Bargain Basement Electric

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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by myglaren »

I've looked at electric as the time is rapidly approaching for the C5 to become bean tins. :(

It has only done around 20 miles in that last couple of weeks, my son has been off work and I've only used it twice, but a Zoe would be a nightmare with that battery hire nonsense and it is also far to small as he uses it for mountain bike ventures, usually out in the sticks in Scotland or Yorkshire and there is no possibility whatsoever of charging it at home.
Even a Leaf would be far to small, the C5 is barely adequate as it is and I'm looking for an estate - which don't come in electrified versions as far as I can see.
And wouldn't be affordable for me anyway.
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by mickthemaverick »

I am watching the situation but a Zoe is too small on one hand and too new on the other. I'd have to ditch one of my current pair to take on a new "current" car so instead I am considering an electric kit conversion for the MX3. I think the running gear and body are well suited to electric power so when I win the lottery that is the route for me!! :-D
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

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nfownwork
nfownwork
Regards Neil
Last edited by NewcastleFalcon on 11 Dec 2019, 15:19, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by RichardW »

A quick calc suggests that without tax a 50 mpg diesel car costs about 3p/mile, which is equivalent to 12p / 4 miles, which coincidentally about the same price currently as an electric car at 4miles / kWh given the current incentives / subsidies (depending on your point of view...!). So, at what cost would you consider the 'hassle' involved with (current) electric car use to be too much? Would you still go with an electric car if it was the same running cost as an ICE car currently is?
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

RichardW wrote: 11 Dec 2019, 15:06 So, at what cost would you consider the 'hassle' involved with (current) electric car use to be too much? Would you still go with an electric car if it was the same running cost as an ICE car currently is?
The current incentives, lower price for electricity than petrol/diesel, means that for me the costs of running and financing a 65 reg Leaf, over 4 years are not a kick in the pants off the costs of running a finance free Micra bought for £100 over the same period. That is on a milage of around 15,000 a year.

So if an electric car had the same running costs as an ICE car on a level playing field of tax/subsidies I would choose an electric car. It's early days for us of course, only a matter of weeks and 1200 miles so far, and we don't have an over-range commute, or indeed regularly stray outside of day-out distance to Yorkshire the Borders or the Lake District.

The fumes factor alone makes it win hands down every time, I have developed electric vehicles owners sense of smell. Not sure how many Euro 6 vehicles are driving around our neck of the woods with their pure sweet smelling exhausts...not many if the early morning warm-up fume fest is anything to go by :-D

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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by Mandrake »

RichardW wrote: 11 Dec 2019, 15:06 A quick calc suggests that without tax a 50 mpg diesel car costs about 3p/mile, which is equivalent to 12p / 4 miles, which coincidentally about the same price currently as an electric car at 4miles / kWh given the current incentives / subsidies (depending on your point of view...!). So, at what cost would you consider the 'hassle' involved with (current) electric car use to be too much? Would you still go with an electric car if it was the same running cost as an ICE car currently is?
You're out by about a factor of two, possibly more even with tax taken out of the equation.

First I would ask, does anyone actually achieve 60mpg in real world driving in a medium size car especially in rush hour commuting ? I'm skeptical.

I've borrowed an Ecoboost Peugeot 208 twice now as a courtesy car and driven it on my daily commute - claimed MPG is over 60MPG - driving it carefully over two days I could barely manage 45MPG, and it was as gutless as hell to drive, so something that actually had decent performance is going to have worse MPG again.

By comparison I'm getting 5.4 miles/kWh in my Ion in the summer albeit only 3.7 miles/kWh in mid winter with a basic PTC heater / no heat pump.

In my experience manufacturers claimed MPG figures are just as "manufactured" as EV manufacturers range claims - since they come from the same NEDC / WLTP testing regimes... so I would only go by actual achieveable MPG not manufacturers claims.

However if we take the 60mpg claim at face value lets work out some numbers:

Average price of Diesel near me at the moment is 129.9p / litre, subtract 57.95p / litre tax leaves you 71.95p / litre, convert that to UK gallons and that's 327p / gallon. With a 60mpg car that works out to 5.45p / mile.

Lets take my real world commuting figures for the Ion. 5.4 miles/kWh in summer (which is admittedly very good for an EV) at 12p/kWh residential rates is 2.2p / mile or 2.4x cheaper even with fuel tax removed. My winter figure of 3.7 miles/kWh works out to 3.2p / mile or 1.7x cheaper.

So the present day fuelling cost benefit is reduced from approx 4x to 2x once tax is taken out of the equation, however it is still cheaper than even a 60MPG car by a factor of about two. If you wanted to go to the hassle of a cheap overnight rate like 6p/kWh you could double the difference.

You also have to take into account regular maintenance costs which can quicky add up on an ICE.

