Review: Renault Zoe electric car To argue that the electric car has already failed is farcical. To date only one mass-market EV from an established car maker has been launched in the UK: the Nissan Leaf. Even I’m not fully convinced by the Leaf. I think it’s too big, too ugly and too expensive. A revised, cheaper, longer-range Sunderland-built model will …
A diesel that does 60mpg will cost £0.11 per mile in fuel. If this costs £3.00 to charge and does 150 miles, that's £0.02 per mile, which sounds great. However, there's also that £70 a month battery lease, which makes it less attractive than it would otherwise have been
If you do 10,000 miles a year, the Diesel will cost £1,100 in fuel and the Zoe will cost £1040 in charge and battery lease
If you do 5,000 miles a year, the Diesel will cost £550 in fuel, and the Zoe will cost £940 and battery lease
It's definitely a step in the right direction, but that monthly charge for the battery has to come down to really make an impact IMO
My local supermarket in Brittany has one of these, as part of it's "cars you can rent by the day" etc fleet..
cost per day " all in including insurance and charging" ( Ie it has a full charge when you take it out ) ..and when you bring it back,you don't pay to top it up..( like you would if you'd rented a car with a full tank of diesel/petrol etc )..Rental Cost for 24 hours 25 euros ..about £20.00 ? ( cheaper rates if you rent for longer ) ..
They don't park it out front of their supermarket "attached and charging"..and almost no-one here has a domestic charging point unless they already own an EV car..So it is a thing that one can rent for a day ( having read the article here, I'm going to rent one for a day just to "play" )..I did ask the supermarket owner about the £70.00 per month battery leasing , and how he could be making money with those overheads, if he wasn't renting it every day..his reply.."WTF" ( in French ) .."What !! course I'm not paying that much per month just for 'kin battery leasing..Carlos is really sticking it to the rosbifs"..
I run a clio 1.9 diesel..( I get 75mpg ) so..even at half what you would pay in the UK for the leasing..and my leccy ( domestic ) costs 6p per kwh..I'd still be better off with the clio..
There is one factor that makes EV impractical, except for a few niche operations.
The grid is pretty much overloaded in most countries. When you park an EV in the driveway you will double the electricity consumption of the household, the street and the residential population of the city.
Now if a few % of the population get EVs it really won't change much.
But EVs don't scale well. If 50% of the population were to switch to EVs and expect overnight charging, there is no way the grid in the UK, USA, Australia, or pretty much anywhere else is going to meet expectations.
"When you park an EV in the driveway you will double the electricity consumption of the household, the street and the residential population of the city."
Wrong, even as a starting point.
You might double the theoretical maximum demand, but in any realistic case, the vehicle will (a) mostly charge overnight when other demand is mostly smaller (b) mostly not be used for long journeys so mostly won't need much of a charge.
Average that over any near-term realistic population of EVs and there is no practical problem.
In fact, Mackay (he of "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" fame) has posited that a suitable population of suitably equipped EVs, using grid-tied inverters as are used with solar PV, could provide useful energy storage and/or reduce the peak time stresses on the grid, by using the vehicle battery to generate electricity for the grid, and then recharge overnight ready for the next day's travel. (Apologies if someone already mentioned this, I didn't read *all* the comments as the SNR was getting atrocious).
50% using EVs? Then some thinking might be called for.
Meanwhile, the UK has insufficient gas storage to ride through a brief fallout with our suppliers, and insufficient electricity generating capacity to cover the peak demands of the next five-ten years. We do have a couple of problems to solve there.
"the vehicle will (a) mostly charge overnight when other demand is mostly smaller".
It is only smaller NOW, because residential demands are lower at night than offices etc during the day. When everyone plugs in their cars for overnight charging, the overnight residential demand will easily be triple what it is now.
"(b) mostly not be used for long journeys so mostly won't need much of a charge." It really does not matter how much of a charge it needs. The peak will still be high.
"equipped EVs, using grid-tied inverters as are used with solar PV, could provide useful energy storage " This is eco-greeny horseshit. Using battery storage and inverters is extremely inefficient (~60% or so). Worse still, it will severely impact on vehicle battery life. And then when you get back to your car to go home you find it is flat because some dick used your battery to run their airconditioner via the smart grid.
All engineering is a compromise. If you design batteries for power usage, you would preferably not use the lightweight batteries used by cars.
I'd be very happy about owning one of those. It looks great.
I wouldn't call it "affordable" by petrol car levels though. 70 quid times 36 months is another £2500 on top of the £13650 subsidized price for the entry level. That's still £3000 more than a top of the line stop-start diesel Clio.
Still, perhaps it *might* pay for itself if someone was subject to congestion or parking charges and did a lot of short range driving, e.g. a drive to school, shopping, etc. in an urban setting.
There is nothing practical about an electric vehicle that has, optimistically, a range of 75 miles when it brand new, probably more like 50 miles after a couple of months in the real world. OK for for fat cat city dwellers maybe, but hopeless anywhere else. And you have to pay for the batteries even if you only drive it a few miles a month.
Plus, as others have pointed out, it is Renault. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to own anything manufactured by Renault knows that you couldn't wish a more unreliable and expensive piece of machinery on your worst enemy.
Hate to spoil your arguments but a neighbour owns a Leaf and has done for over a year. He's seen no appreciable decline in battery capacity or range in that time. He actually reckons he gets a little more now than he did at delivery though puts that more down to an evolving divining style.
As for Renault electrics, nothing wrong with the wiring in my three year old Megane coupe or the wife's five year old Scenic.
Still, why let facts get in the way of an ignorant rant?
I had an electric bicycle a few years ago with a range of 35 miles. I charged it every night and still ended up pushing it home quite a few times. It is really, really easy to clock up some miles without realising it. I don't fancy pushing home an electric car.
