Transition to Electric Car Endeavours

[TUK020]

Going through the write up above caused me to reflect on Electric car ownership a bit more.

This looks like it will work for me because:
a) I have off road parking with the ability to put in domestic charging
b) multiple cars in the family, so I can switch cars for longer range journeys.
c) this is feasible now, because I have found a reasonable deal on a second hand BEV.

The whole exercise underlines how maintenance + fuel have become a small portion of the total cost which is dominated by the capital cost/depreciation.

Looking on the Nissan website, a new Ariya (higher tier, bigger BEV, 160kW, 63kWh, 300 mile range) is available on a PCP rate of £400/month. This dwarfs the other costs (£5k per year vs £1k5 for my second hand Leaf)

Maybe I am just too tightfisted to spend on new cars.

It also implies that the tipping point for BEVs will be down to charging infrastructure, improved range, and getting price comparable with ICEs. Further progress on all three fronts needed.

[JohnB]

I'm in the 6000 mile a year, buy cars 3 years old and run them into the ground market. I guess spending an extra £1k for a charger on top of a £15k BEV isn't too onerous, but I really don't want to run 2 cars, and watch the depreciation of a BEV used for 2000 miles of local trips and a ICE for 4000 miles of holidays. Getting the first 150 miles of range for near-free is nice for a weekend away, but charging 10 times when on a holiday would be a pain, so range in the secondhand market would be key for me. And of course you don't want to follow an early adopter and keep a 5yo car for 15 more years.

[odysseus2000]

A few have range concerns at first but then seem to forget about this.

Regards,

I have a VW ID3 with the 48kWh battery and have range concerns. The range reduces significantly in winter. My wife drives it in town 95% of the time. She is very happy with it, in the context of how it is used.

The ID3 is two years old and has just been in for its first service and software update. A few observations:

1 The software update was planned for two days and we got a courtesy ID4. I'm not sure how that works for VW as a business model if they give out a car for every 2 day software update.

2 The software update failed. The car had to stay in for an extra day, thats 3 days off the road.

3 The software update was done within warranty but I'm not sure if updates will be done for free after warranty or if VW will be so generous with courtesy cars in the future. Dont see how they will be making money on this.

4 The car was returned to us yesterday and we are getting a message "emergency messaging is inhibited, please return to garage".

5 My VW app no longer communicates with the car and I get a message saying that another user is logged on, probably the VW garage but who knows.

6 VW was initially slated for its software bugs and if this is what customers are going to get at the 2 year software upgrade, then there is going to be another backlash. I dont know what software satisfaction levels are with other manufacturers but it could be another weak link in BEV acceptance.

The ID3 is a lovely car and my wife loves it but this software upgrade hasn't been a good experience so far and it isn't finished yet.

It is not a secret in the industry that the ID3 & other VW on that platform were deliberately under specs to preserve the combustion market. Several VW engineers have admitted this to Munro & associates & their break down showed how the id3 was made to a restricted specification & has numerous performance issues, no over the air software updates & such that make it greatly inferior to Tesla cars, but it is being heavily marketed & sold at similar prices to competing Tesla. All of this culminated in the firing of Deiss since he saw that taking VW into the BEV space was essential in complete contrast to the vw board who still believe in combustion. The gap between vw & Tesla in production times & hence cost is now remarkable negative for VW. Meanwhile the VW board ventured into various derivative & similar operations & fell on their face. All the details are in the VW accounts but it is not much mentioned in the narrative. A neighbour's son has a etron & loves it, but only for short journeys, otherwise he uses a combustion car & has got so use to doing this that he no longer fumes about the range & charging infra structure limitations of his etron.

As things now are most motorists will have to get a BEV as the £12.50 per day charge to enter urban areas is designed to kill combustion, but the problem is that there isn't much supply of BEV, making for some very upset motorists & potentially an election issue if one party says they will scrap the charges. At my local garage there are loads of combustion cars for sale, but there is limited demand, especially for diesel as folk don't want a bargain if that bargain suddenly attracts £12.50 the moment they leave their drive.

Added to all of these complications are two big issues.

Everyone knows the grid needs to be made smart & modernised & equipped with storage but no one wants to pay for it.

