Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#121 Post by VP959 » Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:49 am

ribrash wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:57 am
G-CPTN wrote:
Sat Jun 04, 2022 11:51 pm
I guess that distances between settlements in Oz are greater and chargepoints are sparse and further apart.
Could be the Ozzie people are not being taken in by all this green crap and refuse to pay the outrageous prices for something that won't get them to the end of the street.
We did the North Coast 500 last year: https://www.northcoast500.com/
North Coast 500.jpg
Absolutely no problems at all in driving ~560 miles from here to get to the starting point, or in driving the over 500 miles around the route. Not sure where this myth persists that EVs have little range, given that the average range for EVs sold here in the UK is around 257 miles, and there are lots of models now that have a range of well over 300 miles. Even my neighbour's little electric hatchback does around 240 miles apparently.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#122 Post by PHXPhlyer » Wed Jun 08, 2022 6:20 pm

An electric car finally makes financial sense

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/08/business ... index.html

Gas prices that keep going up by the day have got a lot of people thinking about buying an electric vehicle. There is no question that electric vehicles cost much, much less to fuel than gasoline-powered models, especially with gas prices at around almost $5 a gallon on average, according to AAA.

It almost never makes sense to buy a new car just to save money on fuel, however. New cars tend to cost more money than you would save on fuel, but if you’re already in the market for a new car, an electric vehicles could be an excellent option.

“Most of our analysis has shown that, from a financial perspective, if you’re buying a new vehicle, it makes a lot of sense for most people to at least strongly consider an electric vehicle if it fits their lifestyle,” said Chris Harto, a senior policy analyst for Consumer Reports.

For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates it will cost around $2,900 a year for the average American to fuel a 2022 BMW 430i sedan. (The base model 4-series sedan gets 28 miles per gallon in combined city and highway driving, and it uses Premium fuel, which the EPA calculates at a national average of about $5.39 a gallon.) The estimated cost to fuel a 2022 BMW i4 eDrive40, which is basically the same car but powered entirely by electricity, is about $600 for a year. That’s one fifth the cost.

A difference that large assumes gas prices stay as high as they currently are, which we can’t really know. (On other hand, we can’t really assume they won’t either.) These costs also assume a certain rate for electricity, and electricity costs – while generally much lower per mile than gasoline – vary a lot from place to place, and even by time of day. Many electric cars, once they’ve been plugged in, can be set to begin charging only when electricity rates are at their lowest, a bit like if you only fueled up your gasoline car when prices at the pump were at their lowest.

Gas prices and electricity prices both fluctuate, of course, and vary from place to place, but, generally speaking, electric cars are vastly cheaper than gas cars on a cents-per-mile basis. That’s partly due to the fact that electric motors are much more efficient than gasoline engines. More than 85% of the energy that goes through an electric motor is converted into movement. For a a gasoline engine, that figure is around 40%. So even if the electricity and fuel costs were completely equal, an electric car should, in theory, be cheaper to own than a gasoline car.

The electric BMW i4 has a sticker price about $10,000 higher than gas-powered base model BMW 4-series sedan. But federal and state tax incentives can significantly lower the actual cost plus it costs an estimated than $2,300 less each year to fuel.

But, of course, you don’t generally get a huge discount on fuel costs for nothing. The i4 costs about $10,000 more than the base model BMW 4-series with a gas engine, but the electric BMW i4 is also eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit, reducing the ultimate price difference to just $2,500. And that’s not considering state tax rebates or other incentives electric cars may be eligible for. In some states, with federal and state incentives combined, the electric car could even cost less than the gas-powered one, based on sticker price. Not all electric cars are eligible for those federal tax credits, though. Cars from Tesla and General Motors, for instance, are no longer eligible.

So even with the federal tax incentive alone, going with the electric BMW over the gasoline BMW, you would make up the basic purchase price difference in a little over a year.

Electric cars do tend to cost more than gasoline cars mostly because of high battery costs. That’s one reason there are so many more electric vehicle options among luxury brands. There are also mainstream brand options such as the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5. The Chevrolet Bolt EV is also back on the market now, following a massive battery recall, and with a new lower price. Toyota also recently came out with its own EV, the BZ4X, that’s similar to Subaru’s new EV SUV, the Solterra. Even these mainstream models tend to cost somewhat more, in terms of sticker price, than their gas-powered siblings.

Keep in mind that auto dealers also aren’t required to charge the sticker price. In the past, customers were usually able to negotiate prices down but, with cars in short supply due to parts shortages, dealers are often charging more. That’s especially true for electric vehicles, said Ivan Drury, an industry analyst with Edmunds.com. It might not be enough to entirely wipe out fuel savings but the upcharges can eat into the potential savings.

