RE: Living with an Enyaq | PH Footnote
Discussion
Max_Torque said:
skyrover said:
Max_Torque said:
i'm going to suggest that most people are currently driving their last ICE passcar in the UK......
I'll take that betNot invested in the industry are you?
When i say "driving their last ICE car" i am talking about people who have reasonably recently just bought a new ICE and will in say 3 to 5 years, buy another new car and you'll note i clearly said "most" people. ie not everyone, but a majority.
People who drive old bangers, or for whom some old crappy derv rattler is the "hill they will die on", well, keep on climbing your hill, you're not at the top yet :-) Those people are not, and never have been, the people who buy the new cars and actually cause the UK passcar fleet to evolve.
Edited by Max_Torque on Monday 5th July 07:40
SidewaysSi said:
Max_Torque said:
skyrover said:
Max_Torque said:
i'm going to suggest that most people are currently driving their last ICE passcar in the UK......
I'll take that betNot invested in the industry are you?
When i say "driving their last ICE car" i am talking about people who have reasonably recently just bought a new ICE and will in say 3 to 5 years, buy another new car and you'll note i clearly said "most" people. ie not everyone, but a majority.
People who drive old bangers, or for whom some old crappy derv rattler is the "hill they will die on", well, keep on climbing your hill, you're not at the top yet :-) Those people are not, and never have been, the people who buy the new cars and actually cause the UK passcar fleet to evolve.
Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 5th July 07:40
Max_Torque said:
SidewaysSi said:
Max_Torque said:
skyrover said:
Max_Torque said:
i'm going to suggest that most people are currently driving their last ICE passcar in the UK......
I'll take that betNot invested in the industry are you?
When i say "driving their last ICE car" i am talking about people who have reasonably recently just bought a new ICE and will in say 3 to 5 years, buy another new car and you'll note i clearly said "most" people. ie not everyone, but a majority.
People who drive old bangers, or for whom some old crappy derv rattler is the "hill they will die on", well, keep on climbing your hill, you're not at the top yet :-) Those people are not, and never have been, the people who buy the new cars and actually cause the UK passcar fleet to evolve.
Edited by Max_Torque on Monday 5th July 07:40
Currently EV does not suit my needs. I drive to the office c.250 miles each way a couple of times a month, as soon as the local hotel or our office has charging points I will seriously consider an EV.
I currently have an AMG C63S which I love and will keep even with an EV as well and use it at the weekend for fun, not slogging up and down the M1 at 60-70mph for hour after hour.
On the Skoda, I like the outside, think it looks quite smart in that downplayed Skoda way. Not a fan of the big touch screen.
I currently have an AMG C63S which I love and will keep even with an EV as well and use it at the weekend for fun, not slogging up and down the M1 at 60-70mph for hour after hour.
On the Skoda, I like the outside, think it looks quite smart in that downplayed Skoda way. Not a fan of the big touch screen.
Fiesta1.0L said:
Dale487 said:
This article is about going to the countryside in an EV but I’ve long thought that an EV is possibly easier for those who live there compared to those who live there than the city; more likely to have off road parking close to the home power supply, which to me seems like the biggest issue bar the initial purchase price of the EV.
You'd think, but my friends place is in a small cluster of houses just outside a village in Sussex. The transformer in the corner of his field (fitted in the 60s) is 100A, so will support 3 home chargers (7kw) and nothing else whilst they are in use. Trouble is there's 7 houses/barns, several with electric heating, Agas and already there's a couple in one of the houses with 2 Teslas and 2 chargers.Either there's a lot of expensive upgrading to come (as the oil heating most of the houses use is banned alongside petrol), or there's going to be serious rationing of car charging (or people having to spend ££££ on solar/batteries for themselves).
We frequently have power outages during the winter and bad weather .. we have a diesel genny for emergency use
Our heating is oil and solid fuels and we aren’t connected to any sewage system ..
I’ve no idea what power our connection is .. other than it’s crap
Left pole in pic is our house supply and right is the the one it comes off that leads to another two houses
rxe said:
Because the economics of public charging really don’t work.
How much does a charge point cost to install? 10 grand? Probably more for one that has decent capacity, and if you have to dig up the car park and put thick cables in, probably a lot more. You’ve got all the charging infrastructure, and then you’ve got to have a service contract to maintain and check it. And it will all be qualified sparks doing the work, not some minimum wage bloke managing the till and shop.
