Electric Cars:what's available?

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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by mickthemaverick »

A brief enlightenment Steve, as well as TV quiz games like "The Price is Right" and others, he presented a Radio 4 show called Just a Minute for 50+ years. In the show contestants were challenged to speak for 60 seconds on a given subject "without repetition, hesitation or deviation". Other contestants could interrupt if they thought the rules had been broken and if they were correct they would assume the position of speaker for the remainder of the minute. Whichever contestant was speaking when the clock timed out would receive the points for that subject. At the end of the show the contestant with the highest score would win a highly dubious prize awarded by the host. It was great fun to listen to as the contestants were generally from the world of comedy or jounalism and very able at both speaking and "playing the game". Willie Rushton was one player who I always found entertaining!! Hopefully you can now see where the previous tributes tie in, assuming I have not fallen foul of the third commandment!! :-D
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by myglaren »

Aha!
I have heard a few episodes of "Just A Minute" and yes, it was amusing.
I don't retain much about most people though, especially 'celebrities'.

I don't recall the 'repetition' part though.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

Man is, by nature, a lazy beast, he does not need twice encouraging to do nothing.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by white exec »

And yet more detail about PHEV hybrids...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... ions-fines

" . . . The green credentials of some hybrid cars are controversial because of their continued use of polluting internal combustion engines alongside battery motors.

Julia Poliscanova, clean vehicles director at Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based thinktank, said there is evidence that plug-in hybrids rarely achieve the emissions reductions predicted by lab tests because users fail to charge them.

“In the real world, their emissions are often two or three times higher,” she said, referencing findings from the Miles Consultancy which said many business users never used their charging cables.

If plug-in hybrids are not charged, they can even emit more carbon dioxide and air pollution than the equivalent car without a battery, because a smaller engine is pulling more weight and therefore running less efficiently . . . "
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by mickthemaverick »

They are on the money with the comments about real world usage. I know three completely unconnected people who own PHEVs and none of them could even tell me how to put their car on charge!! They just got them on contract hire to save money on London's congestion charge and similar costs where running a PHEV has a benefit. One of them came very close to legal action with Mitsubishi because he kept getting fault lights and loss of power on long journeys, it turned out to be misuse connected with not charging!! :( :) :roll:
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by Mandrake »

Short electric range PHEV's are a waste of time in my opinion.

No genuinely useful electric range from the vast majority of them, over complicated, and as pointed out above, many/most owners won't even plug in, which means it becomes a hybrid instead of a plug in hybrid.

Instead of getting the best of both worlds you have the worst of both worlds - you have the issue of battery degradation over time of a BEV (but at an accelerated rate, since the battery is so small) and you have all the maintenance issues of an ICE vehicle - oil and coolant changes, filters, exhausts, timing belts, gearbox to wear out and give trouble, all the things we love to hate...

PHEV's are the nicotine patch way of quitting smoking - BEV's are the cold turkey method! :lol:

In my opinion in a two car family you're better to own one ICE (if you need it) and one BEV rather than a hybrid. If you can do most of your driving in the BEV (as we manage to) and save the ICE for when it's really needed, you'll be doing a greater percentage of electric miles than you would with most hybrids, and not lugging all that extra complexity around with you.

A BEV is mechanically much simpler than an ICE vehicle, a PHEV is more complicated because it's basically an ICE + a BEV + a more complicated gearbox to combine the torque of the combustion and electric motors...
Last edited by Mandrake on 02 Feb 2020, 20:31, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by Hell Razor5543 »

I don't think Mercedes have an understanding about what is needed in a decent sized van (with relationship to how useful an electric van should be);

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/mer ... li=AABFNom
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by mickthemaverick »

I have to agree there James, 6 hours charging for 92 miles is a joke for a van. I used to cover 150-300 miles every day as a cctv engineer around London and the SE. Not to mention £40k for a mobile toolbag which is what mine was. I ran a Fiat Diesel with aircon and it was brilliant for the job for £9500 in 2003.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Yet more evidence of your traditional automakers providing a product....to order....at their own desired price bracket in the hope that a few orders will trickle in and they can tick a few fleet average emissions boxes.

From the article
"Whereas the diesel-powered Vito starts at less than £27,000 including VAT, the eVito costs £39,895 plus VAT in its cheapest guise."

I dont get the impression that Mercedes really want an avalanche of orders for the e-vito.

They dont want to damage potential sales of their ICE vehicles littering forecourts, and continuing to roll off production lines by competing with themselves, so a token effort to sell at high prices to a niche market of customers who will no doubt be there, wishing to go electric with the Mercedes brand.

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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by white exec »

I think we have the big manufacturers sussed. They (some noticeably more than others) will do everything they can to keep churning out ICEs, and maximising their profitability from it. The push for hybrids is part of that, as well as being a cynical move to allow these vehicles into polluted urban areas.

