Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

elma wrote: 22 Sep 2017, 12:15 https://www.gumtree.com/p/campervans-mo ... 1263956278
Works for me and I've got £67k left for sweets.


Now that's something I could be tempted by James, now I have the travel bug back again ;)

But no, I'm going to resist - I like the luxury of a static 'van too much now and in the winter I'll be looking at cottages for my short breaks away...
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by elma »

I saw one if those in silver yesterday.
Awful thing.
I looked into them and the range was only 60miles so realistically probably 45.
The battery is in a stupid place taking up load space too.
The prehistoric Harrods vans outclass it by miles.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by elma »

CitroJim wrote: 22 Sep 2017, 12:22
elma wrote: 22 Sep 2017, 12:15 https://www.gumtree.com/p/campervans-mo ... 1263956278
Works for me and I've got £67k left for sweets.


Now that's something I could be tempted by James, now I have the travel bug back again ;)

But no, I'm going to resist - I like the luxury of a static 'van too much now and in the winter I'll be looking at cottages for my short breaks away...


When my Xantias gone I'll be going motorhome again. There isn't a single car except the Maserati Gran Sport that interests me anymore.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

There's no modern cars that interest me either...
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Timmo »

Saw one of those mitsibushi ones that james may drove on top gear when he and Clarkson did the eleccy car test, in a very odd olive green, glossy yet matte, square numberplate over a normal plate on the back, possibly an import? Couple of leaf's and the big mitsibushi 4x4 jobby today whilst out on the bike,
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

RichardW wrote: 22 Sep 2017, 12:20 I followed another NV200e Combi last night - this time in red!

I hear that e-NV200 is getting a bit of a bad rap. :?

Unlike the Leaf that their drive train and batteries are based on which uses only passive cooling, the e-NV200 runs the A/C compressor whenever the car is charging, which is a good thing in principle, however quite a few people on speakev have reported problems with them including very noisy A/C compressor when charging - enough to wake up the neighbours! #-o When taken in for repair some have been fobbed off with the excuse that excessive noise is not a fault covered under warranty as the compressor is still "working". [-X

My Ion also runs the A/C compressor when charging - but only when doing 40kW DC rapid charging, when it's plugged in charging at the house there is only the very subtle noise of the coolant pump for about 30 seconds every few minutes - nothing to wake up the neighbours, which is just as well as there is a high up bedroom window facing our driveway!

So with this A/C problem and a number of other problems that have been reported, and Nissan's seemingly poor response to the problems I'd have to say the e-NV200 might be one to be avoided...
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

Some old database has me still down as a motor trader, I got an email message from some trade business wanting to buy any Nissan Leafs that come my way and they would be interested in buying any other make of electric car.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Recycling the batteries es and motors are a big business now!
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Spotted a Nissan electric van logoed up with Northumbria NHS Trust down at Cramlington.

https://www.northumbria.nhs.uk/news/nor ... tient-care.

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Saw a Leaf in a fetching shade of light blue. And the NV-200 combi again (I think!).
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Tell you what I haven't spotted....

...any adverts on conventional billboards / TV & Radio/ press/internet for EV's. Maybe the manufacturers have forgotton how to produce, market and sell cars as far as EV's are concerned. More likely they don't want to generate too much demand for EV's because they can't physically produce enough of them, or because a big push for sales of EV's would have a consequential impact on stocks of ICE's they want to shift first.

Youtube does supply a few examples, including in the USA a strange campaign featuring Hamsters for the Kia Soul EV

Posted up in this thread Electric Cars-Adverts

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

...And there still remains a big worry that the UK's electricity infrastructure will be unable to cope with the charging demands if EV uptake was to soar...

I saw a piece on the BBC News Site a while back. Scottish Power raised the concern...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-s ... s-41373466
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by elma »

It is fear mongering though. For EVs to be really beneficial the majority of owners will need to install solar or some other means of generating electricity.

I think the grid can actually take it myself as long as we're not installing high output 3 phase chargers everywhere.

When they do become mainstream it is most likely that dealers will be offering solar and charger installation as options.

It's also worth considering that by the time they are mainstream they will probably be able to drive themselves. If that's the case someone smart will buy up land on industrial and commercial sites. The cars will just drive there and charge themselves up.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

CitroJim wrote: 28 Sep 2017, 06:47 ...And there still remains a big worry that the UK's electricity infrastructure will be unable to cope with the charging demands if EV uptake was to soar...

