When are you going fully electric?

[Simon]

Why does the look of a car need to change due to its powertrain? Fox clearly likes current BMWs and would like them to be the same but with a different method of turning the wheels.

I'm not sure why you picking apart his opinion with yours is really needed? Your last line sums up that up, you are really close to being an EV fanboy now.

 

[d_brennen]

If you still want to use a gearbox and clutch you'd be best off converting a classic car to EV. Best of both worlds.

I saw an old Porsche 911 with an electric conversion. Did wonder how it drives. It's not like keen do-it-yourself mechanics have access to the level of R&D as the likes of Tesla

 

[jamoor]

Because when LCD appeared it was inferior in many respects to CRT. It was a long time before LCD screens offered the flexibility, refresh rates, contrast and response times of a high end CRT. But, eventually, the technology got there and consequently CRT's vanished.

Of course its not quite the same with cars because for quite a lot of people there are little to no downsides of ICE cars and therefore the perceived benefits of moving to EV are smaller. Whereas nobody could deny the size of a 19" CRT wasn't absolutely ridiculous on your desk

I think EV's are really interesting and when it's sensible to do so (ie not when I'm 2 years in after ordering it brand new) I'd love to replace our Mini Cooper with a Mini Electric. It'll be cool to have an EV, it's fun tech and it'll be nice to buzz around town with zero sound. But I'm not going to go full fanboy and pretend that the EV is and always will be the answer to everyones motoring requirements. For many people, being able to spend 90 seconds putting 70 litres of liquid in a car that gives you 700 miles of range is something that is very valuable.

Of course the other thing I like about the Mini Electric is that it is in every respects a conventional car - it looks and feels like any other Mini.

For me the tipping point will likely be when there is a decent credible EV option in a range of regular cars. Even BMW don't quite get it - the electric models need to just look the same as everything else. Where is the fully EV E Class and 5 Series? Why must it always be standalone models that look weird?

The technology is improving, compare the original leaf with the cars of today. The original leaf was strictly short journeys only. Today we are at regular commutes (upto 50-60 miles each way) with long journeys thrown into the mix every now and then.

I'm sure in another 5-6 years we will be at a direct ICE replacement.

At the moment as it stands the current EV tech is fine for the vast majority of people.

Personally I have big doubts that BMW will be able to successfully compete in the EV space as they have a serious image problem with their brand being out of date, the diesel car scandal and disruptive competitors.
Merc and VAG should be ok in the short-medium term as they have a diversified product range.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Its now 90 seconds to refuel 70 litres, wow. This is part of the problem both sides mis representing. Plus I wonder what fraction of cars have a 700 mile range not that many since as diesel MPG has gone up the tanks have got smaller. Gen 1 mini had 50 litres across the range, gen 2 had 40 for most. So for most the potential range went down even though the MPG went up. Gen 3 has virtually no diesels left (assuming they havent ditched them completely).

BMW. Merc etc I can see why they arent really pushing, the tech isnt really quite there yet they have probably looked at their networks, looked as sales, looked at product lifetimes and figured its not quite time yet. But I would bet there are people in BMW working on better / proper Evs not just the tech, but the mainstream acceptable versions.

Why dont they look the same? Only they could tell you specifically but the old saloon shape is losing ground so maybe they dont want to eat into the segments sales of ICE based right now.
Car buyers are clearly moving to SUV type shapes and as such you might never see full blown EV 5 series type shaped cars.
Car enthusiasts tend to be wanting different to the majority.
As far as shapes you only have to look how the mondeo sales fell to virtually nothing to see how consumer buying trends changed.
People are generally buying shorter higher vehicles than longer lower ones.
The target for 5 series isnt really as a town car, its really a distance cruiser, so right now a EV 5 series doesn't make that much sense.

