Advantages:
1. Quiet
2. No emitted pollution
3. Good acceleration & performance

Disadvantages:
1. Limited range (battery technology and weight)
2. Charging time (battery technology)
3. Charging point inconvenience (consider flat dwellers with dedicated charging points and parking spaces. Itinerant visitors charging points)
4. Increased electrical power generation required with added pollution.
5. Danger of explosion during an accident scattering dangerous battery contents - Lithium, etc.

There are about 32 million vehicles on the road in the UK - Statista - if all were replaced by the Nissan Leaf (30kWh), nearly an extra TWh would be required. But people being people we would prefer bigger and more powerful cars leading to greater electricity generation requirements.

Consider, then, if the rest of the world went electric...

See also DUKES pdf

Any other comments?

A number of the cons on the list can be overcome if ownership is taken out of the equation. Self driving cars in a car sharing/hire scenario would mean charging and limited range wouldn't be an issue.

ETA: and self driving cars mean fewer accidents.

I suspect ownership will not be removed from the equation for many, many years and given the number of cars in the world (and car owners), population and structure of the economy, it will not be attainable unless there is a drastic world-wide change in attitude.
Nice idea but a pipe-dream scenario.

There is. Car ownership is hugely down amongst millennials.

Alan B wrote:
Disadvantages:
4. Increased electrical power generation required with added pollution.

Consider though that more and more electricity is being generated by wind/sun/waves. Consider also the power required to manufacture/process and move the fuel to petrol stations around the globe, notwithstanding the power required by the petrol stations themselves.

This is key to the future of car ownership: The intersection of millennials seeing cars as hassles and self driving cars.

An online survey conducted in September for the personal finance website NerdWallet reported that while 75% of millennials who own a car plan to buy another within the next five years, they just don’t seem to be that into it. Some 43% of them called owning a car a hassle.

https://www.google.ca/amp/www.latimes.c ... y,amp.html

There is no necessity to aditional pollution from additional electricity use. Many jurisdictions produce power without fossil fuels including my own.

Charging would mostly occur at night when there is always spare capacity and with enough vehicles in use ....they act a storage facility for renewable power that might otherwise go to waste and as a buffer for the grid.

There was already 1.3 million EV and hybrid vehicles in use by the end of 2015, 2 million by end of 2016 and a steeply rising curve.

Number of electric vehicles in use

In light of increasing worldwide acceptance of electric transmission vehicles, a growing number of automakers are intending to tap into the market for electric vehicles. The world’s best-selling battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles include Nissan’s Leaf and Toyota’s Prius Plug-in Hybrid. California-based Tesla Motors is currently the only carmaker that assembles electric vehicles exclusively.

In 2012, the Netherlands held an eight percent market share of worldwide plug-in vehicle sales, making it the third largest target market for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that year, while Norway is ranked as the largest market for all-electric vehicles. Tesla’s electric Model S outsold the Volkswagen Golf on monthly sales in September 2013, to become the best-selling car in Norway. The growing demand for electric cars in Norway is triggered by the government’s generous incentives including subsidies, exemptions from tolls and free parking. In 2013, the Californian automobile manufacturer announced its plans for expansion across the European Union and other European markets. In July 2014, Tesla and Panasonic paved the way for the construction and operation of the world's largest battery factory in thr United States. In the fourth quarter of 2015, Tesla delivered about 17,400 vehicles worldwide.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/270 ... ince-2009/

Tesla sold just under 80,000 EVs in 2016.

- More than 2 million electric vehicles may be on the world's roads by the end of 2016, writes the Guardian, citing data from the electric vehicle

This will rise to 2020 where the coincidence of retiring ICE vehicles, charging station availability and cost make it a no brainer for urban vehicles.

Shared vehicle use is also strongly on the rise in urban settings ( it's only urban vehicles that need replacing ) to the point that by 2025 there could be 80% fewer private vehicles in use in urban centres.
Copenhagen already demands an 80% of purchase price tax to licence an ICE vehicle.

China will soon ban ICE vehicles in cities as it has done with ICE motorcycles.

I agree urban millenials have no use or liking of cars. EV scooters and motorcycles already sell over 5 million a year and growing.

A downside not listed is replacement of taxes to pay for roads and upkeep ...now streamed by fuel taxes.

It's OK if you have a nice secure garage to charge your vehicle in. If however you park outside, what is to stop your electricity being stolen, the plug being pulled in the night by pranksters/pissheads etc?
Long day trips are out since the recharge time for the return journey are way too long. Run out of petrol somewhere and you can fill up from a can enough to get to a petrol station. Run out of battery and you are fucked if nowhere near a charger.
Most of our petrol costs here are in taxes. Get enough people off petrol and onto electric and the costs will soar to replace that revenue meaning domestic costs go up too.
Plus the hidden eco costs that manufacture of electronic cars causes is still outrageous. It's got some way to go yet before its viable for everyone.

Macdoc wrote:A downside not listed is replacement of taxes to pay for roads and upkeep ...now streamed by fuel taxes.

Well in the UK they're actually being subsidised at present too. The government will contribute £4,500 to any electric vehicle you buy and offer completely free charging points in many places. However, I think they're still prohibitively expensive at the moment. The cheapest is currently £14k after the rebate, but then you have to rent to battery at between £45 and £100 a month. To buy it with the battery included is £19k. But presumably you wouldn't want to do that, because if reports about the Prius were correct, they need replacing every 80k miles. And a car that's done 80k miles and needs a £5k battery replacing is effectively worth nothing second hand. A lot of the costs of electric vehicles will disappear with time, but then as more people adopt them, so will a lot of the benefits. After all, the congestion charge in London is first and foremost about congestion, so once we have a critical mass of people buying supercharged Mercedes that ignore the congestion charge because they're technically a hybrid, they'll no doubt have to pay like everyone else.

