RE: Cars we won't regret going electric: Speed Matters

[Alucidnation]

Absolutely, but i would need it to be a small cv, and I guess adding more weight (tools etc) would reduce that range considerably.

[stevie777777]

DiscoColin said:

Frankly : everything that spends most of its life in traffic or cities. By definition, viable electric taxis and busses are the holy grail of urban transport.

Totally agree, we have a Nissan leaf which my wife uses to ferry the kids to/from school and all local trips and covers approx 30 miles daily - we live in rural Suffolk, range is not an issue. I also have an M3 (shortly to become a C63) - these sorts of cars have no place in cities though !

[loose cannon]

CDP said:

I've always thought trolley busses with batteries to handle the gaps in the network would be an excellent choice for many cities. Put the wires on the main routes with an automatic system for hooking up the supply when available. All of this would have been possible with 80's tech let alone now. With the research on inductive power supplies under the road it may be possible to do away with all the ugly overhead cables.

The company I work for have been messing around with induction charging for busses and so far it has been a complete failure,
Also who is going to pay for all the road development for induction charging when we currently struggle to fill in pot holes, let alone completely re engineer the road system
It all sounds lovely but it's going to be some time
Before anything drastically changes imo

[Thermobaric]

Rolls Royces and Bentleys like the Mulsanne and Flying Spurs.

Designed to be ultra quiet anyway so not missing out on sound e.t.c. Plus wouldn't have to worry about the ruinous MPG.

[Skornogr4phy]

Surely Tesla offers an electric version of every model in their lineup as well as Smart?

[CDP]

loose cannon said:

CDP said:

I've always thought trolley busses with batteries to handle the gaps in the network would be an excellent choice for many cities. Put the wires on the main routes with an automatic system for hooking up the supply when available. All of this would have been possible with 80's tech let alone now. With the research on inductive power supplies under the road it may be possible to do away with all the ugly overhead cables.

The company I work for have been messing around with induction charging for busses and so far it has been a complete failure,
Also who is going to pay for all the road development for induction charging when we currently struggle to fill in pot holes, let alone completely re engineer the road system
It all sounds lovely but it's going to be some time
Before anything drastically changes imo

It wouldn't stop the overhead cable method which is only a minor enhancement of a system that has been run since the 80's. 1882 to be precise...

[CDP]

Just looked it up, they've had trolleybusses with off-wire capacity since the 30's using IC engines and the 1980s in the USA, Canada and China.

So why hasn't it featured in this country?

[l354uge]

CDP said:

Just looked it up, they've had trolleybusses with off-wire capacity since the 30's using IC engines and the 1980s in the USA, Canada and China.

So why hasn't it featured in this country?

The oldest major cities in Canada and USA are much, much younger than many of our cities, with the historic architecture limiting options..

Ofcourse this still doesn't explain most of Coventry and the whole of Mk...

[Dan Trent]

Skornogr4phy said:

Surely Tesla offers an electric version of every model in their lineup as well as Smart?

Sorry, should have been more clear. An electric version of all the internal combustion powered cars in the product range. Obviously Tesla doesn't have any of them to start with!

Cheers,

Dan

[l354uge]

And in regard to the actual topic, near every boring commuting car could be EV, especially city ones. Even weekend cars could be EV (personally I drive my weekend car mostly for the noise behind my head)

Anyone that travels over 100 miles 5 times a year can rent a diesel estate surely? I think rental companies would do well in investing in them when EVs come in big, alot of families needing a car for that summer trip...

[FerrousOxide]

I always thought the next LR Defender should be available as an EV. The 2 major EV flaws (range, and having somewhere to recharge) don't really apply to the farming Defenders round here. Spend most of their days in a field, maybe do a dozen miles on a busy day going back to the yard for more plant, then tucked up at night in a spacious, powered barn.

Or a Caterham. (IGMC)

[anonymous-user]

Dazed and Confused said:

LordGrover said:

Byker28i said:

Wheres the point of a 60-96mile range though. Needs to be 250 to be useful for anyone outside london.

