Electric cars

Gosh, you’re making me read up about these. It says in my google thingy that ‘for short journeys at lower speeds or inbuilt up traffic a hybrid car actually uses no fuel because it runs purely on its electric motor’.

Then it goes on ‘as its speed increases it automatically switches from electric to petrol. Even so the hybrid mpg is still very low’.

It’s all getting too technical for me now and BiL is in the States at the moment or I’d ask him. But why not visit a reputable garage and see if they can answer your queries?

My neighbour has a hybrid that charges itself & loves it.

For fully electric apparently you need to make sure you can replace individual cells otherwise the whole battery needs replacing which can cost more than the value of the car at that point.

I know someone who had a fully electric and found it very dangerous as pedestrians and animals didnt hear them coming, some fully electric cars are being developed to have fake engine noises apparently for safety reasons.

A lot of our charge points in our town get illegally parked in which is an issue. They are stand alone charge points so nobody is there to regulate it.

The range of electric cars is very small. Ideal in towns where there are pollution problems, but not suitable for longer journeys. From what I have seen of the hybrid cars, the battery means they have reduced luggage space.

Not at all the case with my friends toyota hybrid, she has run us down to Healthrow (a fairly long journey) before with no motorway issues and plenty of space. She finds it super cheap to run

I heard that some electric Nissans are pretty bad for battery replacement costs and should be avoided second hand, and once used are hard to sell

Fully loaded with 4 adult passengers? A lot of the figures published my the motor manufacturers are based on non-existent driving conditions - Driving one mile on a specified surface without braking, the driver being a specified weight, and so on. Unlike the average journey driving along a busy road, with a potholed surface, slowing down and speeding up using brake and clutch and several rises and falls, with an overweight driver.

My reaction to most manufacturer mileage figures is to halve the number of miles per gallon they do and you will be nearer the mileage got under real driving conditions.

I am not sure that an electric car has a clutch because the car itself governs when the engine is charging. It is difficult to get an electric car in Europe as most of them are the hybrids. They are really using both electricity as well as carbon fuel. With an electric car the engine is a small one as it is ONLY charging the battery and not driving the car - a different concept.

Interesting thread. I can't see electric/hybrid ever being an option for us, because we live rurally, though I can imagine that for town driving it's a viable option. There's only one fast-charge point within a 20 mile radius of us.

We do long 500+ mile journeys and I get good mileage out of my present car, I think 620 miles from one tank on my last trip to London. That's petrol, not diesel.

When petrol cars were first invented, there were very few places where motorists could get petrol. They had to plan their journeys very carefully. It is the chicken and the egg - when /if electric cars really catch on, so will recharging stations, and when/if charging stations are everywhere, electric cars will be more popular.

The environmental cost of making the electricity can be minimised by using hydro schemes, and solar, wind and wave power.

People used to carry fuel with them when cars first became a thing. A bit scary in the event of a crash!

I don't know how they'll overcome problems such as people living in tower blocks or in densely populated aand rural areas. We don't even have mains gas here, let alone fast fibre broadband so it'll be a long time before there's a network for EV.

The problem is that even if recharging points are readily available, it takes time to recharge an electric car, possible an hour or more.

On a long journey who wants to have to stop for an hour to charge their battery and imagine the scene at busy times when all the chargers at a motorway service station are occupied and queues are building. It could take 4 or 5 hours to charge a car, most of that time just waiting for a vacant charge point. On a 4 hour journey (which we do regularly) it could double our journey time.

An electric car is an automobile that is propelled by one or more electric motors, using energy stored in rechargeable batteries. The first practical electric cars were produced in the 1880s.

My DS and DiL have an electric car but not for long trips. For that they have a conventional petrol-driven car. The electric car is a bit like a dodgem! It is automatic and very quiet. One danger is that you can't hear it coming so an unwary pedestrian is at risk. It's charged on the driveway by a lead from inside the garage.

