Thanks for taking the time to reply and enhance my knowledge. 
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I really like the MX-30 but the range is truly hopeless. Mazda admit itās meant as a second car but itās a bit big as a mere runabout. Public chargers often cost more per mile than petrol or diesel, so you really want a battery that gets you from A to B and back again.
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Bargain! Just found it discounted on Amazon for Ā£109.99. 1/10th scale is pretty good too. Will probably last a lot longer than a a few litres of petrolā¦ 
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Weāve had a Tesla Model 3 since December. Itās a fantastic car and drives very well although Iām not impressed with the ride on rough roads. It handles very well for a car weighing 1.8T and is ridiculously fast but you do feel the weight when cornering compared to my NC2. Obviously it lacks character compared to an MX5 but itās comfortable and quiet and the technology built into the car is very impressive.
Claimed range is 350 miles. Real range in this country is 300 miles. We went for Tesla because of the network of high speed superchargers that no other car company provides. You can literally charge your car from 20% to full in 20 minutes! The public offerings are poor by comparison. All run by differing companies with different rubbish apps you have to download and sign up to just to switch on the charger, but they are improving. Most public chargers charge at about 30mph (as apposed to 400mph for Tesla!) some are around 50-60mph. Thatās fine if your somewhere for a few hours but we really need fast chargers country wide to make EVās viable for everyone. Tesla are the only ones to do it properly so far but the big petrol companies are slowly catching up and adding more to their inventory.
We are on our second trip to Northumberland in the Tesla. Weāll do around 500 miles driving on this trip and it will cost about Ā£20. It can be done you just need to plan your trip to allow for charging in a couple of locations. Not as convenient as petrol stations but a lot less painful when paying for fuel!
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Iāve seen some discussion that rapid charging shortens the battery life (in current battery tech) and that slow and steady is better, which is fine if you have a home/overnight charging option. Is this a concern for you and/or do you only supercharge occasionally?
Ā£20 in electricity used is excellent as long as you donāt also need to save up a large sum (depreciation or replacement) for a new battery.
Ian
Yes your right, you canāt get something for nothing with charging. Supercharging regularly will inevitably reduce battery capacity and life. Tesla recommend keeping charge between 20-80% for normal day to day use and only charging to 100% when you need full range. We only use the fast chargers on long journeys. At home I donāt have a charger installed. When we got the car I thought Iād try just useing the 3-pin 10amp charger supplied with the car. Do you know what itās fine. You plug it in go to bed and in the morning itās added 120 miles of range. Unless your doing big daily mileages a home charger is not necessary just a reliable/weatherproof outdoor socket.
I canāt speak for other manufacturers but Tesla warranty is 8 years/120k miles and they guarantee 70% battery for that period. I would assume if your not fast charging regularly battery degradation will be a lot less than that.
Weāre on a lease deal for 4 years so we donāt need to worry too much about depreciation. I think with newer cheaper batteries arriving imminently replacement of batteries after 7-10 years wonāt be as expensive as it is now and will mean the second hand market should be viable.
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This is a useful observation too, at some point itās likely we would go electric with the āother carā which is currently a C-HR self charging hybrid. While we could have a charger installed because we have the space the cable route to the main fuse / supply input would not be straightforward.
Hopefully it will move this way, Iāve seen some encouraging reports recently on battery tech, hopefully they will be commercial and reliable.
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Interesting tesla saying the 20% to 80% figure.
A good friend of mine still has a 2005 Prius bought new, and Toyota are even more conservative on how they treat the battery, apparently recharge from the engine stops at 60%, partly to leave room for regen storage and partly to maximise battery life.
I had a lift in it the other day and while it is now 17 years old and with original drive battery on a mere 60,000 (? I wasnāt paying enough attention) mostly local miles, it still suggests it has 95% of the original capacity. The car is rust-free so he plans to keep it until it needs a new drive battery.
I was impressed.
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No comments (and no it wasnāt me)
All the Toyota Hybridās are based on their experience with the Prius, currently the platform is on its 4th Generation, a good basic explainer is linked.
Must say the C-HR we have is an excellent car and the build/overall quality is of a high standard.
I saw a Facebook article on a brand new electric Alfa. A comment suggested cars were turning into āwhite goodsā. Thank goodness for my Rocketeer MX-5, a car I can drive!!!
Toyota will tell you themselves that the Prius, being pretty much the first car of its type in the world, was massively over engineered to ensure it will last. Subsequent cars are not so āsafety marginā conscious.
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This is a good discussion. Iāve not been a member of this forum for very long, but already itās impressed me as a good deal less āshoutyā than other car forums, and so Iām going to pluck up the courage to raise a couple of points which I havenāt seen discussed very much. I believe these topics will affect us all at some stage on our road to inevitable electric car ownership, and for me personally theyāre the kinds of questions that we should find answers to sooner rather than later. Here goesā¦
Petrol is cheap
It really is. When you take away the tax (more on that later) and consider the effort involved in getting that subterranean dinosaur-juice into your tank, you wonder how they manage to do it at all. The answer: economy of scale. So what happens as we approach the true end goal of using less fossil fuels by switching to electric vehicles? Less demand equals less production, and the price of the product goes up.