Dealers are charging, on average, $2,700 over the sticker price for Hyundai’s electric Ioniq5 and $3,100 more for the electric Kia EV6, for example. Mustang Mach-E electric SUVs are going for almost $1,900 over MSRP, according to data from Edmunds.com.

While lots of cars these days are going for over sticker price, electric cars are being marked up, on average, twice as much as gas-powered ones, according to Edmunds.com. While internal combustion-powered cars are selling for, on average, 1.4% above MSRP, electric vehicles are getting marked up an average of 3.4%

Insurance rates are similar between electric and gas-powered cars, according to various experts. Electric can cars cost more to insure only to the extent that they’re generally more expensive cars to begin with.

Electric cars can cost less to maintain, though, according to Consumer Reports, which based its finding on extrapolations from owner survey data. Since they have far fewer moving parts that wear and require lubrication, electric cars can cost about half as much to maintain as internal combustion-powered cars, Harto said.

Another thing to keep in mind is that It rarely makes financial sense to purchase an electric car if you aren’t able to charge at home, or someplace else, at standard electricity rates. Public chargers are fine for occasional use when you aren’t able to charge at home, such as on long road trips. Still, even at current high gas prices, charging at a public charger can cost much less than buying gasoline, said Aaron Bragman, Detroit bureau chief for the website Cars.com. It usually costs about $20 to $30 to recharge the battery compared to the more than $60 it often costs to fill up with gasoline.

Many carmakers offer some amount of free public charging for a couple of years after buying one of their electric cars, though. Also, some public charging providers, like Electrify America, offer discount plans for regular users that can cut the cost more, said Bragman.

The question of eventual resale value remains unsettled. While Teslas retain their value very well, other electric cars with comparable battery range haven’t been on the market long enough to know if they’ll perform similarly in the used car market, various experts said.

PP

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#123 Post by VP959 » Thu Jun 09, 2022 12:55 pm

Just back from a short break, driven around ~700 miles over the past four days. Didn't once stop on route to charge anywhere, no need to, charged overnight at home before setting out, then charged overnight (twice) at the hotel we stayed at. Total cost of charging for the ~700 mile trip came to about £25. Not bad, given that the news on the radio whilst driving home a short time ago was that it now cost £100 to fill up an average saloon car.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#124 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Thu Jun 09, 2022 6:36 pm

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#125 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Fri Jun 10, 2022 4:48 pm

Investigations into Tesla cars are set to go deeper and could lead to a recall after more than a dozen of the vehicles crashed while on Autopilot.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an agency of the US federal government, began carrying out a probe in August last year into the electric vehicle company co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk. But the agency has now upgraded their investigation to an "engineering analysis", after which they will determine whether there should be a recall, The Guardian reports .

The investigation focuses on Tesla’s Autopilot feature which enables cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically with the help of artificial intelligence. While the features aim to give drivers less work to do at the wheel, the Tesla website insists that they “are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment”.

16 Tesla vehicles were found to have crashed between January 2018 and January 2022, resulting in 15 injuries and one death. The NHTSA said forensic data had indicated that the drivers had their hands on the steering wheel as advised when the majority of these accidents took place, in which the cars had struck stationary emergency and road maintenance vehicles.

The investigation is covering all four Tesla models, Y, X, S and 3 - more than 800,000 of the cars have been sold in the US. The agency said they are looking into how the Tesla systems “may exacerbate human factors or behavioural safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision”.

The NHTSA said that in around half of the reported Autopilot crash cases they had reviewed, there was an indication that “the driver was insufficiently responsive to the needs of the dynamic driving task”, Reuters reports . The agency also shared that their analysis found Tesla’s Automatic Emergency Braking feature only intervened in approximately half of the crashes.

This isn’t the only ongoing investigation into Tesla - the NHTSA is also looking into complaints about the vehicles braking suddenly, also called “phantom braking”, when driving at high speed. Although the agency has received more than 750 complaints about the issue, there have been no related crashes reported.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/reg ... b246072dc6
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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#126 Post by OFSO » Fri Jun 10, 2022 5:57 pm

What a joke. They are investigating, in all seriousness, a vehicle which either negates or reduces the driver's need to steer. Or brake.

