Buy a EV battery car or not?

SouthLondonUser

I think poor charging infrastructure can be, depending on usage, a deal breaker even if the charging infrastructure is fine for 95% of your needs.

Let's say you use the car mostly around your city, or between two cities, and the charging infrastructure is fine there.

But you go twice a year to Cornwall, or the Scottish Highlands, or wherever, and the charging infrastructure there is poor. What do you do? Buy a second car just to use twice a year? Rent a petrol car for those 2-3-4 weeks? That's an option, but not a cheap one.

At the same time, I genuinely wonder if the economics justify installing enough chargers in those places, if they'd remain mostly unused outside of the tourist season.

I don;t know in other cities, but in certain (not all!) parts of London having an EV without having a home charger seems easier than I would have guessed 5 years ago. Lamp-post charging points are few and often occupied by petrol cars; but I see more and more charging bays dedicated to EVs only; f you live close enough to one of these, you could leave the EV there in the evening and pick it up in the morning. And you won't need to do this every day, of course. I have a couple of colleagues who do exactly this.

Herzlos

WellKnownSid said:

I've got friends with PHEVs and they say it's cheaper using the engine over the battery and these cars are carting around all the extra weight of the battery stuff all the time, I notice PHEVs are falling out of favour and manufacturers appear to be going much more for hybrids with smaller engines and use the battery stuff to make these car very efficient. 

Check out AutoTrader.  If you look closely you will see hundreds of PHEVs advertised with unopened shrink-wrapped charging leads in the back.  Never once been plugged in  

I believe that's quite common with company cars - people buying the hybrid for the BIK advantage. If the companies paying for the fuel anyway, why bother charging?

Herzlos

HillStreetBlues said:

Just wondering what people class as a long journey that needs a stop? More talking about the drivers limits.

The motoring orgs recommend a break every 2 hours or so (which would realistically be 100 miles on UK roads):

https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/tired-drivers

No doubt posters will be along claiming they drive for 10 hours without stopping all the time and the AA is talking nonsense.

I had a Jaguar before that only did ~240 miles on a tank, so regular stops never bothered me.

There is definitely a bit of a change in usage going from ICE to EV though, which some people refuse to do.
Take your travelling sales guy for example, it might sound like a dealbreaker having to stop every 2-3 hours for a 30 minute recharge, but they've almost certainly got some admin work they can do whilst waiting.
So if they had a 500 mile drive, in a diesel car they'd do the drive and then an hours admin at the end, but with an EV they'd do it in 3 legs with 2x 30 breaks to do admin. It'd potentially take up the same amount of their day in a different order whilst saving them a huge amount of money in BIK if not in fuel.

The same largely applies to leisure trips - if you're going on holiday for a week, what's the rush to get to a destination when you could stop for some sightseeing/shopping/lunch on the way?

Ectophile

Car_54 said:

ididgetwhereiamtoday said:

WellKnownSid said:

MikeJXE said:

I can do that with my 7 year old Jaguar XE 

I must admit we use it all the time now.  Nothing better then stepping out of Greggs in the freezing cold and taking the ten minute walk back to the multi-storey to find it's all nice and toasty... 

Now looking forward to Summer - and stepping into a nicely pre-chilled car!

There’s not many ice cars that have heat pumps. With out a heat pump it would require the engine to be running for quite a while to warm the car up. 

Which would be an offence if the car was unattended on a road.

It's possible to fit a diesel-fired heater to a diesel car, to keep it warm when the engine's off.

Bigwheels1111

Ectophile said:

Car_54 said:

ididgetwhereiamtoday said:

WellKnownSid said:

MikeJXE said:

I can do that with my 7 year old Jaguar XE 

I must admit we use it all the time now.  Nothing better then stepping out of Greggs in the freezing cold and taking the ten minute walk back to the multi-storey to find it's all nice and toasty... 

Now looking forward to Summer - and stepping into a nicely pre-chilled car!

There’s not many ice cars that have heat pumps. With out a heat pump it would require the engine to be running for quite a while to warm the car up. 

Which would be an offence if the car was unattended on a road.

It's possible to fit a diesel-fired heater to a diesel car, to keep it warm when the engine's off.

A few years back the Rover 75 estates had them as a factory fit option. 

HillStreetBlues

Herzlos said:

The motoring orgs recommend a break every 2 hours or so (which would realistically be 100 miles on UK roads):

https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/tired-drivers

I'm very surprised it's 2 hours would have thought much higher than that.

MikeJXE

Some drivers must have a break much lower than 2 hours 

My last long trip in September was 455 mile. 1 break half way after driving almost 4 hours 

Full trip 7.5 hours 

Car_54

Herzlos said:

HillStreetBlues said:

Just wondering what people class as a long journey that needs a stop? More talking about the drivers limits.

The motoring orgs recommend a break every 2 hours or so (which would realistically be 100 miles on UK roads):

https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/tired-drivers

No doubt posters will be along claiming they drive for 10 hours without stopping all the time and the AA is talking nonsense.

I had a Jaguar before that only did ~240 miles on a tank, so regular stops never bothered me.

There is definitely a bit of a change in usage going from ICE to EV though, which some people refuse to do.
Take your travelling sales guy for example, it might sound like a dealbreaker having to stop every 2-3 hours for a 30 minute recharge, but they've almost certainly got some admin work they can do whilst waiting.
So if they had a 500 mile drive, in a diesel car they'd do the drive and then an hours admin at the end, but with an EV they'd do it in 3 legs with 2x 30 breaks to do admin. It'd potentially take up the same amount of their day in a different order whilst saving them a huge amount of money in BIK if not in fuel.

The same largely applies to leisure trips - if you're going on holiday for a week, what's the rush to get to a destination when you could stop for some sightseeing/shopping/lunch on the way?

The problem is that where an ICE drive can be confident that he’ll find a free pump pretty quickly, that’s not true for EVs.

From my limited experience with a PHEV, you may well arrive at a service station and find a queue for the chargers. So your 30 minutes (?) break suddenly doesn’t go to plan …

Herzlos

HillStreetBlues said:

Herzlos said:

The motoring orgs recommend a break every 2 hours or so (which would realistically be 100 miles on UK roads):

https://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/safety/tired-drivers

I'm very surprised it's 2 hours would have thought much higher than that.

People vastly overestimate their abilities (something like 80-90% of drivers view themselves as "better than average" which isn't possible) and boredom thresholds.

In my experience, I'm usually pretty happy to get a rest by the 2 hour mark and walk about for 5 minutes.

Interestingly, the recommendation seems to be try and walk about every 1/2/3 hours (depending on source) to minimize the risk of DVT too, since sitting stationary for long periods isn't good for us.

Herzlos

Car_54 said:

The problem is that where an ICE drive can be confident that he’ll find a free pump pretty quickly, that’s not true for EVs.

From my limited experience with a PHEV, you may well arrive at a service station and find a queue for the chargers. So your 30 minutes (?) break suddenly doesn’t go to plan …

That's definitely a risk, and should be less of an issue as range increases, charge times and availability improves.  I'm sure we've all seen images of huge queues for Tesla Superchargers after events or whatever.

So yeah, you may find that your 30 minute admin break becomes an hour occasionally. Ideally you'd have enough range to identify that a charging station has a terrible queue and try the next one, but sometimes you will just need to stop and wait.