Featured Electric

I bought a used Zero FX 5 years ago that I ride about 20 miles a day on average. So far, the only maintenance necessary has been checking the tire pressure. No oil to change or winterizing/bad gas worries and always ready to go. Electricity is included in our rent so it's only cost me what I pay for insurance which is about $60 annually. It has an onboard charger that plugs into a standard 120V receptacle so it's not too difficult finding somewhere to get a little extra juice if needed. I'm not a big fan of larger EV bikes or non-hybrid cars mainly for that reason.

 

As far as I know there's only one Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, and she didn't speak at PMQs this week. Who are you referring to?

 

I expect people said the same thing when we moved from horses to horse-less carriages.

 

Actually, I expect they didn’t given that they chose to move to horse-less carriages because they were better than what they already had (horses).

It’s a bit different today given that we’re being offered something worse than what we already have and being forced to adopt it by government. New tech should sell itself - we want it because it’s better.

 

I expect it will be better in the end. We still have choices for now, anyway.

 

Indeed. They still have eight years (13 for bikes) to make it better. Right now though it’s considerably worse and even the environmental benefit of switching right now is dubious to say the least.

 

There are worse polluters than cars and bikes that need sorting out, like shipping and aircraft. Not to mention heavy industrial processes and fossil-fuel power stations. I know some people think it's all nonsense but to them I say...

 

Depending on where you live, and how electricity is generated in your part of the world, an electric vehicle may well be a worse pollluter than a petrol/diesel one. The reason being that the manufacture of electric vehicles produces considerably more CO2 than the manufacture of ICE vehicles and you probably have to drive it 100k+ kilometres to recover the difference.

whether electric is currently more environmentally friendly than petrol is very debatable. Hopefully in ten years time battery and manufacturing technology will have progressed to the point that they will make a worthwhile difference.

 

I posted a link to some research on this done by Stanford Uni earlier in the thread.

https://www.thetriumphforum.com/threads/electric.30604/#post-564636

 

I'll echo that.

"The new research from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen - in The Netherlands - and Cambridge shows that in 95% of the world, driving an electric car is better for the climate than a petrol car."

How much better will obviously depend on the energy mix:

"The researchers say average “lifetime“ emissions from electric cars are up to 70% lower than petrol cars in countries like Sweden and France (where most electricity comes from renewables and nuclear), and around 30% lower in the UK."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51977625.amp

 

I wonder if their research includes the manufacture and recycling of replacement battery packs, and indeed the recycling of the original battery packs.

I get the feeling that so much lithium in use/none use/recycling is going to have nasty sting in its tail.

 

Replacement batteries are not likely to be needed. If you bought a very early Nissan Leaf back in 2011 then you might benefit from an upgraded pack by now but any current model EVs will have fallen apart before the battery needs replacing as they use much better technology. A good use for old battery packs (from crashed/scrapped cars say) is home energy storage, which is likely to start gaining ground soon as we approach the end of gas boiler sales. Solar panels on the roof providing day time power to your home and charging one or more battery packs, which will take over once it gets dark. This tech exists now - Tesla sells a battery wall system which integrates to your home and your EV charger. With enough panels/batteries you could end up drawing very little from the grid.

 

I'd just finished reading this article https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ive-learned-from-my-year-with-an-electric-car and thought of this thread. It seems a more realistic view of the world of electric cars in the uk, rather than those who see it as a nirvana. Can be done but has issues, can only imagine what it would be like with a 100 mile range on a motorbike. Still seems like you can make a lot of friends standing around charging points.....

 

Some might argue that if you bought a Nissan Leaf you don't need to worry about the future, your life is already over.

 

That has left me NOT full of enthusiasm.

 

It’s an interesting debate.

We have (sorry had) three cars, one for me, one for Mrs fig, and one for the in-laws (who live two doors away).

Once COVID arrived we sold the in-laws car as they weren’t going anywhere for a long time, but as the world seemed to be opening up in March I decided on a whim to replace it with a Tesla Model 3 as an experiment: father-in-law would mostly be driving it, but would we/they be able to cope with an electric car?

Suffice it say that within a month we had sold my car (a BMW 5 series) as we were never using it. At every possible opportunity we were “borrowing” the Tesla, because it was incredibly fast - faster than a 911 - very comfortable, has a brilliant (Google Maps) SatNav, and we could charge it overnight at home for the equivalent of c£5 a tank.

It doesn’t have the same range as most petrol cars, maybe 260 miles or so, but after 12,000 miles we haven’t visited a petrol station in the last 10 months, and have had TWO journeys where we needed to stop at a Tesla Supercharger (for a combined thirty minutes) to top-up enough to get home, on each occasion taking advantage of the stop to have a coffee and a pee. Of course it would have been nice not to have needed to do so, but with a petrol car we would have spent much more than 30 minutes at petrol stations over the course of 12,000 miles.

And as for usability, at a Tesla Supercharger it does recharge at between 300 and 500 miles-of-range-per-hour, which is pretty amazing. In the real world - as we know from our bikes - there are incredibly few occasions when we would want to do more than 260 miles in a day, and even fewer when we would not want to stop after 2 - or maybe 3 at a pinch - hours to stretch our legs and relieve bladders.

Mrs fig drives a (very old) Boxster btw, which she loves. But suffice it to say that since the Tesla arrived she has hardly touched it. The Tesla is just so easy to use and such a pleasure to do so. Why is that…?

- incredible torque and acceleration
- phone is the key, just approach the car and it unlocks
- simple to use
- best SatNav going
- no RFL
- no servicing needed
- comfortable
- high tech
- leave home every morning fully charged
- cheap to run
- warm up (defrost and heat internally) the car from the comfort of the lounge/kitchen/bedroom on cold mornings
- every seat heated
- steering wheel heated
- track location and speed on your phone
- fabulous charger network

Yes there are downsides, but they are (honestly) minimal. So much so that we are torn now about what to do about replacing Mrs fig’s Boxster. Because it isn’t really being used at all. Buy a new ICE car? Or keep it for posterity with a dust cover. Because apart from risk management (i.e. in case at some point the electricity supply fails) an ICE is unlikely to be used other than in an emergency where we cannot recharge the battery.

In the meantime of course the Tiger is petrol and I don’t have a problem with using it, but I can’t see myself buying another ICE car because, tbh, the electric cars are simply better.

 

Not sure I'll be able to afford electric for some time to come. I'll look around for a decent second hand diesel estate to see me out I reckon. As long as the fuel is available I'll stick with a smoker, I'm afraid.

 

Looked into an electric car recently.
Most can't tow (which I need), are very highly priced if you want anything decent and of course there's the range/charging time/charging point issues currently when doing any longer distances.
The Guardian is about the first article I've seen that seems to be more realistic and also answers one of my questions about taking the car through France.
I came to the conclusion I'll keep my current car for normal use for now but at some point might get something cheap like a second-hand Nissan Leaf for local journeys just to get an idea as to whether I'd get on with one as a main car if they ever sort them out (and the infrastructure) before something like hydrogen cars are developed.