When are you going fully electric?

Soldato
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Good point, we should look at other alternatives such as hydrogen as a way complementing combustion engine alternatives, once again Japan is leading the way in this regard. One of the benefits of hydrogen is it can co-exist with fuel stations so part of the infrastructure is already in place (in some cases they would be able to make the fuel on site).

You realise that there is even less infrastructure for hydrogen than there is EV's? It's even more expensive by several orders of magnitude and the fuel costs more than petrol and diesel. They can't really share any infrastructure, its entirely bespoke. The tanks and fuel filling pumps are the cheap bit, making and transporting the stuff is incredibly costly. Making it on site isn't an option for most existing filling stations because there just isn't the space, you also can't store the hydrogen right next to the fossil fuels for fairly obvious reasons. The economics of BEV's VS hydrogen has an obvious clear winner and its the economics that drive the market.

BEV's have already established themselves as the next generation of power train for passenger cars especially with 250kw-350kw charging becoming the normal as it enables a 'splash and dash' on EV's. Hydrogen only makes sense on large long distance HGV's, long distance coaches and boats/shipping. That said there are even BEV Ferries now in Norway, saving thousands in fuel costs.

It seems the biggest obstacle in the way of EV's is manufacturing capacity of the batteries, Volkswagen last year had to halt production of the Golf GTE (hybrid) so it could free up capacity for future EV models that are coming out latter this year.

How many hydrogen fuel cell plants to you think there are out there? There are tens of 'gigafactory' level facilities opening up in the next few months.

VW stopping the GTE had more to do with the fact they sold all the ones they planned to make and its an EOL product with the ID launching now. Changing production plans on when your working on the scale of VW is very difficult, they contracted their supplier to make X motors and batteries, they used them all so that was that.
 
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You realise that there is even less infrastructure for hydrogen than there is EV's? It's even more expensive by several orders of magnitude and the fuel costs more than petrol and diesel. They can't really share any infrastructure, its entirely bespoke. The tanks and fuel filling pumps are the cheap bit, making and transporting the stuff is incredibly costly. Making it on site isn't an option for most existing filling stations because there just isn't the space, you also can't store the hydrogen right next to the fossil fuels for fairly obvious reasons. The economics of BEV's VS hydrogen has an obvious clear winner and its the economics that drive the market.

BEV's have already established themselves as the next generation of power train for passenger cars especially with 250kw-350kw charging becoming the normal as it enables a 'splash and dash' on EV's. Hydrogen only makes sense on large long distance HGV's, long distance coaches and boats/shipping. That said there are even BEV Ferries now in Norway, saving thousands in fuel costs.



How many hydrogen fuel cell plants to you think there are out there? There are tens of 'gigafactory' level facilities opening up in the next few months.

VW stopping the GTE had more to do with the fact they sold all the ones they planned to make and its an EOL product with the ID launching now. Changing production plans on when your working on the scale of VW is very difficult, they contracted their supplier to make X motors and batteries, they used them all so that was that.

The infrastructure for full electric requires the roads or streets or parking lots to be resurfaced with new asphalt layers because the cables must go somewhere underground.
You also lose the battery capacity over time and in cold/wet conditions.
EVs are obviously not the obvious solution for the future.
 
Soldato
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The infrastructure for full electric requires the roads or streets or parking lots to be resurfaced with new asphalt layers because the cables must go somewhere underground.

Since when? The cables already exist, they are under the pavement, they go to your home. It costs very little to add a basic charge post to a residential street. Even less if you can put it into existing street furniture like a lamp post. On top of that the transition to LED lampposts has freed up a metric but ton of capacity on those wires on a winters evening. Smart chargers basically make brownouts caused by EV's impossible. If you need to add cabling it can be done in a 30 cm wide trench, not exactly a a huge resurfacing job.

You also lose the battery capacity over time and in cold/wet conditions.

I don't disagree but most people drive less than 30 miles a day. When your on a long journey like > 200 miles you'll warm the pack up by pre-heating and driving. . It's only really a problem on cars without thermal management (Leaf, e-Golf) and temperatures far below what you get in the UK. Norway is @ 50% of new sales are EV and it gets far colder for far longer there, do you think they all just stay inside in the winter? ICE cars also use more fuel when its wet, so nothing new there.

EVs are obviously not the obvious solution for the future.

As I said above, Norway is at over 50% of new cars sold are BEV's its a much wetter and colder country. Tell us why it works for them and not for us? Their average mileage is slightly higher than ours.
 
Tea Drinker
Don
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Evening, having an extension built at the moment and the electrician starts next week. Now is the ideal time to add an ev point.

Probably looking at a mini ev for the missus at the end of the year. What's on the market to install now on single phase power?