I'm going to go against Jacob vanWagoner on this one.
I think its a long ways to go before electric cars become mainstream - more than 50% of new car sales.

Wait 'till the public catch on to the horrendous damage that lithium mining is doing to the environment.
For those that don't know what lithium is: it's the heavy metal that goes into batteries.
As Elegran said: the only way is hydro.

Check that you can change a flat. Some do not have jacks or jacking points due to the weight of the car and battery. A relative was unable to call the AA etc as they do not deal with this and a garage charged a small fortune.

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There are few charging points where I live in the SW sticks and I don't have a drive so could not charge at home. My present petrol car is 17 years old with only 85,000 miles on the clock. It passes the MOT easily. Electric cars, pure and hybrid, are expensive to buy.

There was a long thread on mumsnet about this recently. Many drivers loved their EVs but admitted they were a lot less efficient in cold weather when heating the car used up battery power quickly. I believe conventional petrol cars will still be with us for my lifetime.

We have a Honda hybrid, and it is a dream to drive. It has all the safety features that you would expect in a honda and is extremely economic to run. In our case about £45 every six weeks. We use the car every day although only locally, and drive from top to bottom of the U.K. on our holidays.

Our son owns a fully electric car, and is on his second one. He would never return to the combustion engine. He had an electric point put onto his drive quite a number of years ago, and has solar panelling. He also drives a good few miles if he holidays in the U.K. and has never apparently had any difficulty. His current car does over 300 miles to a full charge.

My son is on his third electric car, a company car. The latest is a Tesla. There is no dashboard or buttons or switches, but what looks like a large ipad screen. His journey to work takes 1.5 hours. He charges it from power in his garage and when he gets to work. He seems very pleased with it. It is scarily silent.

I do worry about the mining of lithium for batteries. It seems the environmental costs of producing batteries outweighs the advantages of driving an electric vehicle.

My 12 year old car has only done 41000 miles so I am hanging on to it but I am considering a hybrid when I do change.

M0nica

The range of electric cars is very small. Ideal in towns where there are pollution problems, but not suitable for longer journeys. From what I have seen of the hybrid cars, the battery means they have reduced luggage space.

We have said that when my car dies we will get an electric car, but the amount of energy embedded in acquiring the raw materials and building the electric car needs to be taken into account in working out their efficiency so, currently it is probably more energy efficient to keep my 13 year old, light use car on the road.

Do not forget the emissions from the power stations making the electricity and energy embedded in the wind turbines and solar arrays.

This is outdated I’m afraid. Teslas will do 350 miles and most new cheaper models do at least 200-250. The boot space on my 2018 Nissan Leaf EV is the same as a petrol car. The nonsense about materials and energy is no different from a non-electric car. Maintenance is far cheaper (less to go wrong) and running costs are obviously tiny.

The scenario that concerns me as we move towards all electric vehicles is when we have extremely cold snowy weather and miles and miles of vehicles are trapped at night on a frozen motorway. One by one the cars will run out of power as the occupants try to stay warm. How on earth is that situation resolved?

Lots of luddites here EV are the same size and shape as any other, the battery is under the floor. Some cheaper cars have a range of around 150 miles fine for local use as a second car, you charge at home and it costs peanuts. Most have a range of 200-300 miles, many will charge in 30mins but that’s not needed often, OH has a Jaguar IPace EV we charged away from home 4 times last year.
EVs are not silent at low speed they emit a wirring sound probably louder than others, they are the future so get used to it, last year 30% of new cars were EVs, many of the rest were hybrid.

The range of EVs has improved over the last few years. My DS2 was an 'early adopter' with a Nissan Leaf which was used as a second car, mainly around the locality and charged at home. Now the family-sized petrol driven Mazda has been replaced with a Tesla, with approximately three times the range of the Nissan. There is an inevitability about this and it seems that non-believers will sooner or later find that they have no option but to acquire an EV.