Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
So your view is that because you personally may occasionally want to drive 250 or more miles with no break, to an uninhibited place (there are chargers in Tyndrum so it really does have to be very remote) in Northern Scotland, on a whim, for a trip where no hire car was available from a station or you needed to go by road all the way for some other reason, the the rest of society is going to, for similar reasons, reject electric vehicles? Have I got that right?
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
No you haven't. I am merely pointing out that the bald statement that "200 miles between charges is enough for everybody" ranks, for stupidity, with Bill Gate's assertion that "nobody will ever need more than 640 kbytes of memory"
I am pointing out one scenario where an EV is very inconvenient for the user. There are many more and we will have learn to live with that inconvenience. Well other will, I won't
How many chargers are there though?
The only place near me with any chargers is Tesco, which has 4 chargers for a 600 space car park...
There needs to be a significant upgrade of the infrastructure before electric cars become viable.
For now I'll be sticking with diesel for the foreseeable. I don't have access to chargers at home or at work, so I can't actually charge an electric car.
How many chargers are there though?
The only place near me with any chargers is Tesco, which has 4 chargers for a 600 space car park...
There needs to be a significant upgrade of the infrastructure before electric cars become viable.
For now I'll be sticking with diesel for the foreseeable. I don't have access to chargers at home or at work, so I can't actually charge an electric car.
From the climate point of view. But EVs offer reduced pollution in the vicinity of the road so are particularly good in improving air quality in urban areas.
My cars have always been designed and insured to accept more than one driver. On our long trips to Scotland we would change drivers every couple of hours. And even if you accept 250 as the limit having to make an overnight, or even six hour stop, between sessions is a bit OTT
I often do long trips to Scotland from Hertfordshire, easily doable in the most popular types of EV with one stop of an hour. Whilst @Bletchleyite and I disagree about the desirability of driving Scotland to the Home Counties in half a day, the number of people doing it without at least one stop of half an hour or so will be minimal.
Also the forum specialises in incredibly niche reasons why something will work for a tiny number of people, then extrapolate it to being worthwhile for the whole local population. (Ballater reopening, for example). We need to come up with a name for the technique...
Not so. They are better if they can have electricity supplied where the grid mix produces lower CO2 per vehicle mile than if it were ICE. Which, in this country, it is.
I've noticed this too, but just look at the prices of new cars for an explanation. I'm genuinely concerned at what I'm going to do when time comes to replace one or other of ours. We have a Grand Scenic bought for £4.5k when it was 5 years old, and a 208 bought for £3.5k when it was 3 years old.
Comparable stuff seems to be well into 5 figures now, though I've only taken a cursory look.
And electric. £35k minimum even for a lower end brand such as Skoda. And that's before you start adding options you really need and hit the "that option is only available in a higher trim" wall. I prices one up. £42k for a fairly bog standard electric Skoda. Where's the head blown emoji when you need it!
I often do long trips to Scotland from Hertfordshire, easily doable in the most popular types of EV with one stop of an hour. Whilst @Bletchleyite and I disagree about the desirability of driving Scotland to the Home Counties in half a day, the number of people doing it without at least one stop of half an hour or so will be minimal.
Current charger network in Scotland north of the central belt, rarely more than 30 miles from one.
Also the forum specialises in incredibly niche reasons why something will work for a tiny number of people, then extrapolate it to being worthwhile for the whole local population. (Ballater reopening, for example). We need to come up with a name for the technique...
Plenty of chargers at 100kw, all over the country...
Over 20,000 public chargers, plus on average slightly fewer than one per EV owner at their home.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
Not so. They are better if they can have electricity supplied where the grid mix produces lower CO2 per vehicle mile than if it were ICE. Which, in this country, it is.
And yet, with more than half a million plug in cars on the roads, chargers are more often than not available for use.
Yes, we will need a big increase in public charging as EV ownership increases, but it is happening. Don’t forget that most (but not all) EV owners can charge at home. Much more convenient.
In any event, an average EV owner doing average annual mileage, purely using public chargers at 50kW, would have it on charge for about 40 hours a year.
In any event, an average EV owner doing average annual mileage, purely using public chargers at 50kW, would have it on charge for about 40 hours a year.
Q28) What is the average annual mileage per car in England? A28) The estimated average annual mileage per car in England has decreased as the number of cars per household has risen, falling from around 9,200 miles in 2002 to 7,400 miles in 2019.
There is some research from the US that EV average mileage is lower still, although this may be temporary (possibly due to EVs being bought more often by those who use them for city driving, rather than ‘long haulers’).