Coolant, oil and filter changes every couple of years, exhaust pipe and muffler repairs/replacements etc, along with the various things that can go wrong with an engine and gearbox of which you're no doubt personally well aquainted with... :lol:

About the only regular maintenance items I can think of on an EV are tyre replacements and brake fluid changes, with brake disc and pad wear being about 1/3rd of an ICE so not being a high maintenance item.

Unless something actually breaks I can't think of much else in the way of maintenance other than the eventual things like ball joints and bushes that will wear out on all cars of a certain age! Over a 5 year period the savings in maintenance on a car that does a high mileage could be substaintial.
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by RichardW »

Easy tiger :-D Genuine question, not a dig! I was a bit off in the calc somewhere, but not by 2 - you omitted the VAT on road fuels (still trying to work out exactly where the value added part of the fuel duty is....).

At some point, tax on use of EVs is going to come in (or a rise in Income Tax or VAT, but we know how popular that is :lol: ) - early adopters are likely to overlook the difficulties (change in habit?) because of the savings, but how much do you think Joe Public will need to adopt them? Or maybe they will just introduce road pricing for both EV and ICE, and maintain the tax on road fuels to maintain the differential and price ICE off the road?

These Tesla drivers were not all that happy on Thanksgiving.... https://ww.electrek.co/2019/12/01/rapid ... g-weekend/
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by Gibbo2286 »

How about a small trailer with a spare battery for a 'get you home' solution. :)
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by mickthemaverick »

How about a big trailer with a get you 300 miles range battery pack option? :-D
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

The number 1 career choice for todays youngsters....become a youtuber....

This chap jehu garcia is one of the most active youtubers/vloggers/podcasters in the EV World. His VW Microbus project has an example of the "range extender trailer"



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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by mickthemaverick »

And I was only kidding!! It would seem like a calculating job for Simon to decide whether the increased power available is worthwhile against pulling the extra weight and thus the true range benefit :!: :?: :)
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Just over a month in EV ownership now, and 1500 plus miles behind us. No home charging but a 7kw charging point currently free to use quite conveniently placed so no real hassles. I think the lowest "range left" we have experienced is around 6 miles. When I pull up back home/or at a planned charging point I like to have 20 miles in hand, so I can find another charger if the one planned is kaput or otherwise engaged for the foresable by another EV. Set the car to charge up to 80% and not beyond so my working range is about 50 miles (bit less with winter heater use.)

Yes it would take a long time to get to Cornwall, or the Isle of Skye, but I think even with ICE we had evolved into pootle/stop, pootle/stop, Stay Overnight, pootle/stop etc on most of our holiday trips to North Wales/Herefordshire/Shropshire/Norfolk/St Andrews.

So far so good, and £20 "fuel" for 1500miles is a nice introductory bonus :-D

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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by Mandrake »

mickthemaverick wrote: 12 Dec 2019, 20:56 And I was only kidding!! It would seem like a calculating job for Simon to decide whether the increased power available is worthwhile against pulling the extra weight and thus the true range benefit :!: :?: :)
Sorry, that sounds like hard work. :lol:
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by mickthemaverick »

Chicken!! :naughty:
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Re: Bargain Basement Electric

Post by Mandrake »

RichardW wrote: 12 Dec 2019, 12:41 Easy tiger :-D Genuine question, not a dig! I was a bit off in the calc somewhere, but not by 2 - you omitted the VAT on road fuels (still trying to work out exactly where the value added part of the fuel duty is....).
Don't worry, I didn't think it was a dig. :) It's just I've done these calculations before and knew the numbers were a fair bit out and I had actual real life miles/kWh figures to contribute to the discussion. I didn't omit VAT, all prices I quoted are VAT inclusive.

You bring up a good point though that residential electricity is only 5% VAT vs 20% for petrol and Diesel... as I'm not originally from here I don't know what the historical reasons for that are and whether that's likely to change in future ?

I see that some businesses are charged 20% VAT on electricity - I wonder if that applies to public charging providers and might explain some of the additional cost of public charging ?
At some point, tax on use of EVs is going to come in (or a rise in Income Tax or VAT, but we know how popular that is :lol: ) - early adopters are likely to overlook the difficulties (change in habit?) because of the savings, but how much do you think Joe Public will need to adopt them? Or maybe they will just introduce road pricing for both EV and ICE, and maintain the tax on road fuels to maintain the differential and price ICE off the road?
I've said it before, but I think the only feasible way of introducing "fuel" taxing for EV's to replace the current tax on Diesel and Petrol sales is going to be road user charges, where you pay separately for mileage done, with a rate that is based on the class of vehicle. (Car, truck etc)

If you try to raise VAT on residential electricity from 5% to 20% that is going to penalise people who don't own EV's or even drive at all, (thus turning public opinion against EV's) and 20% tax on the electricity used to charge is still far less tax per car-mile than what the government gets from Petrol/Diesel now anyway and wouldn't cover the shortfall.

