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My diesel Volvo will easily exceed 650 miles on a tankful.

My Honda Accord's new fangled digital speedo. shows 800 km ( 500 m ) remaining every time I refill the tank. If I, reluctantly, have to spend the day in Auckland I can do the usual 600 km (ish) round trip without the need to refuel, instead of stopping at least 3 times for 30 minute each time ( I've been told by friends ) to avoid 'range anxiety' driving in the city traffic or nearly back home in the dark.

Having recently moved "into town" the weekly Senior Discount Tuesday shopping trip - car needed for return cartage ! - takes 2 kms not the past 25 km, so I haven't been near a petrol station for nearly two months. If I need to buy a new car before I am eventually - I presume - denied a licence renewal on medical grounds ( just renewed for another 2 years ) I will of course consider electric, but changes to range and re-charging facilities, both at home and at large, will have to be made to suit me, including price reductions !

Each to his own, but I guess like Smarphones I will eventually have to give in, if I have enough years left ?

As before: when an electric vehicle will give me 1200kms on one charge, then maybe.

Just off to France in the little 'un.

Safe travels.

PP

The statements here about regularly driving many hundreds of miles without stopping at all make me wonder just how safe such habits are. For a time I used to drive from West Cornwall to South West Scotland in one trip (about 560 miles, took about 10 hours), but even though I was a lot younger then there is no way I could do that without stopping, even if I had a car that with that sort of range.

The BMW 325i I had back then only had a range of around 350 miles, so I needed to stop for fuel anyway, but even if I hadn't I cannot imagine driving for 10 hours without stopping at all.

Not at all sure that it's in anyway safe to do this, and I admire the bladder fortitude of you older blokes that can drive as much as 1200km without the need to stop for a break, but question whether this is really safe practice . . .

I'm not suggesting not stopping, and bladder control is a factor, but I want to stop when " I " want to stop, and for as long as suits me, and not be dictated to by a product of the Digital Age / Climate Change proponents.

A neighbour and I both got new cars in the same week, mine was a GLC Mercedes and his was a Kia Nero plug in hybrid petrol.I think the Nero did thirty odd miles to the plug in. After three months I had put petrol in four times and he hadn't put any in, I can't remember what the mileage was but it was similar to both cars.

ExSp33db1rd wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:34 am

I'm not suggesting not stopping, and bladder control is a factor, but I want to stop when " I " want to stop, and for as long as suits me, and not be dictated to by a product of the Digital Age / Climate Change proponents.

I don't understand this at all, I'm afraid. My car doesn't dictate when I stop, I do (or more often my wife, TBH). If I've got to stop for a rest break anyway then I may as well just plug the car in whilst stopped, it only takes a few seconds and that way the car is topping up whilst I'm "emptying" (or refuelling). I get back to the car after a ten or fifteen minute rest break and it's topped up and ready to drive another two or three hundred miles.

This is in contrast to a petrol or diesel car where I have to stop and fill the thing when it needs fuel, which may not be when I need a break. I can't take a break and refuel a petrol or diesel car at the same time, as I need to be stood by the thing whilst fuelling.

My longest trip is the 576 miles from near Aberdeen to near Newton Abbot with a B&B overnight near Preston. My stops enroute are driven by bladder anxiety rather than any unlikely range anxiety of an electric car. Using a 350kW charger, by the time I've relieved myself, had a coffee and a snack, the car will be ready to go again. Even though I'm with Octopus for my domestic electricity a spreadsheet tells me I don't do enough miles a year to justify going onto their tariff which gives four hours of overnight cheap electricity to charge the car(7.5p per kWh) as you pay more for the other 20 hours than a standard tariff. A full charge from empty for my EV6 at my standard electricity tariff rates using my 7kw charger in the garage costs £20.56. If I still had my Audi A6 a full tank would cost £143.81......yes, the Audi can do twice the distance on a tank but who would want to drive 550 miles to empty in one go?

Ditto wot Veep said.

I plan my long distance journeys in a similar way to planning a cross country flight. Fuel is always a factor, but not the major one, usually.

Electric cars, not only Tesla, have a gizmo on the dashboard which gives pretty good planning guidelines for where to stop. As ever, PIC is in charge, no pun intended.

1,200km non-stop is simply bonkers. Nobody has that much bladder control. DVT is also a consideration, so getting out of the car and having a wee walk is a good idea every two or three hours anyway. Not having to spend five minutes clutching a refueling nozzle while the blood puddles in the veins of your lower limbs is an added advantage.