Idiots.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#127 Post by llondel » Fri Jun 10, 2022 7:46 pm

ribrash wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:57 am
G-CPTN wrote:
Sat Jun 04, 2022 11:51 pm
I guess that distances between settlements in Oz are greater and chargepoints are sparse and further apart.
Could be the Ozzie people are not being taken in by all this green crap and refuse to pay the outrageous prices for something that won't get them to the end of the street.
Clearly their streets are too long.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#128 Post by bob2s » Fri Jun 10, 2022 11:23 pm

This is one of our longest streets,but at least you can play golf as you transit from one end to the other.
https://www.australia.com/en/trips-and- ... arbor.html

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#129 Post by Hydromet » Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:24 am

bob2s wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 11:23 pm
This is one of our longest streets,but at least you can play golf as you transit from one end to the other.
https://www.australia.com/en/trips-and- ... arbor.html
A bloke I worked with in southern NSW was courting a girl in Perth. Every so often he would visit her for a few days. He'd load up his old MG T series with cans of fuel all around him (petrol on the Nullarbor is expensive) and drive across on minimum sleep. He'd have a few days there, then drive back. Must have worked as they married and she joined him in NSW.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#130 Post by OFSO » Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:44 am

Filled the Mondeo estate tank today with diesel, €82 or £70, which will take me over 1100 kms or 690 miles. 12p a mile or under 3p a mile per seat, mostly urban driving. Not that I ever have all five seats occupied. At a guess 2/3 only me and 1/3 me plus wife. Let's say 9p per occupant mile.

Electricity price today is €28.74 per 100Kw/hr.
So I'd pay around €50 for an overnight charge to take me the distance I quote above, except it wouldn't because of the relatively small size of battery compared with a tank of diesel. Always assuming the power didn't go off (this is Spain). So two, maybe three, overnight charges necessary. As opposed to a monthly trip to the filling station.

Incidently my fixed tarif monthly electricity bill is €177, running most heavy consumers between midnight and eight am. or at w/end. Will be around €250 top-up on that, once a year.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#131 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:06 pm

Recently returned from a road trip through Northern Europe and Scandinavia, the first in three years. Most conspicuous was the enormous increase in the number of public charging stations. They greatly outnumber petrol stations nowadays.

In Norway they've opened up the Supercharger network to all EVs. I have mixed feelings about that. As a early adopter I have unlimited free access to Superchargers anywhere in the world for the lifetime of my ownership of the car. I think I'd be a bit pissed off if I were to find a Supercharger station full of non-Tesla EVs, but that hasn't yet started to happen. Tesla seems to be ploughing the revenue from non-Tesla EVs back into building more Supercharger stations, so I guess it's actually a good thing.

One problem which they don't appear to have addressed is that although all four models of Tesla have the charging socket on the left rear of the car, non-Teslas are all over the place. Some have it in the middle of the front. Some on the left front, some on the right front some on the left rear and some on the right rear. This means that non-Teslas tend to park in such a way as to straddle two bays. I can't think of any easy solution to the problem. The modern Superchargers that they have in Norway are all the very high powered type. 150kW or more. That means a lot of heat buildup in the cables. Thus they cannot easily be made longer as the heat management is specifically designed for that length of cable. Also, the cable length is tailored to the U-shaped stowage. I guess they may have to widen the spacing between chargers. That would be a huge capex to solve a relatively minor problem.

Something which took me by surprise is that EVs no longer have automatic free access to all bus/taxi lanes in Norwegian cities. Nowadays, some lanes are accessible and some are not. There's a geometrical symbol which indicates whether it is permissible, but you have know what the symbol means. I was pure dead lucky not to be fined for breaking the rules on those lanes before I discovered the new rules. Driving around the edge of Oslo to visit friends in Holmenkollen, I'd given them access to the Google Earth mapped real-time tracking app in case I needed guidance on the clever way to get there. My hosts phoned me to ask whether I knew about the new rules as they had spotted that I was in a buss-taxi lane which no longer allows EVs.

I don't know why we don't give EVs free access to bus lanes in British cities. It would greatly relieve congestion in some places such as the Northern approach to Edinburgh where the bus lane is totally empty for two or three miles while there's a slow moving traffic jam in the other two lanes.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#132 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:13 pm

TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 4:48 pm
Investigations into Tesla cars are set to go deeper and could lead to a recall after more than a dozen of the vehicles crashed while on Autopilot.
Of course aeroplanes never crash when on autopilot, do they?

Blame the autopilot, not the pilot.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#133 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:23 pm

Undried Plum wrote:
Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:13 pm
TheGreenGoblin wrote:
Fri Jun 10, 2022 4:48 pm
Investigations into Tesla cars are set to go deeper and could lead to a recall after more than a dozen of the vehicles crashed while on Autopilot.
Of course aeroplanes never crash when on autopilot, do they?