I travel 10 miles each way to work. Sure I'm not alone in driving less than 60 miles a day.

Not alone, but this is the problem. EVs make no sense to most people as an only vehicle. Even people in London need to be able to do a few hundred miles in a day from time to time.

if only there was some way of, say, hiring a vehicle you don't have to own for the few days a year where you need the extra range? Someone should sort that out........... ;-)

My i3 is the small battery model, does around 65 miles in the depth of winter and a max of 100 in summer, and yet, despite that "range limitation" my 335 has been used so little since i got the i3, that so far, over half way through 2017, i've only had to fill it (the 335) up 4 times.............

(the i3 has done about 8000 km, and cost just under £90 in 'lecy!)

[Dazed and Confused]

Max_Torque said:

Dazed and Confused said:

LordGrover said:

Byker28i said:

Wheres the point of a 60-96mile range though. Needs to be 250 to be useful for anyone outside london.

I travel 10 miles each way to work. Sure I'm not alone in driving less than 60 miles a day.

Not alone, but this is the problem. EVs make no sense to most people as an only vehicle. Even people in London need to be able to do a few hundred miles in a day from time to time.

if only there was some way of, say, hiring a vehicle you don't have to own for the few days a year where you need the extra range? Someone should sort that out........... ;-)

My i3 is the small battery model, does around 65 miles in the depth of winter and a max of 100 in summer, and yet, despite that "range limitation" my 335 has been used so little since i got the i3, that so far, over half way through 2017, i've only had to fill it (the 335) up 4 times.............

(the i3 has done about 8000 km, and cost just under £90 in 'lecy!)

Hiring vehicles as and when you need them doesn't exactly keep down the cost of running an EV.

[e8_pack]

Dale487 said:

CDP said:

Diesels.

Not strictly an EV but I think VW should make a Golf GTE estate instead of/as well as the GTD estate.

It would be the perfect car for me (if they could/would make a manual version); as the boot in the hatch is heavily compromised compared with a normal Golf, the estate would negate that to a greater degree & my wife could drive to & from work (daily compute 15 miles in total) plus usually local stuff using electric only then we'd have the petrol for long trips. But I would like a manual though. I bet we'd only use 6 or 7 tanks of petrol a year.

Vauxhall beat them to it years ago, they'd have to call it the GET.

[Thermobaric]

FerrousOxide said:

I always thought the next LR Defender should be available as an EV. The 2 major EV flaws (range, and having somewhere to recharge) don't really apply to the farming Defenders round here. Spend most of their days in a field, maybe do a dozen miles on a busy day going back to the yard for more plant, then tucked up at night in a spacious, powered barn.

Or a Caterham. (IGMC)

A shame LR have binned the Defender.

[anonymous-user]

Dazed and Confused said:

Max_Torque said:

Dazed and Confused said:

LordGrover said:

Byker28i said:

Wheres the point of a 60-96mile range though. Needs to be 250 to be useful for anyone outside london.

I travel 10 miles each way to work. Sure I'm not alone in driving less than 60 miles a day.

Not alone, but this is the problem. EVs make no sense to most people as an only vehicle. Even people in London need to be able to do a few hundred miles in a day from time to time.

if only there was some way of, say, hiring a vehicle you don't have to own for the few days a year where you need the extra range? Someone should sort that out........... ;-)

My i3 is the small battery model, does around 65 miles in the depth of winter and a max of 100 in summer, and yet, despite that "range limitation" my 335 has been used so little since i got the i3, that so far, over half way through 2017, i've only had to fill it (the 335) up 4 times.............

(the i3 has done about 8000 km, and cost just under £90 in 'lecy!)

Hiring vehicles as and when you need them doesn't exactly keep down the cost of running an EV.

it does compared to running either 2) cars or running one expensive to run car all year round

[kambites]

Dazed and Confused said:

Hiring vehicles as and when you need them doesn't exactly keep down the cost of running an EV.