Or just leave a waterproof spur ready?
 
Soldato
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Biggest you can install is a 7.4kw 32A charger. You get £500 grant when you purchase a new EV (currently) which would cover a basic charger and part of a basic install.

Many dealers use podpoint, have a look at their site:
https://pod-point.com/products/homecharge
https://pod-point.com/standard-install-and-olev-terms-conditions

I would call them before deciding if its worth doing some pre-work. All they include with basic installation is tacking the wire around the outside house and though one wall, if you don't want that or it needs more work then its extra £.

I wouldn't bother going any further than getting the wiring put in for now, you might want to consider wiring for a 2nd charger.

One other thing to consider is that the grant may not exist when you come to buy. There is no talk of it being removed but we are just about to have a change of administration and a spending review.

PS: I wouldn't expect to see the electric Mini driving around this year, early 2020 at best for first customers.
 
Soldato
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all right.

lets start by assuming for the sake of convenience everyone's average battery capacity is ~60kwh (the longer range version of the nissan leaf)

to charge that overnight (forget fast chargers, we'll be nice and say it takes 12hrs to charge from empty to full) you'll be drawing 5kw from the charger.

so, lets just forget tower blocks, and houses without driveways and assume everyone has a 5kw charger available to them to do this.

doing a straight swap from IC to electric we'll assume we have ~38million cars on the roads (ie the number of cars doesn't increase from current levels), lets be super generous here and call half of those garage queens so 19million cars used daily (RAC has 15 million as the figure for daily commuters, so including non-workers and leisure use we're not too far off)

so, 19 million cars at 5kw each is 95Gw so that's our worst-case peak load. realistically not everyone's going to be charging at the same time but given we're talking a few hours to charge there's going to be a hell of a lot of overlap at the start of the night when people plug their car in and hit the hay.

given in 2014 the average power demand for electricity was 34Gw, we're gonna need 20 more stations on the scale of hinkley point c to meet that.

and that's just the macro scale, on the more local scale there are plenty of places where a hamlet of 10 cars dropping a 50kw load on the grid is going to kill it.


19 million cars need 60kWh per day?

Average UK mileage is 7900 miles per annum across 38 million cars (300bn miles per year total). So either those hypothetical cars have truly abysmal efficiency, or the average daily mileage for all 38m cars just jumped five-fold.

If we assume a "Well to Wheel" efficiency of 3 miles per kWh, and an average 12 hour overnight charging schedule, then we need roughly 22.85GW average spare overnight capacity to keep the UK's entire domestic car fleet operational (based on 21.64 miles/day average use). If charging were spread evenly across 24 hours, we'd only need 11.4GW of spare capacity. The true figure is likely somewhere between the two. In absolute terms, we would need to produce around 100TWh of extra electricity per annum.

That's a crude calculation. It assumes no variance in daily average mileage, and it assumes every vehicle does 100% of its charging during the same 12 hour overnight period. But it's in line with the National Grid's own, far more in depth analysis on the situation. By 2040, the Grid expects that the UK will need another 8GW of peak capacity above 2017/2018 numbers (so basically the same peak capacity we had 10 years ago). Nothing hugely dramatic.

The key to EVs is to find ways to level out demand so there is minimal variance. The National Grid want to be able to control charging speed, so that they can ensure no interruption in supply for businesses and households, regardless of the number of cars that are plugged in. They want V2G rolled out as part of a wider energy storage solution, to help smooth out supply. And they want "time of use" electricity tariffs for consumers, to encourage consumers to charge their vehicles when there is plenty of spare grid capacity. The average driver of a 60kWh EV needs a full charge once every 10 days. So outside of rapid charging or preparing for a long journey, the vast majority of drivers shouldn't need to charge during peak (domestic, commercial, industrial) demand periods.

If we weren't managing demand at all, then we'd need to cater for 38 million cars demanding 7kWh at the same time (plus extra to account for rapid charging). We'd need something like 350GW of generation capacity. So clearly we do need to manage demand. Doing so is a lot more efficient than building huge numbers of power stations which spend most of their life idle.
 
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Associate
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I'd have a Tesla Model X right now if I could afford one. I'd also have no issue with a hybrid of some sort such as a BMW 530e, but they only made it in the saloon and I want the estate so that's out for now too. I'll stick with my F11 535i for a few more years and then see what the market is like.

Just quoting myself from last year as I've now been running a 2019 i3 120Ah for 6 weeks and its great. My concern before was about size but with my wife and a 2 year old its perfectly fine. We went a bit overboard going for such a large car when the baby arrived!
 
Soldato
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Evening, having an extension built at the moment and the electrician starts next week. Now is the ideal time to add an ev point.

Probably looking at a mini ev for the missus at the end of the year. What's on the market to install now on single phase power?