It needed more maintenance than any other vehicle I have ever owned , bar none. I went through two throttles, three drive motors, an ecu, one handlebar switch and an entire replacement bike in 2 years. The battery was down to a 25 mile range after 2 years, so needed replacing too. Each time it would be off the road for ages while the parts were ordered from the manufacturer. Turns out that delicate electrical parts don't like potholes and rough, rutted roads, or winter rain and salted roads.
I loved that bike - it was great fun - but I couldn't afford to keep throwing money at it and going without it for weeks at a time. When the third motor went (£500) and I knew the battery was getting a bit weak (£275), I called it a day.
I went back to riding a motorcycle. Ultimately, I need reliable, value for money transport and the e-bike wasn't it. Shame really.
I was seriously considering buying one of these, I was trying to look for the range everywhere, they really make it hard to find this, its one of the most important aspects of an electric car.
That is the only annoying thing about these companies advertising electric cars, if they were all just up front and told us is a nice clear place what the range is then I would respect them a lot more.
As my daily drive is 30 miles to work and 30 miles back, this obviously isnt suitable for me. I am going to give it another 3 or 4 years. I am hoping by then that they bring out an electric car with at least 150 miles to a charge. Then and only then will it be good enough for me to have as a daily drive.
So, 80 miles before charging
So I regularly do journeys of 300 miles, that take about five - six hours. So in the Zoe I would need to charge maybe 4 times, taking a journey of five hours would now take nine - ten (assuming each charge is 60mins).
This is unacceptable, at this point I may as well fly rather than drive (the trains being a nightmare).
Admittedly I wouldnt make the journey in a car of this size anyway, it being a bit small.
Having said that; it is a nice looking car, I like the inside and if all a need was a city car I would really consider it.
Whilst a skeptic on human driven climate change, this is a nice looking car, and really, reducing our reliance on a finite energy source cant be a bad thing. (Strictly speaking solar energy is finite too, the sun will after all die one day).
What does trouble me is the renting of batteries, but I guess at this point it is possible the best solution, although having more common batteries so there is some competition in the market would be nice.
I think it looks nice. More importantly, it looks quite normal. There are only so many people who want to be seen driving around in something obviously different like the Twizzy.
Now the down side.
All reviews of electric cars seem to be carried out by people who do a few short journeys trying to get the best possible mileage out of the car. What about a real life 'living with the car every day' situation?
What's the range when driving home on a wet night with lights and wipers on plus the radio for comfort and your mobile phone on charge?
What's the range if you get stuck in a traffic jam? How much electricity is used on a slow stop-start journey caused by an accident several miles ahead?
Don't forget that you need to use a special charging point so halve the range for a return journey to a place of work (for example) that doesn't have the required charging point.
How many charging points will each Renault dealer have? If these cars do catch on, how long will you have to wait before you can get connected for your half-hour fast charge? It's not like running low on petrol or diesel and stopping for a 5 minute fill-up.
I recommend that anybody buying an electric car should take out an AA Relay membership just in case.
It looks like a nice car and I might be interested when they get around to fitting a proper engine, as they surely will if they are to justify the investment. It even has the radiator intake already designed into the bumper. Bear in mind that the larger Fluence has been in production for a couple of years in South America, with a variety of engines, none of them electric.
My guess is that, in a few years time, Renault will say something like: "We built a range of electric cars and nobody wanted to buy them so please go away and let us get on with what we do well".
You can lead a horse to water......
Please learn to understand the difference between peak electricity demand (which is where the problem is going to be) and the charging patterns of electric vehicles (likely to be at times of lower electricity demand, which for the foreseeable future are likely to be overnight).
Despite what another ignoramus may have said, EV charging is unlikely to massively change UK (or anybody's) electricity demand pattern. Do the numbers. A domestic charger might be 10kW max (similar to an electric shower). If there were 100,000 EVs all charging at the same time overnight, that's an increase in overnight demand of a whole 1GW. Only an ignoramus would consider that significant.
See e.g. http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk, as mentioned by others already, for the UK's electricity usage info for the last 12 months (including pretty pictures of the daily demand cycle which illustrate why an increase of 1GW overnight simply doesn't matter, and 5GW might not be much of a problem).
Also, realise(again despite the ignoramuses claiming otherwise) that the power storage in an electric vehicle battery is better qualified to keep Joe Public's house supplied with moderate amounts of electricity at times of peak elecricity demand than (say) domestic solar PV ever will be, and maybe also better qualified than the grid will be in a few years. All it needs is suitable inverter, and the solar PV industry already knows where to find those. Yes the round trip efficiency isn't brilliant between charging and supplying. So what, if the problem is supplying the peak time demand, it's not necessarily efficiency that matters.
Never mind the energy usage, who with any sense wants to go back to the stone age and sit in a small car that has a range of 80 miles and 85bhp? It is like people who buy the Nissan Pointless or the Toyota Abomination, or even the Fiat Ugly – no self respect. Electric cars are driven by aging hippies who think that they are saving the planet when the materials that go into producing these mobile cul-de-sacs are destroying a lot more than they are saving. If you care that much, use a bike and get fit, you lardy-whingers!
Electric cars? In the UK? Pah. You could save more energy on the road by removing the plague of mini-roundabouts, speed cameras, traffic lights, speed restrictions and draconian traffic law enforcement officers and processes, and replace them all with bigger bumpers and an indemnity clause on your driving licence!
"also completely silent. There’s not a hint of motor whine and road noise is well suppressed."
I use the noice made by a cars engine as a pedestrian. I would suggest that they re-introduce a noise, otherwise there will be a sharp increase in the number of people being hit by an electric car because they could not hear it coming.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
