Iāve got a 2018 Nissan Leaf as my daily driver, itās what I use for most of my city driving. Iāve had a number of hatchbacks, petrol and diesel, manual and auto, Iāve also got an auto Freelander 2. By far, the leaf is the best car to drive around the city, itās so easy and quick to use.Ā
Itās cheap to run. Last month I did 400 miles, the estimated electricity cost of charging at home is just under 9 quid. The regen braking means that I hardly use the brakes, I can drive for hours only using one pedal.Ā
If anyone is thinking about getting an EV then go for it. Itās a complete contrast to a manual roadster. I love jumping from one type of vehicle to another.
I have a 330e Msport,It doesnātĀ go far in pure electric mode but it really pulls when both motors are on,70 to 100 is far too easily achieved.
I love the silence of the car,but I also love screaming the MX5 to the max.
I regularlyĀ get to work and back on a charge (15 miles)and in ScotlandĀ the charge points are free once you buy a card.(free charging is also available at UK national trust properties)
But best of all HMRC give you a free MX5 for going green!
You can. Most EVs on the market are competitively priced with Ā£25 -35k hatchbacks. The second hand market starts at about Ā£6k
The running costs are far, far lower. Next to no fuel costs, free road tax, far less parts on the vehicle to go wrong.
The Nissan leafs and early Teslaās from 6 - 8 years ago are still running strong on their batteries. Given that most people only keep a car for 2 - 3 years, thereās no risk there.
What puts most off is the range, my leaf will do about 160 miles on a single charge, which is fine for most peopleās journeys, I use the public charging network very occasionally, that is getting better all the time.
There are plenty Renault drivers that buy the cars after the first owner gives them back to Renault at the end of the lease. The batteries are still under rental and the second owners have the battery rental to pay. When the first owners try to trade them in the prices offered are not worth taking
Go on to the Renault Zoe forums and plenty of the second owners are having batteries replaced at the annual services but on the other hand if that does not suit your rose tinted specs just ignore this posting.
I had the misfortune to have a hybrid as a hire car a couple of weeks ago - terrible things - makes the prospect of me ever buying a full electric one minimal
Put it in electric mode & as soon as you hit the accelerator it says ātoo fast accelerationā and switched to petrol mode, when driving, even at a steady speed the battery was never charged enough to go in to electric mode - this car only had about 5k miles on it.
I live in London, the one place where you would think they would be championing electric cars. The big problem we have here is that (in most cases) you never get parked in the same place twice every evening when you get home as most people donāt have a drive or garage. So that would mean at some point during the week iām going to have to take the time to go somewhere to charge the car and then park again, and guess what iām probably not going to get back in that same place again.Ā
So while the whole electric thing is fine for your average suburban dweller with a driveway it really isnāt for your inner city dweller.Ā
Also as a side note in a couple of weeks i head to France as i do 3-4 times a year and that will be about 400 or so miles of driving. In the ND that will be a case of set off at about 10am, hop on the eurotunnel and arrive out our apartment for about 4pm. If i had an electric car that would probably need an very lengthy stop somewhere, with the ND i will probably top up just before hopping on the train.
To me this is the whole crux of the problem of electric cars. If you have enough money and the space to have one as a runabout then something else for the longer journeys (or fun) then fair play to you, but surely thatās kind of defeating the object here?Ā Until they make a genuine proper alternative with an infrastructure to match then iām afraid it just be something niche for a long time to come.Ā
EVs are coming, for sure. I suppose at the moment, we are where we were when Hybrids first appeared. Its 22 years since the first Prius arriveed. Most of these have been long obliterated, but it seems, looking at the streets of London, quite a few of the 2003 models are still in use. At the time, Parkers applied a projected value of zero after 10 years, on the basis that Toyota didnāt know what the batteries would be like then. The cost of new batteries was prohibitive; about the same as a new engine (despite less parts, so whats the expensive bit??). That proved unduely pessimistic, but batteries are failing, and an aftermarket industry has evolved to repair them for an economic fee. Mostly this is based on swapping out bad cells for good cells out of scrapped cars. This is what Honda does; replacement cells are coming from warranty returns.
If Zoes are going wrong, it might be more to do with Renault than anything else.
Global peak car sales is expected to occur in 2030, thereafter, car sales are expected to decline. But remember, this is global, so the peak car sales for the West is going to be earlier than that, and the decline will be steep. We are moving away from a model of buying and owning a car. Morgan Stanley worked out a car is only used 15% of the time. Mercedes and BMW have been setting up car clubs. Jaguar is supposedly going to pitch Ā£300m for Addison Lee from the Carlyle group. For those utside of London, Addision Lee is a mini-cab firm, with a fleet of black Ford Galaxys. Before Uber, they were trying to muscle in on the black cab business. They now have operations in the US, making them the worldās largest limosine service. Itās becoming clear that the future of the car companies doesnāt necessarily involve buying a car.
