How practical is an electric car in London? If you revel in the independence a car gives you, then electric is not for you. The quoted range of 100 miles (161km) sounds fine, but that's a bit like a quoted ADSL speed. Your mileage may vary. The truth is that if and when the car goes flat, you are in deep doo-doo. Run out of petrol and you can walk to a petrol station, …
"Ridiculous. A car with one person in it in a big city is probably wasting road space
(unless you have to carry tools and parts to do your job, and then you'd probably need a van anyway)."
Depends where in a big city and which city. Transport in city centres is usually good - in the suburbs, not so much. If I need to go visit a friend or relative I'm not waiting 15 mins for a bus to show up then have to change halfway , wait another 15 mins then sit there as the bus stops every 300m to pick up passengers and end up taking 2 hours to do a journey that I could do by car in 30 mins. And thats assuming I don't need to carry anything large or heavy. To coin a phase - fuck that.
If electric cars keep getting all this stuff for free, are we going to go broke when enough people have electric cars?
The subsidy on the purchase price
Congestion charge exemption
Free electric charging
Free parking
Bus lane/HOV use
Reserved spaces
Or... Will the government of the day suddenly change the rules when they realise how much cash they're missing out on compared to the days of the 'evil ICE'?
These encouragements are handed out at the moment to incite people to buy electric cars. If and when people start buying them en masse, you can be sure that the government will cut the funding and attendant favors.
At that point, you'll be back here complaining that car parking is expensive again, that you have to drive with everybody else again, that you no longer have reserved spaces, etc... and car dealers will be whining that the government is crimping their sales because no more subsidies.
The wheel turns slowly, but nothing stops the complaining.
I believe this is already approaching in Norway, where there has been a greater uptake thanks to the generous subsidies, which are becoming unsustainable. Their government is now claiming that they didn't say it was permanent (although I suspect they didn't say it wasn't, either) and things will slowly revert to normal as the tax breaks disappear. I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck above the Arctic circle with a dead battery...
Run out of petrol and you can walk to a petrol station, fill up a can and walk back. Run out of amps and you need to be close to a charging point. This massively impacts on the perception of range.
Ironically this would work for Me. It's roughly 25km between fuel stops around here but there are plenty of houses and farms between.
The biggest problem is cost. I looked at the hybrid version of my current motor and it would take nearly 10 years to pay back the extra outlay and that's doing roughly 24km per annum.
I drove into London in my Leaf on Saturday. It was surprisingly painless and I found a space, with charging, relatively easy (just off The Strand).
I'd planned ahead, and discovered that in the City Of Westminster, parking is free and I could stay for 4 hours, which fit my plans perfectly.
I plugged in and went for lunch.
While eating I decided to check the ParkRight app (City Of Westminster's app) and it told me the street I'd parked in was not in their zone, which meant I was no longer certain I could park for free.
I ended up running back to my car, mid meal, to move it. Bizarrely, the street I was in *was* classed as City Of Westminster - but only on one side, the side without a charger. So I moved my car, but lost the ability to charge...
So, though pretty painless, the 4 hour limit is a bit mean at weekends, and the lack of clear signage on the other side of the street (Holborn side) meaning I wasn't sure if parking was free, was confusing.
I'll definitely do it again (but only at weekends).
I hope the Dept of Energy (and Climate Change!) has done its homework, as it seems to be encouraging us all to use electric vehicles while simultaneously closing power stations at the behest of the EU. Charging an EV at home will at least double your consumption (more if it needs frequent full charges), which is hard to reconcile with the present 2-3% capacity margin that has already resulted in this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-22845487
"Are you absolutely sure recharging an electric car will at least double your electricity consumption?"
Well our average daily electricity consumption is 18kW.h - so using an electric car even moderately (50 miles/day) would double our consumption. ( a Leaf charging empty-full is supposed to take ~25kW.h)
Charging an electric car does massively increase electricity consumption.
My household electricity usage is ~ 9kWh/day and my 60mile daily commute means my car uses ~ 16kWh/day which, given some losses in charging (it is not 100% efficient) equates to about 18kWh usage.
Switching to eco7 meant my daily household bill was a bit higher but the cost of charging the car overnight dropped significantly.
It costs me ~ £1 to charge my car 18kWh which works out about £25/month (I don't commute on weekends).
There is an argument that this is bad but I am using electricity overnight which helps the Grid by reducing the 'bath tub' effect and I'm buying my electricity from a renewable provider meaning my bills are being used to build more renewable energy sources and my usage is being matched by renewable units at some point.
Remember, with electric cars you can improve their co2 footprint *after* the cars have been purchased without needing to retro-fit them. Upgrade the Grid and all the electric cars get that bit cleaner. You can't do the same with a fleet of ICE cars :)
I think at the moment the one electric vehicle option that makes sense for cities is the electric bicycle/scooter. They're used mainly for shorter journeys, and they can be charged in a reasonable time by a 13A socket. For bicycles, there is even pedal backup. The battery can be removed and charged indoors.
But...the Department of Transport does its best to discourage them. Idiot requirements like a 200W limit (meaning that the one time you really want the motor on a bike, climbing hills, it's useless), the requirement always to have to turn the pedals to keep the motor going, and the refusal to distinguish between ICE and electric for scooter taxation, all suggest that they aren't wanted.
