Are you ready for an electric car?

This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.

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A few things have happened since the thread was closed :slight_smile:

More recharge stations from Shell at Waitrose

Tesla opening up the SuperChargers to other cars

So lots of good news, and only 7 weeks till I get my new car :slight_smile:

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@mozzauk

Has the delivery of your electric Ionic now been confirmed :question:

@pekem due 15th September so all confirmed and a couple of days have been booked off to play :slight_smile:

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@mozzauk

I don’t know very much about the Ionic but I suspect it will be very efficient as is my Kona.
To demonstrate the efficiency of the Kona I captured the stats for a journey I made this morning.
You can see that the energy consumption was 6 miles / kWh :blush:

Of course if I had traveled at a faster speed the figure would have been less.
It is often reported that EV drivers adopt a different driving style to that which they had with an ICE.
I think that the focus of an EV driver is understandable on range and it quickly becomes apparent that range is reduced very considerably at high speed.

As the charging infrastructure improves and the rate of a car’s charge becomes faster the style of many may change but not for me, I get great satisfaction from economy driving.

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Ok, so not exactly a ‘for the public’ vehicle, but this seems, foolhardy and a bit of a waste of time and money…

Coming up with a solution to basically install cables across the whole motorway network? It’ll be easier and quicker to come up with hydrogen fuel stations and rapid battery charging stations for trucks instead - and all the major truck manufacturers, (DAF, MAN, Volvo Trucks and Daimler as well as Tesla) are already developing their own solution to this without the UK government having to come up with their own wacky ideas.

If they wanted to develop a transport network that was powered by overhead cables, how about also putting it on iron rails and making the vehicles multi-carriaged so you can get more passengers or goods on it… a bit like a train…

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Don’t think it’s the government coming up with these ideas, but it’s wacky nonetheless. Will these cables sag in the heat and shut down motorway traffic like they do with trains?

To be fair, this isn’t a new concept, they are called Trollytrucks and were in quite a few countries and were used all the way up to 1950s, more popular were the bus versions which you can still find operating in several hundred cities around the world.

To be fair, a Trollytruck would basically solve the long distance freight issue when it comes to electric trucks.

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Most buses in Lithuanian :lithuania: cities are electric :trolleybus: and that’s for many decades now :relieved:

I am amazed London never overtook/implement this kind of transport yet :thinking:

As @StuartMac writes above many towns and cities in the U.K. relied on a trolley bus fleets until the sixties.

With electric buses performing very well in London today it would in my view be a retrograde step, never mind the enormous cost.

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BBC News - Electric car charging prices ‘must be fair’ say MPs

Also Morrison’s is adding rapid chargers to their car parks:

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@Lewis_P

The key to levelling out the cost between those with off road parking, and as a consequence low cost electricity, is smart metering which is available today with some charger manufacturers.

The cost of installation would be the hurdle for government and so the road pricing model which has featured in recent media reports will perhaps be the final solution.

Its a step in the right direction, but why only 1 in each location, seems a bit of a token plan…

Its a chicken and egg situation I think. The amount of investment for the private sector will probably track with proportion of EVs on the road (i.e. demand). At the moment, new registrations are 10% EV, but that’s just new registrations and doesn’t mean 10% of cars on the road are EVs. There are only around 250,000 EVs on UK roads today, out of 38.6 million total cars. Which is more like 0.6% share for EVs. So a full 200 capacity car park should on average only have one EV in it (and that one EV doesn’t necessary always need to charge when it visits Morrisons).

So if you were to buy an EV today, you are pretty likely to be able to rock up and charge at a morrisons even if there’s just one charger (though this likely depends a little on how wealthy your area is as that probably correlates with EV take up). Then, as the quantity of EVs on the road increases, demand for chargers will increase and Morrisons will install more. The catch 22 is that the appeal of EVs is partially dependant on an increase in charger infrastructure. Hence, chicken and egg situation.

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Another factor for Morrisons is the fact that at my local store the cost of charging is prohibitive(Registered GeniePoint driver: 35p/kWh, guest driver: 39p/kWh) whilst Tesco and others provide it free of charge.
Big difference is that the Tesco chargers are not Rapid but for many that is not important.
With a modern EV equipped with a fast charger, typically 11 kWh, an hour’s charge will provide around another 50 miles of range.

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:articulated_lorry:

Umm…

You even responded to it

I was going to post the first article myself today. It’s good to see some balanced views on electrifying transport, and some of the concerns that I – and countless others – share. Hopefully increased awareness will help resolve some of these teething problems

I’m still a little bit surprised that none of the charging networks have come up with a ‘white label’ service yet that they can then resell to larger organisations - like supermarkets.

Most major supermarkets have a petrol station and that’s generally branded as the Supermarket’s own petrol station and not ESSO, BP or Shell and it then allows them to set their own prices and link it to their own reward scheme (Clubcard, Nectar etc.).

A ‘white label’ EV service, which is then resold to the supermarkets means that the supermarkets themselves decide how much to charge and could also link up to their own promotions and rewards.

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