Because the economics of public refuelling really don’t work. How much does a charge point cost to install? 10 grand? Probably more for one that has decent capacity, and if you have to dig up the car park and put thick cables in, probably a lot more. You’ve got all the charging infrastructure, and then you’ve got to have a service contract to maintain and check it. And it will all be qualified sparks doing the work, not some minimum wage bloke managing the till and shop.
How much does a filling station cost to build? 800 grand? Probably more for one that has decent capacity, and if you have to dig up the a whole chunk of land, bury a few massive big tanks, install the pumps and other infra, then seal everything so run-off can be controlled, probably a lot more. You’ve got all the building and pumping infrastructure to buy and build, and then you’ve got to have multiple service contracts to maintain and check it all. And you've also got to buy and maintain a fleet of specialised trucks to deliver the highly flammable fuel all around the country, pretty much constantly. And it will all be qualified trades doing the work, plus some minimum wage bloke managing the till and shop.
Do you see?
JonnyVTEC said:
Counter to that really is obvious.
No one has a fuel tap at home.
Yes, but the 'this is a huge hassle/expense to install' is also a weak argument. Any number of complex networks have been set up in the last hundred years, public charging infrastructure is probably one of the easier ones to manage when you compare it to stuff like cellular comms, GPS, or the natural gas network.No one has a fuel tap at home.
I test drove the new Audi Q4 etron the other day because I am open minded about moving from ICE to BEV. However, it seems to me that in this and other BEVs, corners have been cut in order to bring the cost down from stupidly expensive to merely significantly above an ICE equivelent. Quality of plastics, especially in the rear / boot was definitely below the usual Audi standard.
Hoping that JLR will have some good BEV options for future Range Rover FF / Evoque / Sport in the not too distant future.
As for the Enyaq, that grille...
Hoping that JLR will have some good BEV options for future Range Rover FF / Evoque / Sport in the not too distant future.
As for the Enyaq, that grille...
dvs_dave said:
Fiesta1.0L said:
You'd think, but my friends place is in a small cluster of houses just outside a village in Sussex. The transformer in the corner of his field (fitted in the 60s) is 100A, so will support 3 home chargers (7kw) and nothing else whilst they are in use. Trouble is there's 7 houses/barns, several with electric heating, Agas and already there's a couple in one of the houses with 2 Teslas and 2 chargers.
Either there's a lot of expensive upgrading to come (as the oil heating most of the houses use is banned alongside petrol), or there's going to be serious rationing of car charging (or people having to spend ££££ on solar/batteries for themselves).
Only a single phase transformer, not 3-phase? That would be unusual. A 3-phase 100A could theoretically support up to 72kWEither there's a lot of expensive upgrading to come (as the oil heating most of the houses use is banned alongside petrol), or there's going to be serious rationing of car charging (or people having to spend ££££ on solar/batteries for themselves).
Having recently gone through this process myself when getting a a 7kw home charger installed and come across this very issue (limited supply to a group of houses built in the 50s when requirements were much lower).
The answer is the the local DNO, in my case Western Power Distribution is responsible for making any necessary changes to support the upgrade. That means digging up roads and installing a new 3 phase supply, lots of expensive work all done at their cost. When I say their cost, in reality we are all paying for this as consumers as the liability is priced into our electricity bills.
Its worth noting that EV chargers are not the only driver of upgrades. Even without needing EV chargepoints, millions of homes are still going to need upgraded incoming supplies over the next few years to enable them to run air/ground source heat pumps as an alternative to the gas boilers which are next on the agenda for legislating out of existence.
I drove all the way from London to Yorkshire (and back) at the weekend and enjoyed the ease of doing it in my ICE car (with a tiny fuel tank and mediocre MPG).
It did cost a fortune in petrol (£140 of super unleaded), but I managed a 5 hour trip yesterday (on the return) with a 5 minute fill up. No other stops.
There were no charging facilities either at my destination, at my stopping point, or at any of the places that I visited.
I'm very happy to wait a few years for the infrastructure to get to a point where the effort of going electric is minimal - until then, I'm not interested - and I think the same can be said for the majority of the population.
If I had to go electric now, the only viable option is Tesla given the quality of their supercharger network - but the product is too expensive and out of the reach of most (plus they don't make a reasonably priced estate).