Lets face it most car design is still limited by having to put a relatively fixed shaped item in the car package. An item thats not easy to place since its very heavy, and generates lots of heat and noise. That pretty much goes away with EV, it allows the same footprint to be changed with less restriction. You could easily fit 3 rows in the same footprint of a 5 series. Cars may end up with seating more like a taxi configuration, one seat up front, luggage by the side, 4 seats behind in a far more open configuration
and this whole area being the total footprint of the vehicle, no boot, no engine compartment.

 

[Simon]

Lets face it most car design is still limited by having to put a relatively fixed shaped item in the car package. An item thats not easy to place since its very heavy, and generates lots of heat and noise. That pretty much goes away with EV, it allows the same footprint to be changed with less restriction. You could easily fit 3 rows in the same footprint of a 5 series. Cars may end up with seating more like a taxi configuration, one seat up front, luggage by the side, 4 seats behind in a far more open configuration
and this whole area being the total footprint of the vehicle, no boot, no engine compartment.

A battery is very heavy, bigger and also generates heat. The issue doesn't just 'go away'.

 

[ianh]

I live on a terrace street with non-allocated on road parking. How often do you drive from Stoke to Scotland? You say "everyday" issue but I'm guessing that's not often. In any case, that's why you buy into Tesla; you can drive to Eastern Europe and not have to charge at anything but Tesla Superchargers.

What are the practicalities for you charging your car overnight in a terrace, how does it work for you as it's something I'd need to figure out? In my case I sometimes had to park on the other side of the street or maybe 50m+ away from where I live which I would imagine makes charging very difficult if not impossible. As for Stoke to Scotland, every weekend for 2 years - I worked near Inverness during the week and travelled home to Stoke every weekend (8hr drive each way).

Having driven from Ayrshire to Manchester and back in a day (circa 450 miles round trip, 4 hours each way) in my SR+ Tesla - I'm not sure you fully understand how simple and easy it is to do. Certainly no longer time wise than ICE car.

One stop at Westmoreland Services (M6) each way for 14 minutes on the way down and 18 minutes on the way back to top up on the Tesla supercharger, and on my way again. I would be stopping for a coffee/toilet break anyway so it's zero hassle to park up, plug in, walk into the services and then stroll back out, unplug and drive away. Total cost for the journey was £15.40. Zero extra time added to the journey.

My concern is that, right now today, the "simple and easy" experience you are having is only due to the very small ratio of number of pure EV's (not hybrids) vs fast chargers making it "simple and easy" for most EV drivers to find an unavailable fast charger for your 15min top-up - currently 1 fast charger per 5 EV's (linked below).

So my point was that was that unless the fast charging infrastructure grows inline with expected EV sales (est 70% increase in sales per year), then this ratio of EV's to chargers will increase significantly, meaning your total 15min fast charging time will now take significantly longer as you won't be able to find an empty fast charger to start your 15min charge to begin with and, unlike ICE refueling times, each car infront of you in the "queue" isn't going to take just 2-5 minutes to refuel and pay, they're taking far longer to fast charge their cars before you can use it.

That is why I said that I will wait until the infrastructure is scaling for the huge EV growth we're expecting as I'm not sure that it will keep pace, and if it doesn't then the current "good times" that EV owners like yourself are having with finding a fast charger will rapidly change once there are millions of EV's but still a similar amount of fast chargers.

For example, there is an expected increase in pure EV numbers over the next 30 years from just the tiny handful currently running around (<150k - 0.5% of the total number of UK cars) using 35,000 fast chargers currently available to an expected 35+ Million EV's (100% the total number of UK cars) by 2050 which is the Government set Zero Emissions date. This would need over 7 million Fast Chargers to keep that same ratio of EV's to fast chargers that current EV drivers have, and if that infrastructure doesn't scale then the "simple and easy" charging you have right now will disappear very quickly into massive queues waiting for a limited number of chargers, electrical brown-outs from a National Grid which can't cope and massively increased "cost to charge" etc etc.