Where I work they have an electric Peugeot Partner van, itās ideal to run between the office and workshop/warehouse; a distance of half a mile.
The acceleration is impressive, the child in me had to find out if you could leave a number 11 on the warehouse floor. It turns out you can.Ā
When charged it has a range of about 80 miles from what I remember.
They also use electric Nissan vans around London, they make sense economically as there is no congestion charge to pay saving a considerable amount.
For me personally however they make no sense at all. I tend to run an older vehicle (my current daily drive was 10 years old when bought) so the batteries will be at the end of their life, if not totally knackered by the time Iād buy one. The cost of new batteries would write off an older electric vehicle. Or if the batteries are leased like on a Renault, I like to own my vehicles outright and the thought of renting batteries is a complete turnoff.
There is the elephant in the room with electric cars and itās a big one; are they really that green?
The power has to come from somewhere, with the network in itās current state you are taking the problem from the vehicle and passing it onto the power station. A few years ago we were told that our current power station network is close to suffering a shortfall; if weāre being asked to turn lights off to save the planet is adding the burden of electric vehicles really the answer? Especially as weāve still got fossil fuel power stations.
I understand we have to take action to save the planet and fully support it, but in my view electric cars arenāt the answer they are being sold as. Battery and electric motor technology is progressing at a rate but until a true answer like hydrogen fuel cells are available we wonāt have a true solution.
This i can concur with as it pisses me off to the nth degree that a lot of people living near me have a car each but barely use it to go anywhere. I have what i call the long-termers on the street which barely move from one month to the next and youāre not talking classics here.
Maybe if the idea of car sharing (as they do all over Paris) was to be rolled out in big numbers then it might see a shift from ownership, to me that would be heaven. Also canāt wait for this new ULEZ to finally kick in so the old shitters get booted out.
One of my very good friends bought a Prius new in 2003, and still has it after about 70K miles. It only does between 50 and 60mpg, and often a bit less on a long journey at the āfullā 70 on the motorway, so not all that much better than my old 1.4SE Astra which averaged 45mpg for its 205K miles. However, my mileage was mostly motorway and open country and for that I would still prefer my old Astra, but his is mostly around town where the Prius wins hands down and for this it is a much, much better car. The battery condition indicator in the Prius suggests it still has at least 95% of original capacity, this on the untouched 2003 battery. The secret with the Prius is that it never charges the battery past 50% on the engine, reserving the rest of the capacity for regen. Toyota reckoned that never taking the battery to full lengthened its life immensely, and this seems to be working as they expected. The car is not rusting even though it lives outside, so he plans to keep it until the battery dies and only then move on to another of the same or better. Witness how many old Prius are still running as minicabsā¦
These Prius batteries are much the same as laptop batteries, and my early laptops were eating a battery under Warranty every six months, and I was not impressed by Li-ion. However this latest laptop allows me to choose how it is charged, and I bought it after having read the Toyota blurb on battery life. So Iāve set it that the laptop stops charging the battery at 95% and does not attempt to recharge until it drops below 50%, and then only after I undock and redock it (ie normal use). Most of the time it is docked with permanent mains supply, and I might need to remember to briefly undock it to prompt a recharge if I later expect to be using it as a portable for any length of time. This battery lasts up to five hours at full screen brightness (much the same as when new) and is four years old. So maybe the batteries can last, and it is down to how they are treated.
Thereās a few common misconceptions about EVs here.
The batteries are getting better and better all the time. If youāre buying something that is less than 5 years old, you donāt even need to think about it.
If I was doing a lot of long journeys I wouldnāt use an EV, the public charging network isnāt there yet. But very few people do regular long journeys. Most households would be fine with one EV and one ICE car.
As for it being greener. Who really knows? How many batteries can we actually make? That wasnāt my main reason for buying it, I like cars, I like new technology, when it comes to city driving, you cant beat an EV for comfort and ease, in the winter I can remotely heat the car up from an app on my phone, it gets blistering hot in minutes, faster than any ICE car.
Youāve got to try one and live with one before you can make your mind up. Thereās pros and cons with everything.
Theyāve not convinced Horiba, who point out recharging infrastructure cannot readily replace existing refueling infrastructure in developing countries. DeLoitte have determined there is a gap in the money needed to invest in the technologies, and car maker profitability. The result is some canāt and wonāt make the transtion, and will just end up exiting the market. Others will talk up the numbers of cars, leading to a glut in car. The US is still an important market, and so far, no EV satisfied the needs of the average American car buyer. BMW are now saying EVs have been overhyped from the European perspective, and are detecting absolutely no consumer demand for them, and consider that the main markets are confined to China and California. Outside of those, the future is in PHEV not BEV. In their view. The reasons are the lack of infrastructure, and, pertinent to this discussion, abysmal resale values.