Or just leave a waterproof spur ready?

A spur off the main fuse box may not be sufficient. I had to get Western Power Distribution out to fit a second box which caters solely for the EV charger. Didn't cost a huge amount though. £80 IIRC.
 
Soldato
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The more I think about it - right now is the golden era of electric cars - and the slower the uptake for everyone else, the better.

Right now, I'm driving completely tax free, there's a charger everywhere I need to go, which I very rarely have to wait for, the majority of which are free. There's no servicing costs to worry about, or any mechanical issues to worry about.

Driving a car will never be this cheap and easy again.

In the future electric cars will be taxed somehow. Manufacturers will find ways to make sure you have to service them regularly, and the more cars are on the road, the more competition for chargers will occur, and I seriously doubt they will be free to use.
 
Soldato
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The tax free train has already gone for good. For that you need something pre-tax system update.

I suspect they will retro-actively add tax for EVs under the current system at some point. They will have developed it with that in mind.
 
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Soldato
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I suspect they will retro-actively add tax for EVs under the current system at some point. They will have developed it with that in mind.

You mean like Free/£30 Euro 5 diesels? Doubt it.

To add some more context to what @satchef1 and myself were saying about the national grid and smart chargers/demand pricing. The technology very much exists (smart meters and internet enabled chargers), just at the moment it's optional while adoption is low. As soon as adoption increases it will become mandatory. I imagine time of use electricity tariffs will become normal quite quickly.

You can right now pair your basic EV charger with a smart cable from Ohmi and a time of use tariff from someone like Octopus. With this combination you can charge your car automatically when electricity is cheapest (normally overnight). The cable taps into the energy companies API online to get prices so it can work out when to charge your car and refill its battery. They release the prices the day before so you know when its going to be expensive so you can shift your home use to out of those hours (e.g. washing machine). Sometimes the electricity rate goes negative so Octopus pay you to charge your EV. If you have an electric immersion heater you can also get smart heater controllers that work on the same premise.

When you start throwing in vehicle to grid and home batteries things really start to get interesting.

You also have other solutions from companies like myenergi which you can use to divert solar power to your vehicle or heating/hot water instead of exporting it to the grid.
 
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Soldato
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Instead of starting a new thread I thought you guys might know.

Let's say I bought a 2015 Toyota Auris self charge hybrid, are the batteries and electrical bits going to be in decent condition after 4 years and what are the chances of lasting another 5 or longer?

Thanks
 
Soldato
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Just have to clear one thing up, there is no such thing as ‘self charging’, is a marketing con. It’s a brilliant piece of marketing but incredibly damaging to the general publics understanding of how the technology actually works.

They are just Hybrids, the battery gets its energy from the petrol at 1.2X/litre. Don’t get me wrong it’s better than a normal ICE but they don’t ‘self charge’ as that’s simply impossible by the laws of physics.

Getting to the actual question. It should be fine, they are very reliable. There is a reason why almost every under driver in London uses a Prius. There are taxis out there on 200k+ still getting the same MPG on the original battery pack.

It’s a US link but I don’t see why a UK car would be any different.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro...n-how-does-the-toyota-prius-hold-up/index.htm
 
Soldato
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Well I don't think it's too deceiving, the car does charge itself. I like the look of the new Camry but won't be getting a brand new one anytime soon. I'm thinking sensible cap on for the next car. My main journeys will be short town shuffles and with a hybrid I'd still have the versatility for long runs. Dont fancy plugging the car in at home.
 
Soldato
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To answer the original OP, When I get round to building one (I have an old VW T3 (Sometimes called T25) that I always felt would be good for an EV conversion.)

:p
 
Soldato
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To answer the original OP, When I get round to building one (I have an old VW T3 (Sometimes called T25) that I always felt would be good for an EV conversion.)

:p

I think maybe EV conversions will become quite popular once it's figured out. Otherwise you buy a new ferrari that's EV for £500k when it's not really that different from the outgoing petrol motor. I can see people thinking of saving their treasured car by doing a conversion. Admittedly you do lose that soundtrack from these engines :o
 
Soldato
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Just have to clear one thing up, there is no such thing as ‘self charging’, is a marketing con. It’s a brilliant piece of marketing but incredibly damaging to the general publics understanding of how the technology actually works.

They are just Hybrids, the battery gets its energy from the petrol at 1.2X/litre. Don’t get me wrong it’s better than a normal ICE but they don’t ‘self charge’ as that’s simply impossible by the laws of physics.

It grates me the myEV news podcast sogns off with that. You don’t plug it in and it has regenerative braking. The car charges the high voltage battery itself. Therefore the claim of self charging is fine in my book.

I simply don’t see the drama.
 
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