The cost point is a good one. I charged my car entirely from self-generated solar power from the end of March until one night last week, when the cloudy weather meant I needed to spend about £5.50 charging the car overnight at the cheap rate. Since the end of March I've driven around 2,800 miles at a cost for "fuel" of less than 0.2p/mile. I fully expect the running cost to be much the same until around the end of September, when the solar generation tends to drop and I'll have to revert to overnight charging again. Even so, if my "fuel" cost for a whole year exceeds about 2.5p/mile I shall be surprised. My last petrol car would cost around 15p/mile to run at today's fuel prices, so I'm making a very significant saving in running cost (helps to offset the higher cost of the EV).

Please don't poke the poor people in the eye with such a sharp stick.

They don't like it up 'em ye know, Cap'n Mainwaring Veep.

Plum, you been skipping your medication? Nobody is suggesting driving 1200kms non stop!

So where did the 1,200km range thing come from?

Do English ladies' fitbaa' baa's have such a capacity?

See C16's post above.

He spent a lot of his working life carrying trusting people above cold and undrinkable water.

When he speaks of workable range, he knows of what he speaks.

For me, with my diesel car, the extended range means that I can avoid expensive filling stations on the southern highways and return to my preferred discount store to replenish my tank.

I don't know whether there is variance in the price charged to charge EVs.

What to do when your Tesla runs out of juice:-

G-CPTN wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 03, 2022 1:15 pm

For me, with my diesel car, the extended range means that I can avoid expensive filling stations on the southern highways and return to my preferred discount store to replenish my tank.

I don't know whether there is variance in the price charged to charge EVs.

The point is really that the price at chargers isn't that significant, as most charging for most EV drivers never takes place on route somewhere. I can count on my fingers the total number of times I've stopped on route somewhere to charge, and that's in several years of EV ownership. Almost all my charging is either at home or is overnight wherever we happen to be staying. Sure there is a problem to be solved for the ~20% of UK homes that don't have off-road parking, but that is being solved. A friend and his wife have just moved into a new retirement apartment and all the parking spaces have charge points, for example.

If you rarely need to ever stop on route somewhere to charge the price per kWh isn't that big a deal, as a part of the whole year's charging cost. I've stayed at hotels where charging is free, one where they charged a fixed fee of £5 per charge and at the moment all superchargers charge the same price, 28p/kWh, or around 7.5p/mile. Charging an EV needs a totally different mindset to filling a conventional car with fuel. It's cheaper and very much easier and more convenient to charge overnight, whether that be at home, at a charge point in a parking bay or at a destination, like a hotel or holiday accommodation.

Having a car that is always charged and ready to drive 250 to 300 miles available every morning is a significant benefit. For example, right now my car is fully charged so if, heaven forbid, we had a call meaning we'd need to rush down to see an ageing relative 120 miles away I know I could just get in the car and go and not have to bother to think about charging, either on the way down or the way home. On holiday this overnight charging thing is just magic. Everyday you get up knowing that the car is full with no need to think about having to refuel on days out, or for the drive home.

We appear to have 3 members who are rich enough to afford a EV.Could they not set up a new section whereby they pat each other on a daily basis and save boring the tits off the rest of us.

How many people at our age really care how much we spend on fuel?

I don't get the "rich enough to afford an EV" bit at all, as the running cost saving more than offsets the higher cost of the cars, which is why so many people are getting them. Waiting lists are now up to around a year for some models and virtually no EV can be bought off-the-shelf from stock, most have a wait of several months before delivery. The reason for that is that the demand is sky high at the moment, as more and more people are doing the sums and realising that they are better off with an EV.

Admittedly this is driven largely by the majority that now lease cars, rather than buy them outright, as the combination of rock-solid residual prices plus very low running costs makes the PCP price for a high spec EV very competitive when compared to even a much lower spec conventional car.

For someone like me, driving the UK average of around 8,000 miles a year, the fuel running cost saving alone amounts to about £1,000/year. Then there is the free road tax, which saves another chunk of cash every year, plus free parking for EVs that's all over the place now, plus exemption from congestion charging that saves another few hundred pounds a year. Chuck in the fact that my car has depreciated by about £6,000 in nearly three years and it really was a complete no-brainer to buy it. How many new cars can you buy today that cost you next to bugger all to own for the first three years of their life?