peak and off peak if the smart charging does it's job - consumption will level out throughout the day and night - which is a good thing for the efficiency of power generation.

But that will mean there won't be off-peak cheap tariffs to offer because there will be no off-peak, and therefore the 5p / 7.5p overnight prices will rise to match the pricing of "peak" demand in the daytime.