I saw a piece on the BBC News Site a while back. Scottish Power raised the concern...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-s ... s-41373466

There will definitely need to be some buffing up of electricity generation and distribution, mainly last mile distribution at a street level - there is no doubt of that, you can't shift an entire fleet of cars from petrol/diesel to electricity without some shift in infrastructure focus. The fact that it's possible at all shows how large the scale of the existing electricity infrastructure already is when you consider the bazillion gallons of petrol/diesel it is trying to replace.

However I think it's far from doom and gloom. From the article:
The estimate of a 20%-30% increase in demand for electricity comes after years of gradually declining power use, much of that due to growing energy efficiency and the closure of older, energy-intensive industries.
So what they're saying is that it would cause an increase in demand of 20-30% over our current electricity use...... and my response is so ? If the required demand was to have doubled or tripled our current electricity demand then I would have been very worried indeed. However 30% is an incremental increase, and in reality it would gradually ramp up over many years - probably 5-15 years when you take into account "grandfathering" existing ICE vehicles on the road which won't just suddenly come off the road all at once. It's not like millions of homes would dump ICE vehicles and switch to electric cars over night, especially those that drive old cars.

30% is well within the bounds of normal engineering upgrade work, and is no different to any of the other increases in demand for electricity of the last century as new energy intensive industries have come online such as aluminium smelting - demand increased and money was spent to build out the infrastructure to keep pace and everybody was happy. The tone of a lot of the news articles implies that we somehow can't do this upgrade work or that it will be left until it is too late - I don't think that will be the case.

Other interesting points - low energy light bulb adoption accounts for a large proportion of the decline in electricity demand in the last decade or so - if the switch hadn't been made then our current generation levels would most likely have already been 30% higher today than what it actually is - would we have been complaining about the extra infrastructure to keep up with the increase in demand then ?

The switch to energy saving bulbs has given a temporary respite to the gradual increase in demand but it was only ever going to be temporary - once they reached a high market penetration the trend was always going to go up again.

A lot of articles focus on peak demand - there is something like a 20GW difference between peak load in the early evening and the middle of the night in the UK - it has been calculated that the difference in demand between peak and off peak is enough to charge a country full of EV's without any increase in generation as long as they all charged off peak.

So you can either incentivise people to charge off peak (with a timer and cheaper rates etc) or you can build out a lot of storage capacity on the grid such that generation at night can continue at daytime levels going into batteries or other storage mechanisms and then released at peak times. So you don't have lots of power generation sitting idle at night time. We need this grid storage to move to majority renewable generation anyway as they are fluctuating sources of power. A combination of those two in theory would make it possible to charge all EV's with the current level of generation we have by tapping into the underutilisation in off peak hours.
The added challenge of cars is the change in technology from an eight-hour overnight charge to a rapid charge of 15 to 20 minutes.
This is somewhat irrelevant as rapid chargers are normally only used on a long journey (and that will certainly be the case when batteries get bigger) and most charging is still going to be done at home at no more than 7kW. Whether you charge quickly or slowly the total amount of energy in kWh is about the same and therefore the total generation required is the same. However in localised areas the grid would need to cope with higher peaks, something which could be buffered by a battery bank at a rapid charging site. But as far as total generation capacity goes, rapid charging is irrelevant.
If several car owners on a residential street plug those in at the same time, the system could not cope.
This is nonsense. Residential charging in the UK on single phase supply (which is the majority of houses) is limited to 7.2kW or 32 amps at 240v. Many cars still only charge at 3.6kW like my Ion.

Lets compare that to other large power users in a home - Electric Shower - 10kW, Electric hot water heating - 3kW or in some cases 6kW. Electric oven - 3kW. Kettle - 3.6kW.

So charging your car at 7.2kW is not as bad as turning on an electric shower in terms of instantaneous demand.... so if everyone in the street turns on their electric showers at about the same time in the morning the system can't cope with that either ? What if their hot water heater is on, the shower is on, someone is using the kettle and toaster, then what ? Lights out ? :lol:

Yes there will be places where the supply to a street is a bit under-provisioned and those will need to be sorted out, but 7.2kW from a house is really not that much of a problem, especially if most of that charging is through the night.

The article then goes on to conflate a "shift to electric heating" in the home with demand from EV's - where ? I don't see anyone rushing to switch to electric heating as it doesn't make financial sense...

More doom and gloom - if I were an engineer involved with the grid or generation in any way I would be thinking "These EV's are coming one way or the other, we better crack on and get the system upgraded in time to ensure a smooth transition and continuity of supply". Anything else would be negligence of duty.
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