Miles / kWh: 4, although the most popular new EVs do more than this (WLTP), source here:
I am merely pointing out that the bald statement that "200 miles between charges is enough for everybody" ranks, for stupidity, with Bill Gate's assertion that "nobody will ever need more than 640 kbytes of memory"
Earlier this week, in a column on Bill Gates, fellatio and media, and how all three relate to a profile of Gates in last week's Time magazine, this column daringly offered free software into the millennium to anyone who remembers one thing Bill Gates ever said. We were taking issue with the...
www.wired.com
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
As for electric cars, range isn't so much an issue but cost and lack of choice are much bigger ones. I've been toying with replacing my current car and looking for a big estate for under 20K, there's no big electric estates and if there was it would likely be around double my budget. From a green point of view I use a bike for most of my day to day transport which is about as green as it gets plus the running costs are low, good for my health and many other benefits.
When comparing costs between the car and train ticket I only consider fuel costs because I have the car for other uses although the running costs for my car are low as there's almost no depreciation due to its age, insurance is cheap, rarely any repair bills as it's very reliable and so forth. One of the main reasons I use the car is for carrying a bike or two and that's extremely difficult on trains with so little capacity for bikes.
With all possible discounts, ie splitting and using a two together rail card, in standard class my journey comes to around £180 for the two of us.
Even if I double my fuel cost of £70, to account for other costs, I still don’t get to £180.
Now I consider my car to be more akin to travelling first class, I get comfortable seats, privacy and quiet, and crucially I’m not tied to a particular time. So my journey, which we are doing first class is £340.
This is very much more than the fuel cost, and any other cost you might think needs adding in for an equitable comparison. Furthermore, the car journey is marginally quicker. Once two of you are travelling the train becomes very expensive.
And this is going to get significantly worse as EVs become more popular.
For two of us to get to London with a 2-together railcard is ~£160 (£120/person full fare). For us to drive to London is... about £25 (300 miles there = £4 after charging at home at £0.05/kWh. 300 miles back = £20 at a public charger at £0.30/kWh).
Even accounting for paying for parking in London, it's not even close (ULEZ etc aren't a problem, obviously). And if our destination is a similar distance away but *not* London, eg a wedding at a country house, we don't even have to account for parking.
Of course, EVs aren't cheap currently, but the price is plummetting (10 years ago the cheapest with a decent range was a £100k Tesla Model S, 4 years ago it was a £50k Tesla Model 3, now it's about £30k (with several options). I'm not suggesting people are gonna buy a whole car instead of taking a train, but many people have a car anyway, and if the train is 5x more expensive than even a single person in a car (and 20x more expensive than 5...) then they're likely to opt for a train more often.
Earlier this week, in a column on Bill Gates, fellatio and media, and how all three relate to a profile of Gates in last week's Time magazine, this column daringly offered free software into the millennium to anyone who remembers one thing Bill Gates ever said. We were taking issue with the...
www.wired.com
As for electric cars, range isn't so much an issue but cost and lack of choice are much bigger ones. I've been toying with replacing my current car and looking for a big estate for under 20K, there's no big electric estates and if there was it would likely be around double my budget. From a green point of view I use a bike for most of my day to day transport which is about as green as it gets plus the running costs are low, good for my health and many other benefits.
When comparing costs between the car and train ticket I only consider fuel costs because I have the car for other uses although the running costs for my car are low as there's almost no depreciation due to its age, insurance is cheap, rarely any repair bills as it's very reliable and so forth. One of the main reasons I use the car is for carrying a bike or two and that's extremely difficult on trains with so little capacity for bikes.
There aren't many petrol or diesel estates new for £20k... but EV prices are dropping all the time. You can get a Skoda Enyaq (a decent sized car) for ~£30k new, so in 3 years you'd expect that to be well under £20k. Similar for the ID4, Kia EV6, Ioniq 5 etc
Not so. They are better if they can have electricity supplied where the grid mix produces lower CO2 per vehicle mile than if it were ICE. Which, in this country, it is.
I mean that's what you'd do if you were deliberately trying to sabotage yourself I guess. Meanwhile people in the real world would simply ensure that their plan included visiting a conveniently located charging point. Lets say you're going hiking in the Cairngorms. There are currently charging points in Aviemore, Kingussie, Dalwhinnie, Blair Atholl, Pitlochry, Dunkeld, Braemar, Ballater, Banchory, Forfar and more besides. If the only way you can come up with charging your EV on this trip to the Cairngorms is to make a sixty mile round trip out of your way then I don't think anyone can really help you. Meanwhile in the real world you're probably going to say the night somewhere like that anyway so it'll be easy enough to charge up. Even if you're camping you're going to go through somewhere like one of the above on your way to the starting point of your hike. So, again, easy enough to charge up.