Again, I'm very happy to swap to EV but only when I think the infrastructure is scaling alongside EV sales well enough for the country to cope or, alternatively, that EV battery/power-pack/fuel-cell technology fundamentally changes so that charging takes much less time (same as ICE levels) or can do far more for same amount of energy used or that you need far less energy to do the same work, meaning you don't need as many charging points overall. Once those points are covered I'm all in but if they're not, and the rapidly increasing number of EV's starts to cause issues, then I'm not if swapping if it'll just make my life "harder" over using an ICE car.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Its now 90 seconds to refuel 70 litres, wow. This is part of the problem both sides mis representing. Plus I wonder what fraction of cars have a 700 mile range not that many since as diesel MPG has gone up the tanks have got smaller.

How am I misrepresenting? Flow rate in a petrol pump is circa 50 litres a minute. Some faster, some slower. 90 seconds is about a fair approximation of the fill time of my car - I've no idea what fraction of cars have a 700 mile range, but mine does. They to tend pump faster on the Continent, too, plus you can clip so the pump so the pumping time is often used for other things like bug cleaning off the screen (Something else we weirdly don't seem to offer at petrol stations here).

I appreciate my usage is perhaps not typical - my use of a car is heavily weighted towards large distance road trips - its how we like to holiday - but the only usage of a car I'm interested in when it comes to making future purchase/rental decisions is my own, for obvious reasons

 

[Jez]

Its now 90 seconds to refuel 70 litres, wow. This is part of the problem both sides mis representing. Plus I wonder what fraction of cars have a 700 mile range not that many since as diesel MPG has gone up the tanks have got smaller.

To be fair, this isnt miles off at all. The main point and party piece of an ICE is how quickly you "recharge" them, therefore making them super flexible as they never really run out with any consequence. While my diesels dont have a 700 mile range, they do take probably barely a couple of minutes all told to refuel including slapping your card into the pump reader. Refuelling an ICE car is such a non event that it doesn't come into consideration lets be honest (I am not anti EV at all by the way, when i was doing high mileage pre covid i did lust after the savings potentially possible with a Model S Tesla, but right now with me being primarily home based the thing would be a massively expensive white elephant, very glad i didnt make the maths work based on my mileage).

 

[Journey]

I'm not if swapping if it'll just make my life "harder" over using an ICE car.

I'm hoping more people have your attitude, as it keeps the BEV low/zero tax rate for early adopters locked in for longer, and since you'll only change for convenience that means you'll suck up any increases in taxation be that fuel duty or VED. Happy days

 

[Jez]

The issue is (and i have run these numbers to death) as a private punter who cannot put the car through a company, EVs are very expensive even with the tax breaks. They only start to save money when you project quite high mileage and therefore rack up lots of fuel duty savings.

If a VED came in for them, and more importantly the playing field in terms of fuel duty was levelled, then it'll be a seriously tough sell for most people i would think.

 

[DarrenM343]

To be fair, this isnt miles off at all. The main point and party piece of an ICE is how quickly you "recharge" them, therefore making them super flexible as they never really run out with any consequence. While my diesels dont have a 700 mile range, they do take probably barely a couple of minutes all told to refuel including slapping your card into the pump reader. Refuelling an ICE car is such a non event that it doesn't come into consideration lets be honest (I am not anti EV at all by the way, when i was doing high mileage pre covid i did lust after the savings potentially possible with a Model S Tesla, but right now with me being primarily home based the thing would be a massively expensive white elephant, very glad i didnt make the maths work based on my mileage).

I think that's one of the key things at the moment. How much work in future is going to be from home? The most environmentally friendly and cheapest option is to not own a car at all, EV or ICE. I bought a new car last year and hardly used it or my other old car since March. Feels a waste but I enjoy motoring so will keep hold of both for the moment. Many would get away with an electric pedal cycle now .