No, but neither does it need to push it up prohibatively if it's only a very rare event.

However for now, I think EVs work best as one car of two (or more) in a household - there's as many registered cars as registered drivers in the UK these days, two-car households have become the norm.

One EV and one ICE would certainly suit us fine and the EV would end up doing 70-80% of the miles. We could also live quite happily with one long-range (200 miles+) and one short-range (~50 miles) EV; I don't think we've done anything that combination wouldn't cope with in at least the last five years. I'm looking forward to ditching the internal combustion engine from our family car just for the added convenience that an EV will bring us.

Edited by kambites on Tuesday 4th July 22:22

[Defconluke]

An electric vehicle would be perfect for the sort of drving I regularly do however it's not so much the range that worries me with an electric car but the logistics of being able to charge it at home.

If (like me) you live on a busy street and especially if you do shift work then being able to get parked even remotely close to where you live can be a lottery. You can't run an extenstion lead across a busy road or down the street & round the corner very easily (especially from a 2nd floor flat) and parking spaces are irregularly sized because people drive cars of all shapes and sizes so placing a charging station every so often isn't going to be practical. With a current ICE vehicle I can park wherever there is a space and not have to worry about the logistics of being able to refuel it for a week or longer if needs be regardless of where or when I need to drive somewhere.

[Mr Tidy]

Defconluke said:

An electric vehicle would be perfect for the sort of drving I regularly do however it's not so much the range that worries me with an electric car but the logistics of being able to charge it at home.

If (like me) you live on a busy street and especially if you do shift work then being able to get parked even remotely close to where you live can be a lottery. You can't run an extenstion lead across a busy road or down the street & round the corner very easily (especially from a 2nd floor flat) and parking spaces are irregularly sized because people drive cars of all shapes and sizes so placing a charging station every so often isn't going to be practical. With a current ICE vehicle I can park wherever there is a space and not have to worry about the logistics of being able to refuel it for a week or longer if needs be regardless of where or when I need to drive somewhere.

And that seems to be the biggest problem with them - in big cities doing lowish daily mileages they would be ideal. But most people using them in that environment have no way of charging them (barring an extension cable across the pavement, which just isn't an option with Elf & Safety and all that)!

Any property in a London Borough with off-road parking is going to cost £500K and the nearer the centre you go the dearer it gets, and if you pay that for a house are you really going to desire a Nissan Leaf?

When I lived in Sutton and worked in Victoria I commuted by motorbike (25 mile round trip) - it's a shame that there don't seem to be too many electric bikes. One of those Mugen Hondas from the TT would have worked for me - they do over 37 miles, but I think they are a bit pricey!

I now live in Berkshire and have "allocated" parking (but some neighbours don't seem to understand that concept). Even if I always got "my" space I'd need to chuck a cable over my garden fence (and no doubt some scrote would unplug it, wire into it from time to time or make a point of falling over it for some compo.).

I don't commute by car, but at least once a week I have to go and look after my elderly mother in Worcester Park which is a 70ish mile round trip. I'd get range anxiety in anything electric - especially with the last 3 years of M3 closures, and a recent trip when I opted for M3 avoidance and used the A331, A31 and A3 only to find the A3 was closed due to a tanker spillage! I got off at Ripley and used the A246 through Clandon, Leatherhead, Epsom, etc. and it only took me 5 hours to do what should have been a 33 mile journey, but in an EV I think I would have been walking home!

I know they aren't pure EVs, but perhaps BMW have actually got close with the i8 and i3 (assuming you have the range extender option). Just a shame the i8 has a 3 cylinder engine and the i3 looks so minging.

As for as ICE cars going electric, top contender must be the Honda Jazz!

Edited by Mr Tidy on Wednesday 5th July 00:43

[Thermobaric]

Rumor is there will be a new i model sometime soon. i5 perhaps? 330e seems to fit the bill for that area for the moment.