A robust bicycle with a 600W motor and decent brakes would be a workable form of urban transport, with a top speed around 20mph and a P/W ratio around 7-8HP/ton (6kW/tonne in real units) giving the ability to climb a steep hill at at least walking speed, but the organisation that hasn't even got around to legalising Segways for postmen and police doesn't seem to be in the slightest interested.
"The refusal to distinguish between ICE and electric for scooter taxation, all suggest that they aren't wanted."
They aren't. Western govts worldwide are more or less actively discouraging the purchase of small motorcycles due to very high injury rates for riders(*). At the extreme end, New Zealand has compulsary personal injury insurance built into vehicle licensing and motorcycles end up costing over twice as much as cars each year.
(*) Yes, I know, most crashes are the fault of 3rd parties but that doesn't make the riders any less injured. Small (under 12kW) bikes put people in the danger zone where they're going too fast to stop quickly but don't have enough power to go around trouble and most riders tend to exacerbate the problem by riding in the "oil slick" or in the kerbside wheel lane.
If eco-freako electric car drivers really cared about the environment, they wouldn't be looking for benefits like driving in bus lanes and getting priority over everyone else - It's obvious the most environmentally friendly thing for the to do is for them to give way to everyone else, so that the emissions of gas-guzzlers are minimised - that's why I never give way to Pri-arses
Make then wait......
Once upon a time, you couldn't get broadband internet because it didn't get to your doorstep.
Now, electric cars can't park anywhere because there are not enough plugs, conveniently close. Just give it time.
But I'm still waiting for laws to make it illegal to someone unplug your car without your consent. Because you are liable to find such punks everywhere.
"But I'm still waiting for laws to make it illegal to someone unplug your car without your consent. Because you are liable to find such punks everywhere."
That's one of my concerns, but apparently there's an electromagnetic locking mechanism to prevent such things. Some wag will still try and rip the cables out, which might prove interesting.
is a pretty silly thing to do at the best of times, regardless of the propulsion system your vehicle employs. Buses, trains and tubes are all available frequently and fairly cheaply during working hours. Having to take two taxis and park in a less than ideal location is a symptom of driving anything in to central London during the week and expecting to park exactly where you want to.
Buses, trains and tubes are all available frequently and fairly cheaply during working hours.
My train ticket costs more than my mortgage.
Try getting a train into one of the northern or western stations and then get to Canary Wharf for work. Walk, train, tube, dlr..... it all just takes so long, and its pretty well unreliable - most weeks one of the "unholy trinity" breaks down or experiences significant delays or strikes or staff absences.
Public transport is great for very short distances, but hasn't been the future for a very long time now. The age of rail has been and gone, and anyone that thinks night busses are safe should feel welcome to travel through Croydon on one for a couple of nights.
Now if we wanted to look to the future, it'd look a lot more like petrol or electric motorbikes travelling in on roads that are built over the top of the disused rail lines, with the train stations turned into multi-story motorbike parking..... Or we could just carry on with our current inadequate and crippled infrastructure hoping somehow that the train and bus will one day make sense again (they won't, of course).
Now if we wanted to look to the future, it'd look a lot more like petrol or electric motorbikes
I'd love one of these[1] - if only they weren't so damned expensive :-(
Vic.
[1] Yes, there is an electric one. It won its class in the 2010 Progressive Insurance Automotive X-prize, with the highest MPGe of any of the class winners at 205.3 MPGe. And I think that's rather cool.
I'd be very worried about travelling in an enclosed two wheeler. It takes too little to go wrong to have a fall over in traffic incident.
The Vectrix electric scooter was pretty good (I know someone who has one) and is excellent for central London use. But nobody bought them.
I'd be very worried about travelling in an enclosed two wheeler. It takes too little to go wrong to have a fall over in traffic incident.
That's why it has two additional wheels that come down at the sides.
Even if you forget to put the wheels down, it will land on one of the additional wheels, and you can get going from that position.
Vic.
In a city-communter environment, is anyone really going to run them off the petrol bit unless the worst has happened and the daily charge has run out?
So give them the same urban-area advantages as pure electrical cars. After all, if someone with a pure-electric car needs to make a long journety, he's going to use his other car, or hire a conventional car, so the CO2 emission will also be the same or worse. (Worse, if two cars have to be manufactured instead on one).
I hope everyone's taking into account the replacement cost of the battery pack in their calculations - that's $15000 for a Nissan Leaf as well as the steady loss of per-charge mileage year-on-year. With costs like that, or even if it were half that, the car is effectively scrap metal after the battery dies because nobody's ever going to fork out that much to get a used car running again.
I really want electric cars to work but today's implementation is just too flawed to be a long term solution. Now if the manufacturers could just standardise on the power pack then I could drive into a 'petrol station' and my pack would be automatically swapped out for a fully charged one. I'd pay for the differential in charge plus an ongoing usage tax towards their manufacture and my old pack would go off for charging at a power station.
The cost of the pack is something people would like to avoid talking about.
Some want to see it rolled into a lease, well, that won't work for most people.
Most people want a car free of debt that they can patch up when absolutely necessary.
Having a car that has a slowly shrinking fuel tank that costs a lot to replace is clearly a problem.
If people say "oh, but they'll get cheaper over the years" - that may be true, but it sure won't be for the old packs, and even if it was, they can charge you whatever they want.
Ever tried to buy a projector bulb for an old model? Just as expensive, if not more, than a new one. The good old razor and blades model.
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