 

[Russinating]

What are the practicalities for you charging your car overnight in a terrace, how does it work for you as it's something I'd need to figure out? In my case I sometimes had to park on the other side of the street or maybe 50m+ away from where I live which I would imagine makes charging very difficult if not impossible. As for Stoke to Scotland, every weekend for 2 years - I worked near Inverness during the week and travelled home to Stoke every weekend (8hr drive each way).

So both myself and my other half can charge at work. My commute is 2 miles each way - hence I usually cycle - and my partner's is 12 miles each way, though she uses our second car sometimes. Both are free so if anything I'd rather not charge at home (though we're with Octopus Agile and sometimes this is very cheap or we actually get paid to charge). I have a charger installed at home and you can see my setup at https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/sharing-my-no-driveway-on-street-parking-setup.189161.

I can't always get parked right outside, but I can usually move it to right outside at some point before I need to charge it. My neighbours are all very kind and if one of them is in the space then they used to message and ask if I wanted to swap, or they wouldn't mind if I asked to.

Otherwise public chargers, namely Tesla Superchargers. If I absolutely had to then I live 5 miles from one which is on the M5 junction and would be my exit route to go north or south anyway. So far every where I've travelled to I've been able to charge for free: I'm off camping this weekend and despite the camp site having no mains electricity with showers heated by solar, the owner is letting me use a 3-pin plug at the farm house to charge overnight. Plenty of car parks and other destinations like hotels have free charging too; I drove to Cardiff and back for free, and if I really wanted I could drive to Cabot Circus in Bristol and charge up for free whilst watching a film or shopping or something.

Inverness to Stoke every weekend is obviously a ridiculously unusual journey even for an ICE owner. Hell, even for a lorry driver!

According to https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ - which you should check out - you'd need to stop and charge 3 times for a total of 52 mins, total drive time of 7h 32m, assuming you can charge at the end (you'd arrive on 10%). You could charge for longer at the last point to arrive with more obviously. Total cost £19 odd.

 

[Kenai]

The issue is (and i have run these numbers to death) as a private punter who cannot put the car through a company, EVs are very expensive even with the tax breaks. They only start to save money when you project quite high mileage and therefore rack up lots of fuel duty savings.

If a VED came in for them, and more importantly the playing field in terms of fuel duty was levelled, then it'll be a seriously tough sell for most people i would think.

The other thing is that whilst things like the Model 3 LR are occupying a similar price bracket to getting into something like an M340i (as well as similar performance numbers), as much as I might want to try EV, a big part of me also thinks "I've got another 10/20/30/40 years of driving to do EV, I might not get a sensible chance to enjoy some half decent petrol cars if I don't do it now" and as you say - without doing big miles to make significant savings on fuel, it's a hard choice to go Model 3 LR over M340i (as an example)

 

[Jez]

I think that's one of the key things at the moment. How much work in future is going to be from home? The more environmentally friendly and cheapest option is to not own a car at all, EV or ICE. I bought a new car last year and hardly used it or my other car since March. Feels a waste but I enjoy motoring so will keep hold of both for the moment. Many would get away with an electric pedal cycle now

Yep, being home based (primarily) and doing so few miles, our cars are doing very low mileage. If anything if this continues i will go the other way and go for cars which are actually far worse on fuel, we are barely burning anything so even if i went back to a V8 petrol Range Rover as i used to have, it would be a non issue. If i had gone for a Model S based on my mileage (the maths did work at the time, based on 25k/year of duty saving) i would be pretty annoyed right now.

 

[Journey]

According to https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ - which you should check out - you'd need to stop and charge 3 times for a total of 52 mins, total drive time of 7h 32m, assuming you can charge at the end (you'd arrive on 10%). You could charge for longer at the last point to arrive with more obviously. Total cost £19 odd.

Seems like a great route to me, with nicely broken up stops to ensure you stay fresh and alert, giving you a chance to stretch your legs, or get a drink, use the loo etc. 7h 32m is also faster than the 8 hours the ICE car was doing it in, so faster too! Obviously I assume roadworks may be involved, and I'm not sure I know any one that has an 8 hour gap between meals, breakfast 07:00, lunch 13:00, dinner 18:30+ so I'd be stopping for at least 40 minutes for one stop if it were me.

