Electric vehicles-Conversions

[Hell Razor5543]

It has been announced on the BBC News that Basingstoke company InstaVolt has signed a multi-million pound deal with American company ChargePoint for over 200 vehicle rapid charge units. These units can, apparently, put 250KM charge back into the vehicle in 10 minutes.

http://instavolt.co.uk/instavolt-signs- ... argepoint/

[NewcastleFalcon]

I didn't know it until recently but the UK Government does have an

Office for low Emission Vehicles within the Department for Transport and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

It is charged amongst other things with running Grant schemes for electric vehicle charging infrastructure

Recently I have read some heavy criticism of the "rip-off" charges at some charging points from disgruntled EV owners, as well as "out of order" problems. The "petrol" network evolved over the last 100 years or so without too much Government strategy and planning, so in the early days of the Electric Charging infrastructure, the "free-for-all" (figuratively not literally of course) of development will no doubt evolve into a usable network, and the market will determine the "price" and excessive charging will be brought into line by competition.

Regards Neil

[bobins]

The "petrol" network evolved over the last 100 years or so without too much Government strategy and planning, so in the early days of the Electric Charging infrastructure, the "free-for-all" (figuratively not literally of course) of development will no doubt evolve into a usable network, and the market will determine the "price" and excessive charging will be brought into line by competition.

Regards Neil

.......you said that without a hint of irony

[NewcastleFalcon]

A decent "Tongue-in-cheek", sarcastic, or ironic emoticon hasn't been invented yet as far as I know

Regards Neil

[Hell Razor5543]

How about an emoticon with half closed eyes, flat line mouth, and a speech bubble with "Yeah, right!" in it?

[myglaren]

Or a sarcastic font

[Gibbo2286]

Old electrics:

[Mandrake]

For those who like statistics (who doesn't ? ) I stumbled across this wikipedia article which gives a good overview of how many EV's there are in the UK, model breakdown and lots of other goodies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_e ... ed_Kingdom

I still don't understand why the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is the biggest selling PHEV in the UK by far, when by all accounts it's a pretty poor vehicle! I guess there's no accounting for taste, or common sense...

[demag]

Its all about the school run.

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[Mandrake]

Probably, but the big issue is that the electric only range of the Outlander is barely 25 miles, and when that runs out its a gas guzzling petrol automatic that does pretty crap MPG!

Also, it was fitted with a Chademo rapid charge socket even though it can only charge its tiny battery slowly, thus it ends up hogging rapid chargers when it doesn't really need to, much to the disgust of Pure EV drivers that have more of a claim to needing the charger...

I've also read more than one review that says it just isn't that good to drive. So I really don't understand why it has sold so well. At the Evolution EV car show I went to the Mitsubishi booth was a ghost town compared to several other Marquees! Nobody seemed interested in looking at them.

[RichardW]

Probably, but the big issue is that the electric only range of the Outlander is barely 25 miles, and when that runs out its a gas guzzling petrol automatic that does pretty crap MPG!

Our friends had one.... got rid of it for almost exactly that reason - well that and they couldn't get 3 car seats in the back when 3rd baby arrived They've got a Sharan now; not sure if it's diesel or one of the mini turbo petrols.

[Mandrake]

Came across this great video on Youtube (if you can get past the annoying voice of the narrator ) that goes into some of the architecture of an electric car - for example it has a very nice animation of the internals of an AC induction motor which shows just how simple it is and how it works:



The video is somewhat Tesla-centric but most of the principles apply to other EV's as well, although some EV's like my Ion (and the Leaf I think) use "Permanent magnet synchronous" motors that have a permanent magnet attached to the rotor instead of shorted windings of copper wire. The principles are a little bit different to an induction motor and there are pros and cons to the two approaches but the overall performance is similar.

[CitroJim]

Interestingly, and possibly after very loud howls of protest at the discrimination of giving away free 'fuel' only to a privileged and very rich few (i.e. those who can afford Teslas and the like), our place of work is hastily withdrawing the use of the free charging points...

They say they are now going to re-work them to be paid-for.

[demag]

I did hear after all the initial hooha that the outlander was not that good.

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[Mandrake]

Interestingly, and possibly after very loud howls of protest at the discrimination of giving away free 'fuel' only to a privileged and very rich few (i.e. those who can afford Teslas and the like), our place of work is hastily withdrawing the use of the free charging points...

They say they are now going to re-work them to be paid-for.

I'm an EV driver and I wouldn't expect my work to give me free charging either! (In fact my work doesn't even offer parking full stop, I have to pay someone else to park up the street )

There's nothing to stop them getting some standard Level 2 public chargers installed and hooked up to one of the charging networks like Charge Your Car though...