Fortunately, this pretence at electric propulsion is now being rumbled, and city authorities taking the matter into their own hands. Expect some governments to kick up, but not too publicly, about that.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Hell Razor5543 wrote: 02 Feb 2020, 20:28 I don't think Mercedes have an understanding about what is needed in a decent sized van (with relationship to how useful an electric van should be);

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/mer ... li=AABFNom
Plenty of incentives for commercial electric vans, 20% off purchase price, up to a max contribution of £8000 at the time of this article. Still seem overpriced even with the incentive off.
https://www.buyacar.co.uk/vans/702/best-electric-vans
"70 per cent of van users drive less than 62 miles a day, according to research from Renault."

This is the cheapest :-D Image
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by Mandrake »

Not sure which thread to put this in so I'll put it here:

https://insideevs.com/news/396102/psa-g ... factories/
French battery manufacturer Saft (part of Total since 2016) and the PSA Group (with its Opel brand) officially announced plans for two lithium-ion EV battery cell plants in Europe.

The French-German alliance intends to establish a joint venture named Automotive Cell Company (ACC), with a total output of 48 GWh annually by 2030 (not as high as earlier rumors were suggesting - 64 GWh), through a €5 billion investment, supported by nearly €1.3 billion in public funding from the European Union.
Good news for PSA's EV ambitions ? Late to the party but now taking it seriously ? Many current EV manufacturers such as Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, BMW etc rely on outsourcing the cells and sometimes even the entire battery pack design (Chevy Bolt) which means they are at the mercy of battery suppliers who effectively limit how many cars they can produce, and they are having to compete as one of many customers of that battery supplier. This has been the main reason Kia and Hyundai can't keep up with orders - they simply can't get enough cells from their battery suppliers, who also have other customers to serve.

To be truly successful at EV's and be able to pump them out in quantity and at reasonable prices (at least for the foreseeable future) you really need your own battery factory with guaranteed supply that someone else can't outbid you on. Tesla figured this out years ago and built their own Gigafactory...

In an ICE vehicle the engine is your critical core competency and differentiator as a car manufacturer, and while you might platform share engines of some of your models, you wouldn't completely outsource all your engines to third parties and just be making the shells to put them in. You have your own engine designs and your own factories to produce them in.

In an EV while the motor is still important it's more of a commodity (to some degree all EV electric motors behave the same the difference is just size/power/cooling etc - electric motor technology is already very well advanced and refined) while the battery is the heart of the vehicle and also its Achilles heel - it's the performance of the battery that will dictate more than anything else, how well your car performs and its specs (range, performance, charging speed, weight, cost, longevity etc) vs your competitors. The battery has to be a core competency.

Some car manufacturers have still not figured this out yet. One day batteries will be high performance off the shelf commodities but not for at least another 10 years, maybe 20 years, as it is a rapidly developing field which is nowhere near reaching a plateau. What is cutting edge in batteries today will be obsolete 5 years from now etc...
Last edited by Mandrake on 03 Feb 2020, 10:58, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

I dont think it matters that much Simon. We started off with one "electric thread" and now there are a few more as things have evolved so now there is..in addition to your own blog of course :-D

I recently started a thread on
Electric Vehicles Batteries- To mop up battery developments...I'll put up a link there to your post.


Electric Vehicles-Whats Available mainly new vehicles on the market
Electric Vehicles-Conversions conversions
Electric Vehicles What have you Spotted? simple spotting thread
Electric Vehicles Adverts youtube ads etc ( and in general how bad/none existant they are)
Bargain Basement Electric basically secondhand electric and where I dump my stuff on the leaf
Electric Vehicles Infrastructure developments of the infrastructure news/debate

and a few spin offs like Micks
"to E or not to E"
and my largely uncontributed to thread, probably because like me it is difficult to make a case to buy a second hand Zoe
"Used Renault Zoe-can a case be made to buy one?"

and with electric developments being pretty integrated with overall Global Car News there is
"Car News Global and Domestic"

Last, and probably least from your point of view
"Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles Still Alive?" mopping up developments in Hydrogen cars/trucks/buses/trains etc.

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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

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Not the most interesting road trip read, quite undramatic, not funny and a conclusion that the KIA e-Niro is very comfortable and capable vehicle for the type of long trip which most of the general public mistakenly think can't be done in anything other than a petrol or diesel vehicle.

Possibly only true for those who like to drive 5 hours at 70mph or more without stopping.

Just a question for those who know about these things, have you ever driven up the M6 without being snarled up in extremely slow moving traffic in the bit between the midlands and Manchester? Yes top bit of Lancashire and Cumbria flows pretty well. It suprises me that relations from Leicester on their regular trips up to visit the Edinburgh always choose to go up the West of the country, rather than M1/A1.

KIA e-Niro from Oxfordshire to Edinburgh

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Re: Electric Cars:what's available?

Post by mickthemaverick »

Back in the 80's when I was working on the pipeline, mentioned previously, I had many drives up to Runcorn on that section before the toll was opened and the majority were free flowing once past Birmingham. More recently I have used the toll only to get stuck in the last 30 miles to Manchester.
As for relatives using the western route Neil I should imagine it is to enjoy the Cumbrian section which is IMO the prettiest motorway route in England!! :)
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