Trying to add a separate EV charging only tax on Electricity is not feasible because it would be so easily defeated. To implement such a tax either every EV itself would have to "phone home" to the power company or government to report how many kWh it has consumed charging, (with no EV's currently supporting such a feature and manufacturers probably reluctant to add it) or the EVSE (wall charger) at the house would need to do so. At the moment there is no legislation forcing installation of "smart" chargers at home, and my one is not smart in any way. (You do now have to install a smart charger to get the OLEV grant though)

Besides, so long as EV's can be charged via a "granny charger" (portable EVSE which plugs into a regular 3 pin plug) that would be a loophole which avoids using a smart charger, and that charging would then go un-taxed. So I can't see it as a workable solution.

Road user charges for passenger cars is already a thing in some countries, so it's not a stretch to implement it. Diesel in New Zealand is sold without any road user tax included (and is thus far cheaper than petrol) but you then have to pay road user chargers per 1000km for any Diesel car, including passenger cars at least 6 monthly from memory. Unless the odometer reading on the car is falsified this can't easily be defeated, and once a car is old enough for MOT checks the mileage is recorded anyway.

So I think that's the way it's going to end up having to go for EV's, and we may also at some point see road user tax removed from petrol and diesel pump prices and road user charges implemented for all cars. That would have the benefit of eliminating the existence of "red diesel", and also solve any ambiguity that might exist for hybrid cars that do some of their miles on fossil fuels and some on electricity...

As for early adopters overlooking the limitations of EV's in the name of cost savings and others maybe not willing to do that if tax is added on, that kind of reasoning is based on the assumption that cost saving is the only reason someone might prefer to drive an EV, and that problems like range, battery life and up front cost won't be addressed and iterated on in the future until they are no longer an issue. It focuses on the negatives without adequately considering the positives, not the least of which include not poisoning everyone else's kids during the school run.... :lol:

There are many other reasons than lower per mile cost to prefer to drive an EV, (certainly for the daily commute) including the smooth, quiet, hassle free driving experience itself, as well as knowing that there are a whole host of high maintenance items that don't exist in an EV that are going to break down and need replacing.

I've owned and maintained old cars all my life but at some point it can start to become a chore and I'd just like my main "get me to work and back" car to work without frequent repairs and maintenance.

When comparing ICE and BEV today its easy to get too hung up on comparing what is available today, instead of thinking about what the situation is going to be in the near future. The trajectory for BEV's is clear - prices will go down with increased volumes and improved manufacturing, batteries will get cheaper, bigger (in kWh capacity) and more compact, charging speeds will go up dramatically, longevity and reliability of batteries will improve to the point where they outlast the rest of the car and are no longer a concern, rapid charging infrastructure will grow to the point where it can adequately cope with large numbers of BEV's etc...

The question becomes not is an EV viable for the average punter today, (for many people, no not yet) but how soon will it be viable, and how much longer after that does it go from viable to the "no-brainer" choice. So when is your jumping on point, and that will vary depending on your circumstances.

There are so many examples in the past of new technology that was initially too expensive, unreliable etc which was mocked but eventually took over the world. A great example is the humble transistor.

Invented in 1947 but not commercially manufactured in any useful numbers until the early 60's due to the extreme difficulties and costs in manufacturing them in quantity. Yield rates were extremely low and the transistors you could buy in the 60's were very expensive, (much more expensive than valves) quite unreliable, could only operate at very low voltages and powers, had high distortion and many other limitations, but they had one big advantage - they were small and power efficient and had the potential to be shrunk further and have more than one put on the same chip, later leading to the invention of the integrated circuit.

Something that was initially totally unable to compete with valves in all other performance metrics was progressively refined over several decades until they started to take off in the 70's. Today transistorised circuitry is so many orders of magnitude denser and more capable than valves that they left behind in the dust that it boggles the mind, with transistors now measured in the nanometers with billions of them on a single chip the size of a finger nail. All the technology we have today in the form of computers and modern electronics have the invention of the transistor to thank for their existence, and you can genuinely say the transistor revolutionised and created the modern world.

That small plucky invention that struggled for so long to get off the ground in the beginning due to the huge challenges in developing the manufacturing processes for it that could get cost down and volume and reliability up. Today nobody even remembers valves with the last thermonic valve in common use being the venerable CRT tube in now obsolete CRT TV's, with use of other valves in consumer equipment disappearing in the 70's.

Never underestimate what can be achieved by progressive refinement and optimisation - EV's are too expensive to buy new today, don't have enough range, don't charge fast enough etc but every year that is improving and the inflexion point is coming sooner than we think.
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