The number of people who might have to detour 60 miles out of their way to charge is going to be vanishingly small and will get smaller all the time as more and more charging points are added.
Stats from Zap-Map (who I believe provide the by far the most comprehensive info about the EV charging network) suggest that there are currently just over 43,000 connectors at nearly 16,000 locations throughout the UK. So we're already not far off. Plus, and I think this has been pointed out before, most EV owners are more likely to charge up at home using their own charging point (either three pin from the mains or proper wall mounted charger) so just drawing straight comparisons with petrol pumps isn't really the whole story. Plus when you're charging at home if it takes ten times longer than filling up a petrol station who cares? "Oh no my car took eight hours to charge, most of which I was asleep for anyway!" is not exactly a critical flaw in the design.
This also ignores the very rapid growth in the charging infrastructure in general anyway. In 2016 Zap-Map note that we had around 6,500 charging points (not connectors, so there will probably have been more connectors than that) and in 2021, to date, we now have just over 25,000 charging points. With 611 having been added in the past 30 days. That's a pretty substantial rate of growth and one which I don't see decelerating any time soon (indeed it will probably accelerate).
I appreciate that it seems hard to accept for many and yes there are going to be edge cases that continue to exist for a while and indeed brand new EVs, particularly the ones with ranges of over 200 miles, remain a bit more expensive (though not that much more expensive, particularly on the most popular way of purchasing a car via PCP). But, the reality is that EVs are here, they are here to stay and they are just as good, indeed I would suggest in most cases better, than their petrol and diesel powered equivalents for the vast majority of drivers.
I think there are two mentalities with regard to fuelling cars or charging them. One is that you notice you are lowish so fill up at the next convenient petrol station. The other is specifically making journeys to get fuel. The former works better than the latter with regard to EVs - the habit is that if you go somewhere with a charger and will be away from the car for more than a few minutes, plug in.
But to get to any of the places 30 miles from a charger, you have to drive past a charger. And your car will tell you that - ie if you try to go out of charging range it will make sure you know about it!
At present, all of them (EVs and PHEVs). But then, not all of them are charging simultaneously overnight - far from it. Even assuming 7kW charging at home, the average driver will only need to charge overnight at home once a fortnight. And that assumes they never need to charge at a public charger.
To recharge the whole car fleet in the UK if it was all electric - which hit won’t be for at least another 20 years - would need an average of around 15MW for 10 hours each night. That assumes no one charges at all for the other 14 hours a day. By 2042 there will be a lot more nuclear and wind power, plus more connections to Europe, so generating capacity won’t be an issue. What will be an issue is local network capacity in some places, but then there’s ways round that which are being actively pursued you the local network operators.
And yet, with more than half a million plug in cars on the roads, chargers are more often than not available for use.
Yes, we will need a big increase in public charging as EV ownership increases, but it is happening. Don’t forget that most (but not all) EV owners can charge at home. Much more convenient.
In any event, an average EV owner doing average annual mileage, purely using public chargers at 50kW, would have it on charge for about 40 hours a year.
"Most" makes the number of people without home charging sound trivial. The figure that I have seen is that roughly 30% of households don't have suitable access for home charging. With the UK population an estimated 68 million that is not a trivial figure.
I was referring to those who have EVs now, most of whom have home charging facilities. Indeed there are many homes now that have charging facilities without an EV; it is quite conceivable that there are more homes with EV charging facilities than EVs.
I agree that home charging will be an issue in future for those who don’t have a drive, but there are solutions and they are being worked on.
To recharge the whole car fleet in the UK if it was all electric - which hit won’t be for at least another 20 years - would need an average of around 15MW for 10 hours each night. That assumes no one charges at all for the other 14 hours a day. By 2042 there will be a lot more nuclear and wind power, plus more connections to Europe, so generating capacity won’t be an issue. What will be an issue is local network capacity in some places, but then there’s ways round that which are being actively pursued you the local network operators.
Plus about half a million charging points at people’s homes. Do you have a petrol pump on your drive?
That also needs to assume that a) the proposed nuclear power stations actually get built and b) that Europe has capacity to spare with all of its car users also converting to electric vehicles.
That also needs to assume that a) the proposed nuclear power stations actually get built and b) that Europe has capacity to spare with all of its car users also converting to electric vehicles.
If there is a desire to electrify transport (and home heating via heat pumps), then they will have to get built. There is clearly massive pressure for this, so I think we can be sure they will.
I think there are two mentalities with regard to fuelling cars or charging them. One is that you notice you are lowish so fill up at the next convenient petrol station. The other is specifically making journeys to get fuel. The former works better than the latter with regard to EVs - the habit is that if you go somewhere with a charger and will be away from the car for more than a few minutes, plug in.