EDIT: The cost seems reasonable as well, circa £20 vs. maybe 3x-5x that in fuel

 

[Pottsey]

How am I misrepresenting? Flow rate in a petrol pump is circa 50 litres a minute. Some faster, some slower. 90 seconds is about a fair approximation of the fill time of my car - I've no idea what fraction of cars have a 700 mile range, but mine does. They to tend pump faster on the Continent, too, plus you can clip so the pump so the pumping time is often used for other things like bug cleaning off the screen (Something else we weirdly don't seem to offer at petrol stations here).

I appreciate my usage is perhaps not typical - my use of a car is heavily weighted towards large distance road trips - its how we like to holiday - but the only usage of a car I'm interested in when it comes to making future purchase/rental decisions is my own, for obvious reasons

It could be seen as misrepresenting because for the average driver it can take a lot longer then 90seconds and for the average driver fueling up an ICE car is less convenient and takes longer than keeping an EV fueled up.

Clearly for your none typical use an ICE car is superior but for a typical driver with a average home and doing an average trip EV win out most of the time in time saved and convenience. Sometimes even for a longer trip an EV is more convenient. Although to be fair for longer trips there are so many variables its swings between ICE and EV per situation.

 

[Jez]

The other thing is that whilst things like the Model 3 LR are occupying a similar price bracket to getting into something like an M340i (as well as similar performance numbers), as much as I might want to try EV, a big part of me also thinks "I've got another 10/20/30/40 years of driving to do EV, I might not get a sensible chance to enjoy some half decent petrol cars if I don't do it now" and as you say - without doing big miles to make significant savings on fuel, it's a hard choice to go Model 3 LR over M340i (as an example)

For me the difference is worlds apart as neither of those cars would be on my wish list to be honest as i prefer a larger/more luxurious car as a preference. My next car i think i am going to go for a (used!) Porsche Cayenne, but as a Saloon would be an S-Class Merc or 7-Series BMW.

Which EV can i even get which is remotely comparable to those? Really the only usable ones with a decent range are the Model X or Model S. Those things are seriously expensive and seriously struggle to stack up financially. I did run the maths for a Model S (used) vs a similar aged S-Class Merc, and BMW 7-Series, but again due to the high price of the car, the savings take many thousands of miles per year in duty savings to equalise. The maths does work at a high projected mileage, but right now it doesn't at all, and that is inclusive of the generous tax breaks.

Then add in that lets be honest, the Teslas are no where near as nice as the Porsche, BMW, or Merc. You are paying for the drive-train with the Tesla.

 

[[TW]Fox]

It could be seen as misrepresenting because for the average driver it can take a lot longer then 90seconds

I've got one of the largest fuel tanks, how is it taking people a lot longer to pump fuel?

 

[Joe T]

For me the difference is worlds apart as neither of those cars would be on my wish list to be honest as i prefer a larger/more luxurious car as a preference. My next car i think i am going to go for a (used!) Porsche Cayenne, but as a Saloon would be an S-Class Merc or 7-Series BMW.

Which EV can i even get which is remotely comparable to those? Really the only usable ones with a decent range are the Model X or Model S. Those things are seriously expensive and seriously struggle to stack up financially. I did run the maths for a Model S (used) vs a similar aged S-Class Merc, and BMW 7-Series, but again due to the high price of the car, the savings take many thousands of miles per year in duty savings to equalise. The maths does work at a high projected mileage, but right now it doesn't at all, and that is inclusive of the generous tax breaks.

Then add in that lets be honest, the Teslas are no where near as nice as the Porsche, BMW, or Merc. You are paying for the drive-train with the Tesla.

I see you in a used Taycan in c.5 years time.

 

[[TW]Fox]

I see you in a used Taycan in c.5 years time.

Now that is an EV!!