Blame the autopilot, not the pilot.
I think that the only reason that the current generation of automotive autopilots appear to work is that the majority of the vehicles on our roads are still driven by fallible, but flexible wetware, namely humans with brains! That is not to say that in the future all vehicles couldn't be controlled by autopilot, but this would require everybody to use a standard proven system. We are nowhere near that whatever Tesla (or other automotive company) hype would have us believe.
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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#134 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 1:45 pm

OFSO wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 2:11 pm
Interestingly enough, in sixty years of driving petrol and diesel cars, I've never been unable to open the fuel filler cap, and never, when returning to the car after a few days, found less in the tank than when I left it.

Lucky old you!

When the price of petrol reached the giddy height of a Pound a gallon (yes, a gallon) some thieving scrote nicked ten gallons of 4Star out of the Stbd tank of my XJ6. I presume he only had two 5 gallon cannisters with him because the Port 12 gallon tank was untouched.

I've never had that sort of thing happen with my Tesla. I guess the technical problems of pinching power out of a 380v battpack are just too much for the average pikey these days.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#135 Post by VP959 » Sat Jun 11, 2022 2:59 pm

OFSO wrote:
Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:44 am
Filled the Mondeo estate tank today with diesel, €82 or £70, which will take me over 1100 kms or 690 miles. 12p a mile or under 3p a mile per seat, mostly urban driving. Not that I ever have all five seats occupied. At a guess 2/3 only me and 1/3 me plus wife. Let's say 9p per occupant mile.

Electricity price today is €28.74 per 100Kw/hr.
So I'd pay around €50 for an overnight charge to take me the distance I quote above, except it wouldn't because of the relatively small size of battery compared with a tank of diesel. Always assuming the power didn't go off (this is Spain). So two, maybe three, overnight charges necessary. As opposed to a monthly trip to the filling station.

Incidently my fixed tarif monthly electricity bill is €177, running most heavy consumers between midnight and eight am. or at w/end. Will be around €250 top-up on that, once a year.

Not sure where the €50 overnight charging price is coming from, TBH. That implies a battery capacity of around 174kWh. I'm pretty sure the largest EV battery around at the moment is about 100kWh, and the battery in mine is around 75kWh, so at your rate a full overnight charge for my car would cost about €21.55.

Overnight rate here at the moment is about 18p/kWh, so a bit cheaper than your ~24.4p/kWh rate. The battery in the car is around 75kWh, does around 320 miles or so on that. A full overnight charge from 0% charge to 100% would cost:- 75 x £0.18 = £13.50 which works out at about 4.2p/mile.

The last petrol engined car we had did around 45mpg to 50mpg. Petrol here is currently about £1.80/litre (where we are - it's getting close to £2.00/litre in places). At £1.80/litre the running cost is between 16.4p/mile and 18.2p/mile, so around four times the cost of running an electric car.

A diesel might be slightly cheaper, although diesel here is generally around 10p or so more expensive than petrol, so the slight gain in mpg might be offset by the extra cost.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#136 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 3:11 pm

Veep has got the numbers nailed.

I presume that's 'cos he knows what he's talking about.

Leccie cars really are much cheaper to operate, even before you take into account the delight factor of being freed from the pistonbanger awfulness of 18th century pistonslapping technology.

Living with an EV is not at all "silly". It's the opposite.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#137 Post by OFSO » Sat Jun 11, 2022 4:27 pm

Thanks for the calculations, VP. Almost no electric cars on the roads here. Of new cars, biggest selling model is the Dacia Duster, on my daily drive I see perhaps two out of every ten cars*, plus the town halls, forestry authorities, various fleets all run them. .

*Not counting the Porsches, Maseratis, Lambos, Ferraris, Range Rovers, Jaguars, all on French plates.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#138 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 5:09 pm

Ouaqueures, the lot of 'em.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#139 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Sat Jun 11, 2022 6:06 pm

Given the big disparity between the price of petrol and charging an electric car (in favour of the electric option) in Europe and even here in the UK, at the moment, I wonder if the market for electric cars will now reach a certain critical mass that might allow the electric automobile industry to make the next big step up in its evolution?

Of course our electricity generation capacity, and the grid, here in the UK would be hard pressed to match any large increase in demand, but that is another issue!
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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#140 Post by Undried Plum » Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:18 pm

There is plenty of capacity in the UK grid. Most sensible people charge their cars during the off-peak hours when there's lots of spare capacity anyway.

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