Second the San Francisco decision to allow robo taxis is indicative of a coming move to not having a car as it looks to be far cheaper to use robo taxi than own a car. Clearly the San Francisco experiment with geo fenced cars won't work away from the specified areas, but the general solution to robo taxis is moving very fast with the many billion parameter models using Nvdia Tensor processors & full neural net processing is showing strong super impressive advancements.

It is possible that the next uk administration will reverse all of this, but if not the greatest limitation to BEV will be supply & BYD are filling up fields with registered but unsold BEV as China's economy is in trouble. A future administration may decide to fast track BEV from BYD to the UK. If this happens Legacy combustion car makers will have issues.

Regards,

[Tedx]

Well I also taking the plunge next week and transitioning over to an electric toothbrush. It's a big change and what with the huge upfront cost, all the range anxiety and charging faff I fear I may be better off a few year until the technology improves. But hey, you only live once!

[odysseus2000]

Well I also taking the plunge next week and transitioning over to an electric toothbrush. It's a big change and what with the huge upfront cost, all the range anxiety and charging faff I fear I may be better off a few year until the technology improves. But hey, you only live once!

Ha ha! I didn't know they still made manual ones having had an electric toothbrush for longer than I can remember.

Regards,

[funduffer]

Fuel costs:
Switched to Octopus as energy supplier (no hassle), and got the Octopus Go tariff: 30p/kWh standard, and 9p/kWh at cheap rate (00.30-04.30am). The car has a location aware timer. At home, I program it to start charging at 00.30, and run to 07.30. This means that it will charge 70% of the battery at cheap rate, and then top up at higher rate. Assuming that the majority of the time I will not have depleted the battery more than 70%, and will be doing relatively local driving, then my fuel cost will be 83p (4 hrs x 2.3kW x 9p/kWh) to give 112 miles (70% x 160 range) = 1.35p/mile (mild weather, urban driving). Assuming reduced mileage/kWh for bad weather, and higher costs for external charging, and higher costs when I run the battery down below 70%, allow for some increase in teh cheap rate tariff - call it 2p/mile overall?

Conclusion: So far, like it, and think it a success - nice to drive, think it will be very cost effective to run.

Well done TUK, I think you have made a good buy. When you get your 7kW charger, I would have thought you could always charge up in the cheap rate, so your fuel costs will be very low, as you say.

I took the plunge 2 years ago and bought a 64kW Kia Niro, which has a nominal 280 miles of range. In the summer I get over 300 miles if the air con is off, and still around 280 with it on. Cold winter days do hit the range: my stats show that on average I get 3.2 miles per kWh in Dec-Feb and 4.7 miles per kWh in Jun-Aug, so quite a difference! Some of this is due to the fact my winter journeys are usually quite short, whereas my summer journeys are much longer. I do about 8000 miles per year.

I too use a 7kW home charger and the Octopus Go tariff, which is very good, and I rarely have to charge outside the cheap rate.

I do have occasional holidays in SW England (from Yorkshire) and obviously have to use public chargers on these long journeys. I have not had any real problems with this except being blocked from charging by an ICE vehicle in the charging space!

Fortunately, at my age 'bladder anxiety' is more of a problem than 'range anxiety', so I usually stop quite often on long journeys!

On depreciation it will be interesting to see whether BEV or ICE vehicles depreciate most. I got a valuation for my BEV after one year and it was pretty much what I paid for it (brand new price). So, not much depreciation yet. However, if BEV's get cheaper then I would expect second hand values will fall. Maybe ICE vehicles will depreciate quicker as well as they stop being sold - or will that mean their values stay high - who knows?

Good luck

FD

[1nvest]

I'm waiting for when battery packs become standardised and swappable. Pull into a garage/refilling station, swap the low power remaining battery pack for a fully charged one, and off you go again after a similar amount of time as it takes to fill up with petrol. Dropped off a pack with 5kWh remaining, swapped for a 65kWh replacement, pay for the 60kWh difference at 20p/whatever per kWh.

No issues with worn out replacement batteries, all accommodated by the suppliers.

No issues with burnt out cars, where as-is they can reignite again hours later, other than detaching the battery packs and making them safe.

[Arborbridge]

I ordered an ID3 in November 2021 and waited 14 months for delivery. I think that turned out to be a lucky accident because the later cars came with improved software installed whereas others had it retro installed at the dealer with some problems.