Electric BMWs are selling better in the US than here, because US homes typically have more than one vehicle. Average number of cars per household in the US is more than 2, in the UK is less than 1.2. So UK (and European) requirements are very different from those in the US; we ask more of our cars. Americans get a vehicle to do a particular job, hence pickup sales are high. You canāt beat a truck for hauling stuff. You enjoy your Leaf for city driving. My local city in London, and you have to be nuts to drive a car there, whatever is powering it.
There are different charging standards. Are we seeing a repeat of VHS versus Betamax, where the eventual long term winner was streaming (but lets see where your Netflix film collection goes when the apocalypse comes. Densil Washingtonās chacter in Book of Eli was smart to get hold of an ipod not an iphone to enjoy listening to jazz during the End of Days). The UK government is looking into inductive charging in motorways. Will that be backward compatable? Probably not, so some how I doubt there will be the Classic Nissan Leaf Owners Club in 2050.
Iām not sure that EV are āprovenā, insomuch they are a replacement for the ICE car. Your own situation shows the EV is not. And the case for EV is severely undone by, for instance, hydrogen powered vehicles, where the infrastructure needed (tanks of compressed gas sitting at designated refueling stops, aka petrol stations) is much more compatable with what we have already. Most petrol stations in the UK canāt really be converted to recharging stations, and still be economically viable. Will hydrogen charging development be quicker than the rolling out of domestic EV car recharging infrastructure? Hard to say, and while we still like to āownā a car, that uncertainty will continue to affect consumers. Average age of a car in the UK is 8 years old, and going up, and in the US, is 12 years and also increasing. Because we are already car based societies, the conversion will be slow (I still have a proverbial VHS player). In societies that are less built around car ownership, then uptake is fast, because its not replacing anything except a bike (eg China), and petrol refueling infrastructure is minimal (in India, you still buy petrol by the bottle, form some at the road side).
What is the big gap is in EV commerical vehicles. I see around LOndon increasing numbers of light EV vans, but nothing bigger. Chinese company BYD has pretty much cornered the market in EV buses. That will more of a breakthrough; a medium-heavy duty EV vehicle that can effectively replace the traditional truck. Doesnāt exist.
However I think there is a strong argument for having part electric and part combustion/fuel cell, ie hybrid.Ā This is specifically for recovering braking energy, and in this particular shorter range instance the Super-capacitors might be a better answer than batteries because of no chemistry losses. The capacitors might even be a viable more efficient supplement to batteries for busy stop-start such as taxis and buses in traffic.
The combustion fuel from a āpetrolā station could be Hydrogen or Ethanol; hydrogen can be obtained from water via solar panels and sunlight, and ethanol from sewage and domestic refuse.Ā The ethanol systems have been tested for decades now, but it seems that some of the vested interests are resisting them.Ā
I remember seeing studies a couple of decades or so ago mapping out the possibilities and the economics of various replacements for fossil fuels in several different applications, but no longer have access to them.
Bio-ethanol from sewage is not straightforward to produce, and the process has only really come into the limelight in the last 12-24 months. Conventionally, ethanol used in fuel has come from plant crops, such as corn. There is a discussion as to whether so much agricultural resource should be put into fuel production. It didnāt make economic sense for Brazil, really, and they were the first.
The process of bioethanol from sewage starts with activated sludge, not domestic refuse. What you are getting mixed up with is methane production, by methanogenic bacteria. Most of this is tapped and burnt off. Ethanol production requires processing of the sludge into a dried activated sludge cake; by that stage, the material is essianlly bacterial biomass.Modified bacillus spp. are favoured for this production, but what is uncertain, is the efficiency. The issue with activated sludge is that it can go out of control; a brewery dumps sugar into the system, crashes it. A dye manufacturer adds in effluents, kills in.
Currently, the sludge can be treated and used as a fertilizer. Is it better to use the sludge to grow crops that can be converted to a fuel, or to convert the waste into ethanol. The former we know veey well; plant sugar plus yeast gives ethanol. Sludge needs something like a proteus spp loaded with genes from several unrelated bacteria. Having worked with transgenic bacteria for best part of 30 years, I can tell you its not straightforward, and people go nuts when you mention the possibility of introduction intomthe environment. Remember the last FMV outbreak? Due to a cracked pipe at an animal vaccine production plant, which lead to 1968 FMV being introduced to farms by the very vets who were inspecting cattle for FMV. There are better uses for modified bugs than making the base material of booze.
This isnāt supposed to be a debate about the future of EVs.
The fact is that they are here for us to use and enjoy, theyāre not going away anytime soon. They are a practical and long term work out to be a cheaper solution for many people.
There isnāt any other vehicle that delivers that instant torque like an electric car.
Anyone who is really into automobiles will love the different driving experience and all the other benefits that you donāt get from a fossil fuel car.