Depends on the price and the situation, commercial public chargers seem to be several times the price of charging at home overnight, so you would only want to use them if you are going to be away from home for an extended period. OTOH there are a bunch of places offering free charging at the moment, how long that will last is another matter.
Earlier this week, in a column on Bill Gates, fellatio and media, and how all three relate to a profile of Gates in last week's Time magazine, this column daringly offered free software into the millennium to anyone who remembers one thing Bill Gates ever said. We were taking issue with the...
www.wired.com
As for electric cars, range isn't so much an issue but cost and lack of choice are much bigger ones. I've been toying with replacing my current car and looking for a big estate for under 20K, there's no big electric estates and if there was it would likely be around double my budget. From a green point of view I use a bike for most of my day to day transport which is about as green as it gets plus the running costs are low, good for my health and many other benefits.
When comparing costs between the car and train ticket I only consider fuel costs because I have the car for other uses although the running costs for my car are low as there's almost no depreciation due to its age, insurance is cheap, rarely any repair bills as it's very reliable and so forth. One of the main reasons I use the car is for carrying a bike or two and that's extremely difficult on trains with so little capacity for bikes.
I have always bought oldish low millage cars and run them to destruction.
My current car was bought in 2018 at ten years old and 10,000 miles. It cost £3,.500 and I expect it to last until 2028 when I will be 80 and probably too old to drive. So every thing I write is more devil's advocate than real criticism. And I am pleased to see so many of my doubts mollified
I suspect that the market for second hand EVs will be very different, very much influenced by reservations about the state of the batteries. Can we expect a ten year old EV to have fully functioning batteries? And what does it cost to replace them ?
Depends on the price and the situation, commercial public chargers seem to be several times the price of charging at home overnight, so you would only want to use them if you are going to be away from home for an extended period. OTOH there are a bunch of places offering free charging at the moment, how long that will last is another matter.
It will be interesting to see how offerings and etiquette develop here. Free wifi is an expectation at most businesses these days, and it isn't considered rude to ask for the password when visiting someone's home as a friend, nor to ask if they have a charger if your phone is low on battery. Charging a car will obviously cost much more but will it be similar, I wonder?
Functioning usefully, yes. Plenty of data out there that shows Teslas lose between 5-10% of battery capacity by 100,000 miles. You can expect other manufacturers’ vehicles to be similar. There are plenty of Teslas out there running around with more than 100k on the clock, and indeed there is one for sale on Autotrader now with 150k on the clock ... for around £30,000.
That depends on the car. But, realistically, the battery pack is not going to be the life limiting factor unless you are going to be doing upwards of quarter of a million miles.
It will be interesting to see how offerings and etiquette develop here. Free wifi is an expectation at most businesses these days, and it isn't considered rude to ask for the password when visiting someone's home as a friend, nor to ask if they have a charger if your phone is low on battery. Charging a car will obviously cost much more but will it be similar, I wonder?
I recently stayed for a few days with relatives who were early EV adopters - they have a pure EV and a PHEV, both mainly recharged from solar panels and a mini hydroelectric generator. They were happy to let me recharge my car, as long as I did it on a sunny day when their solar panels often generate more than they can return to the grid.
It will be interesting to see how offerings and etiquette develop here. Free wifi is an expectation at most businesses these days, and it isn't considered rude to ask for the password when visiting someone's home as a friend, nor to ask if they have a charger if your phone is low on battery. Charging a car will obviously cost much more but will it be similar, I wonder?
My guess is that for most people visiting friends / family it will become generally accepted to recharge if needed. Taking the cost of a few quids worth of electricity off them is no different conceptually to taking the cost of the food / drink etc often provided at such visits.
The issue will be that bloody aunt / uncle who always rocks up ‘needing’ a full charge for their half hour trip home, but then doesn’t offer the same when you visit them. A bit like when you lay on the full works for dinner for them, but they don’t bring a bottle of wine and proceed to drink all of yours, and then when you go to theirs you get a cup of tea and a biscuit if you’re lucky.
The issue will be that bloody aunt / uncle who always rocks up ‘needing’ a full charge for their half hour trip home, but then doesn’t offer the same when you visit them. A bit like when you lay on the full works for dinner for them, but they don’t bring a bottle of wine and proceed to drink all of yours, and then when you go to theirs you get a cup of tea and a biscuit if you’re lucky.
RailUK was launched on 6th June 2005 - so we've hit 20 years being the UK's most popular railway community! Read more and celebrate this milestone with us in this thread!