My feeling is that VW launched a beta version of the software, so the early buyers became the test population for the improvements incorporated into 3.0. Whatever you think of that as a technique, it is fairly common among software developers to get something off the ground, receive a revenue stream, then use that for improvements.

Anyhow, I have a car which so far has been fine from delivery in March 2023. Early days, but I am enjoying it and have completed a couple of longish trips. The latest was a 1000 miles up from the south coast to Northumbria and back with no "range anxiety" and plenty of available charge points. Mostly, I was lucky with finding unoccupied charge points, and only in one case (AI Peterborough) was it too busy, so I just moved on to a garage a two or three miles further one.

I'm on Octopus Intelligent and most of my motoring is thereby at 2p a mile. Public charging costs are grim (unless you can justify a subscription scheme), with the price per mile similar to my diesel, but even so I have a car which is a superb drive in every way.

No complaints so far!

Arb.

[TUK020]

I'm waiting for when battery packs become standardised and swappable. Pull into a garage/refilling station, swap the low power remaining battery pack for a fully charged one, and off you go again after a similar amount of time as it takes to fill up with petrol. Dropped off a pack with 5kWh remaining, swapped for a 65kWh replacement, pay for the 60kWh difference at 20p/whatever per kWh.

No issues with worn out replacement batteries, all accommodated by the suppliers.

No issues with burnt out cars, where as-is they can reignite again hours later, other than detaching the battery packs and making them safe.

The route to both 'rapid charge rate similar to petrol station stop/refuel" and to "fire safety" is more likely to be via solid state batteries than swappable batteries.
In addition to Toyota, Nissan has publicly declared they will have SS Batteries in 2027.
SS means that no solvent in the battery gunk, which is what gives the flammability, and also limits the charge current.
From memory, the Toyota announcement referred to a 1200 km range car with a 5 minute 80% recharge. Now the infrastructure to do this will be hefty, but probably simpler than a swap out capability

[JohnB]

There have been battery swap stations in China for some time (see https://fullycharged.show/episodes/nio- ... p-station/ from 2020) but they aren't getting traction. You can see why with the elaborate infrastructure and the need for manfacturers to standardise on batteries when its to their competitive advantage not to. Also EVs designed from the ground up use the battery pack as a key structural element, having it replaceable needs a lot more framework. And if it takes 3 minutes to swap a battery, you can get a lot of charge in that time. Basically, it won't happen

[murraypaul]

I'm waiting for when battery packs become standardised and swappable. Pull into a garage/refilling station, swap the low power remaining battery pack for a fully charged one, and off you go again after a similar amount of time as it takes to fill up with petrol. Dropped off a pack with 5kWh remaining, swapped for a 65kWh replacement, pay for the 60kWh difference at 20p/whatever per kWh.

No issues with worn out replacement batteries, all accommodated by the suppliers.

Yup, that is what I am hoping for too.

[Tedx]

They already do a similar thing for moped/scooters in Taiwan. You pay a monthly fee and you become a member of the battery swap scheme - although obviously you can change a battery on a scooter by hand whereas a car would need lifts or whatever.



https://www.voanews.com/a/game-changer- ... 07427.html

[88V8]

They already do a similar thing for moped/scooters in Taiwan. You pay a monthly fee and you become a member of the battery swap scheme - although obviously you can change a battery on a scooter by hand whereas a car would need lifts or whatever.

May become possible for small cars, but larger cars, I doubt it.

On another thread, a poster raised another elephant anent parking... what happens when everyone needs their own charging point.
The feasibility of that is years and years away.

V8

[Arborbridge]

They already do a similar thing for moped/scooters in Taiwan. You pay a monthly fee and you become a member of the battery swap scheme - although obviously you can change a battery on a scooter by hand whereas a car would need lifts or whatever.

In view of the size and weight of car batteries, this isn't going to be feasible - unless battery technology undergoes an order of magnitude advance like computer chips did. By that time, I wonder if other competitor technologies would have come to the fore.

Arb.

[1nvest]

They already do a similar thing for moped/scooters in Taiwan. You pay a monthly fee and you become a member of the battery swap scheme - although obviously you can change a battery on a scooter by hand whereas a car would need lifts or whatever.