It did cost a fortune in petrol (£140 of super unleaded), but I managed a 5 hour trip yesterday (on the return) with a 5 minute fill up. No other stops.
There were no charging facilities either at my destination, at my stopping point, or at any of the places that I visited.
I'm very happy to wait a few years for the infrastructure to get to a point where the effort of going electric is minimal - until then, I'm not interested - and I think the same can be said for the majority of the population.
If I had to go electric now, the only viable option is Tesla given the quality of their supercharger network - but the product is too expensive and out of the reach of most (plus they don't make a reasonably priced estate).
Max_Torque said:
UK sales figures from SMMT for June 2021
It would be very interesting to know who is buying what The only people I know who have bought electric cars privately are beardy retired types
Virtually everyone I know who has one has got it as a company vehicle, not because they are EV fanatics but because it makes financial sense to do so through a company
Now what happens to those £70-£90k Tesla’s and Taycans when their business leases are up will be very interesting to see
What appetite and at what price will “Mr Average” buy into them or will they be unwanted white elephants ?
It sounds as though your journey was quite stressful and required additional planning with regard to stops, as well as some luck in terms of recharging areas being vacant.
I'm no fans of touchscreens in cars either. Great for phones/tablets/etc., but in a car your eyes should be on the road. Buttons and switches that fall to hand might seem very 20th century but they just work! Texting while driving is illegal, and rightly so. Yet trying to navigate a fiddly touchscreen while on the move is somehow OK. Not to mention a touchscreen that controls pretty much every feature yet fails to function properly. How is this acceptable on a car that costs over £40k?
Having covered nearly 1,000 miles in the last week in my 23-year-old banger, this article makes me realise I took for granted just how effortless the whole experience was. My car - which cost £700 four or five years ago - has been perfect as a means of getting me from A to B and has caused me no stress or anxiety whatsoever. It doesn't have a fancy touchscreen, yet I was able to operate the air-con without any bother. I was also able to listen to a radio station of my choosing.
Over forty grand for a slab-sided MPV with a weird name that sounds like a total ball ache to live with? I'm out!
I'm no fans of touchscreens in cars either. Great for phones/tablets/etc., but in a car your eyes should be on the road. Buttons and switches that fall to hand might seem very 20th century but they just work! Texting while driving is illegal, and rightly so. Yet trying to navigate a fiddly touchscreen while on the move is somehow OK. Not to mention a touchscreen that controls pretty much every feature yet fails to function properly. How is this acceptable on a car that costs over £40k?
Having covered nearly 1,000 miles in the last week in my 23-year-old banger, this article makes me realise I took for granted just how effortless the whole experience was. My car - which cost £700 four or five years ago - has been perfect as a means of getting me from A to B and has caused me no stress or anxiety whatsoever. It doesn't have a fancy touchscreen, yet I was able to operate the air-con without any bother. I was also able to listen to a radio station of my choosing.
Over forty grand for a slab-sided MPV with a weird name that sounds like a total ball ache to live with? I'm out!
bearman68 said:
Surely the jury is out on maintenance....
I work in the trade.
Probably about 10% of my work is engine and gearbox work.
Suspension work - I can see that being more with an EV.
Electrical work - Now that's going to be significantly less with an EV - Oh! Hang on!.
Body work - about the same.
I think the balance of work will change, and EV's will be more complex, and more difficult to repair, resulting in higher repair costs, rather than lower ones.
And that's before you even talk about battery degradation.
TL:DR - Used EV's are going to have higher maintenance costs than used ICE.
I'm in agreement with this. My A6 was 3 years old last month, and it's been the most reliable car I have owned. Everything worked on day 1 and still works today and during that 3 years the maintenance costs have been £450 which is 3 annual services. I was going to sell it and buy an EV as its used by my wife, but I've decided to extend the warranty for 12 months. I'll definitely make the switch to EV as we had an i3 7 years ago and loved it, but that wasn't used as the main family car and the A6 replacement will.I work in the trade.
Probably about 10% of my work is engine and gearbox work.
Suspension work - I can see that being more with an EV.
Electrical work - Now that's going to be significantly less with an EV - Oh! Hang on!.
Body work - about the same.
I think the balance of work will change, and EV's will be more complex, and more difficult to repair, resulting in higher repair costs, rather than lower ones.
And that's before you even talk about battery degradation.
TL:DR - Used EV's are going to have higher maintenance costs than used ICE.
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