This doesnāt bode well for anyone who needs to run a combustion engine because thereās no viable alternative for their particular scenario. Your local plumber could go and buy a shiny new electric van, but guess whatās going to happen to the cost of unblocking your sink? What about the industries where thereās no alternative at all, viable or otherwise? Iāve not seen many electric trawlers or tractors, and I lack the courage to ask a farmer how heāll cope with diesel at Ā£20 per litre ā¦
No doubt the government will try to step in with some kind of rescue package, but thatās not likely to be very effective, because theyāll already be billions out of pocket.
Less tax here = more tax somewhere else
People doing their everyday shopping in the US and Canada are used to seeing a break-down of their purchase on pretty much every receipt; the merchantās total, local tax, federal tax. Can you imagine if petrol stations did that in the UK? Once weād gotten over the in-your-face outrage at how much tax weāre paying just to fill our tanks, one or two of us might ask where that moneyās going to come from when weāre no longer filling our tanks. Will there be āredā electricity thatās taxed differently because itās used for transport? Not sure how thatās gonna work. Obviously weāll have to go back to some form of road tax, but weāve already got expensive road tax now in addition to ridiculous tax on fuel, so whatās that tell us about the future of road tax?
The āBā Word
One of the hottest topics in any EV discussion centres around range and, in turn, battery size, but Iām more interested in the bigger picture. The process of manufacturing batteries is hideously damaging to the environment, and nobody really wants to talk about what happens when theyāre knackered. Or when you have a sizeable accident.
Putting that aside for a moment, thereās another interesting angle thatās not getting a lot of coverage: competition for resources among devices. Pretty much everything nowadays features some kind of rechargeable battery, but if a Prius packs the same as 500 laptops, what happens to the price of laptops? Mobile phones? Getting back to the economy of scale you might hope that increased demand will lead to better prices, but āscaleā isnāt a happy word when you look at pictures of a cobalt mine.
So whatās your point?
Apologies for the long post, and thanks for making it this far. Iām not a conspiracy theorist or automatic nay-sayer, but I am worried that weāre rushing into something without understanding the wider implications. Now more than ever weāre used to getting our ideas and opinions as bundles or packages without examining the individual contents; being in favour of organic food automatically makes you against GMO, being patriotic implies youāre against immigration, etc and so on. Well, Iām 100% for electric vehicles - I think theyāre the right choice for many, many applications - but Iām 100% against their forced adoption through a manufacturing ban on fossil fuelled cars and the eventual vilification of anybody creating a bit of COā.
Who knows, the distinction between EV technology as a consumer choice versus EV technology as mandated transport method might just turn out to be one of the most important talking points of our times.
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Iāve looked a bit more into battery tech since my post above.
It seems in the drive battery the early Prius used NiMH tech, which is cheap, safe (ie unlikely to explode or catch fire) and easily recycled. They will buy back duff ones and re-manufacture them! I think Toyota got it right on this score, except I expect it can be refined still further because potential braking energy is not recovered from all wheels, and the generators-battery-motor electrical systems still have losses.
Now look at the competitorsā many later types, with technology based on Lithium. It has a higher energy storage density (KWh/kg), but is much more poisonous, much more expensive (a limited resource) and highly prone to combustion in temperatures over about 80C!
No battery tech comes anywhere near petrol or diesel for KWh/kg energy density, and with normal system efficiencies in most road vehicles, miles/KWh tends to be inversely proportional to vehicle weight, ie more KWh usually needed to move a heavier vehicle a given distance at a given speed. This suggests really big vehicles (HGV?) will not have a long economic electrical range, partly because theyāll need such big batteries - diminishing returns?
It seems to me the ideal system might be hybrid, maybe like a Prius, but with good KERS from ALL-wheel braking and big enough lossless storage (super capacitor? no chemistry losses, longer life) to get back up to speed again, Then an infernal combustion engine could run on biofuel (as in Brazil) to overcome normal rolling and air friction, and use existing fuel distribution networks, or even produce it locally from domestic and industrial organic waste (if the poisons in it can be sorted).
But then there are the usual vested interests opposed to change of status quo! See in the last paragraph of the Wiki article on NiMHhow Chevron effectively shut down GMās early electric vehicle sales in 2000 after somehow acquiring the GM patents on NiMH tech.
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From personal experience over 25y of dealing with rc models with various powerplants IC and battery chemistry
NiMH suffer from memory effect if they get abused. They donāt really have fast discharge rates and cannot be quickly charged. They still can explode.
Lithium Polymer. A battery with high discharge rates but also a ticking bomb if misused or shorted. Lipo fire canāt be stopped as the oxidizing agent is released with the high temperature and chemistry within the battery. However I donāt think these batteries are used in vehicles.
Lithium Ion, most of the newer stuff use these standardized batteries like the 18650 pack. They have decent discharge rates (not as high as lipo) but are much more stable in comparison. Iām pretty sure automotive industry uses this type of chemistry however the biggest issue is to design the thermal environment for these batteries to work at peak efficiency. It requires temperature and discharge rates control as well as individual isolation of ābad/compromisedā packs.
I still think small electric city cars make sense but either hybrid or hydrogen powered cars is the solution for long term journeys
I found some old mobile phones from years ago yesterday. There was a Blackberry. Given that the box they were in was from moving over 6 years ago and the Blackberry not used for a couple of years before that, so unused for at least 8 years. When I put the battery in it, which was separate, in the box, it powered up and showed of half battery charge.
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Some say that a Nokia 3210 will outlive humansā¦ true fact that
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A neighbour has a new VW ID4 since about January. He came home in the salesmanās Golf today as itās already broken down/faulty. Not happy to say the least.