In view of the size and weight of car batteries, this isn't going to be feasible - unless battery technology undergoes an order of magnitude advance like computer chips did. By that time, I wonder if other competitor technologies would have come to the fore.

Arb.

A convertible ...



... easily converted to carry large battery packs or a large tank of hydrogen ... whatever.

Electric motor rear wheel drive, hydrogen engine front wheel drive, and it could be a hybrid ("fill up" with either a hydrogen tank or a battery pack)

[88V8]

A convertible .... easily converted to carry large battery packs or a large tank of hydrogen ... whatever.
Electric motor rear wheel drive, hydrogen engine front wheel drive, and it could be a hybrid ("fill up" with either a hydrogen tank or a battery pack)

Good idea... and another option.

V8

[odysseus2000]

I'm waiting for when battery packs become standardised and swappable. Pull into a garage/refilling station, swap the low power remaining battery pack for a fully charged one, and off you go again after a similar amount of time as it takes to fill up with petrol. Dropped off a pack with 5kWh remaining, swapped for a 65kWh replacement, pay for the 60kWh difference at 20p/whatever per kWh.

No issues with worn out replacement batteries, all accommodated by the suppliers.

No issues with burnt out cars, where as-is they can reignite again hours later, other than detaching the battery packs and making them safe.

The problem is practicality.

If you have a swap battery station, it has to have a lot of batteries on site, both charged and charging, which means each site has to be large and has to have a good supply of power. This might work well in a country with a low population and lots of land but not so good in a strongly populated place like the UK.

Secondly if batteries are swappable they can not be incorporated into the structure of a car and that means the car will have to be much stronger, heavier and more expensive.

Regards,

[murraypaul]

If you have a swap battery station, it has to have a lot of batteries on site, both charged and charging, which means each site has to be large and has to have a good supply of power.

Surely the same problems exist for electric charging stations as they are now.

They take massively longer to charge than swapping a battery out would, or filling a petrol car does, so need 10 times as many charging spaces.

And they require the same amount of power, whether they charge the cars on demand, or charge the batteries first. Indeed charging batteries first is much better, as you can do it overnight when demand is lower.

So your arguments are against electric cars, not swappable batteries.

[JohnB]

Nio are one of the leaders in battery swapping in China and were going to launch in the UK this year, now its 2025, and of course you've got to want one of their cars. No other manufacturer has agreed to partner with them, and I can't see any other companies as far advanced.

https://newsletter.autocar.co.uk/car-ne ... pping-2025

[1nvest]

If you have a swap battery station, it has to have a lot of batteries on site, both charged and charging, which means each site has to be large and has to have a good supply of power.

Surely the same problems exist for electric charging stations as they are now.

They take massively longer to charge than swapping a battery out would, or filling a petrol car does, so need 10 times as many charging spaces.

And they require the same amount of power, whether they charge the cars on demand, or charge the batteries first. Indeed charging batteries first is much better, as you can do it overnight when demand is lower.

So your arguments are against electric cars, not swappable batteries.

Centralisation of points with high levels of power is better than distributing that more widely. Similar to water flow, its less expensive to have a central point to/from which individuals travel to collect their own water, than it is to have to upgrade the existing infrastructure to have bigger water pipes providing each and every household with the capacity to draw multiple more amounts of water than what the existing infrastructure supports.

On the one hand you have twice as many batteries being required and the distributed space to store and charge the being charged/charged units (refuelling stations). With standardisation you can stack/rack many within a small land area, that also requires provision of high power cables to that location. On the other hand you have half as many batteries required, but have to distribute the same amount of power much more widely, and being in-built/fixed as/when improvements in technology occurs the whole car/vehicle has to be recycled.

I've no idea of how long the batteries might last, but say 7 years before a expensive replacement becomes necessary, being integral. If instead the battery is easily detachable then there's no cost, other than the cost for refuelling stations to replace those battery units.

If ultimately you have a street of 50 houses each with 2 cars each typically being charged overnight, then current lower rates for nighttime energy will flip to being cheaper daytime energy as the cars are disconnected and travelling around, expensive nighttime at times when many are charging their parked-up car. With centralisation the battery charge times can be adjusted to be more during cheaper energy periods, less during expensive times. Indeed could be tied into energy suppliers controls such that at times of high general demand the combined battery packs at refuelling stations could be called upon to support variations in the general network (feed back into the network).