I can't help but think that hydrogen is still the long term future. It has the convenience of petrol and the benefit of batteries in that we can effectively choose where to create the emissions rather than having them concentrated in the city centres. But they're even more expensive and impractical at present.

A Prius car battery can be reconditioned for as little as $600 US so that's off the table.

Add up your cost of oil changes, etc that you do not have with electrics plus the fuel costs which are very high in the UK.
A Yaris gets 30 pmg in the city. Thats about 2700 gallons of fuel over the 80k miles. Average London price is $5.80 a US gallon.

That's $15,600 in fuel costs alone let alone maintenance, filter and oil changes.
Cost of electricity over the same distance abour $2640.

Hydrogen is a non- starter....lithium rules for the next forseeable future

monkeyboy wrote:It's OK if you have a nice secure garage to charge your vehicle in. If however you park outside, what is to stop your electricity being stolen, the plug being pulled in the night by pranksters/pissheads etc?
Long day trips are out since the recharge time for the return journey are way too long. Run out of petrol somewhere and you can fill up from a can enough to get to a petrol station. Run out of battery and you are fucked if nowhere near a charger.
Most of our petrol costs here are in taxes. Get enough people off petrol and onto electric and the costs will soar to replace that revenue meaning domestic costs go up too.
Plus the hidden eco costs that manufacture of electronic cars causes is still outrageous. It's got some way to go yet before its viable for everyone.

No need for a garage or a charging station when self driving cars appear on the scene. I drive almost every day, don't have a garage, don't need to go to the mechanic for oil changes, tire rotation, or anything else that might go wrong with the car. Insurance and gas included in the rental. The only real hassle is going to get the car. In the future, the car will come to me.

I can also use my account in any city service by car2go, which means driving in the States or Europe.

https://www.car2go.com/CA/en/

Macdoc wrote:A Prius car battery can be reconditioned for as little as $600 US so that's off the table.

The Prius was an example of the expected lifespan of a lithium battery. The £5k is the price of a new battery for the Renault Zoe, which is the car I was discussing (i.e. the cheapest electric vehicle available in the UK). Like I said, these batteries presumably last longer than that of a first generation Prius, but the fact that the standard deal is to lease the batteries rather than buy them as part of the car suggests that there's still an issue there.

Macdoc wrote:Add up your cost of oil changes, etc that you do not have with electrics plus the fuel costs which are very high in the UK.
A Yaris gets 30 pmg in the city. Thats about 2700 gallons of fuel over the 80k miles. Average London price is $5.80 a US gallon.

Okay, let's do this properly with a source.

Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion Petrol (£14,730) - 7.92p per mile
Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion Diesel (£14,655) - 6.14p per mile
Renault Zoe (£13,995) - 3.57p per mile

So for 80,000 miles, the VW petrol costs £6336 and the diesel costs £4912, and the Renault costs £2856. The average mileage in the UK is 7900 miles a year, so let's round that up to 8000 to make it easier, and it'll take 10 years for you to complete the 80,000 miles. In the Renault in that time, you'll have also racked up between £5400 and £12000 in battery rental costs depending on the battery you choose. And that's with a government subsidy. Surely the existence of the subsidy itself is evidence that they're an expensive option? If they were competitively priced at the moment, people would not need encouragement to buy them.

Although it's worth mentioning that none of the cars above are the best bet for a combined price + fuel deal. That would obviously be any number of cheap petrol cars available for between £6k and £8k, that would immediately wipe out any savings made as a result of buying any electric car available today. The cheapest cars are almost always extremely economical 1 litre models, so are typically using around the same amount of fuel as the VW petrol car mentioned above. And of course there's the ultimate eco-choice: the second hand car.

Macdoc wrote:That's $15,600 in fuel costs alone let alone maintenance, filter and oil changes.
Cost of electricity over the same distance abour $2640.

I think I've shown that that simply isn't the case. And an oil change? What £30 once a year? How about all the tickets you have to buy every time you want to go anywhere out of your car's range? The whole point of the car is that flexibility. If you live in a city, take public transport. What's the point of owning a car that can only take you places that public transport already goes? They'd actually be far more useful in the sort of small town that I grew up in where public transport is infrequent, expensive and doesn't go where you want it to.

Macdoc wrote:Hydrogen is a non- starter....lithium rules for the next forseeable future

Plenty of manufacturers don't think it's a non-starter. Hyundai and Toyota sell hydrogen cars in the UK already, Honda sell them elsewhere, and Mercedes, BMW and Audi are all developing models. Like I said, the infrastructure is not properly in place yet, and it's expensive, but it's the far superior product. But then the far superior product doesn't always win out. The obvious question is whether we'll even bother owning cars in the future and whether anyone will be able to drive. For self driving cars, it really makes no difference what type of fuel it uses.

In California, they will actually give you a lot for buying a hydrogen fuel car. If you want to buy the Toyota Mirai ($57,500), you get $7500 help to buy, plus a $5000 rebate from the state, plus three years of free fuel up to the value of $15,000.

Why ever would you RENT a battery for 10 years ....geez - talk about distorting the picture. EV cars are getting into the 200 + miles range for the Tesla 3

Model 3 achieves 215 miles of range per charge while starting at only 35,000 USD before incentives.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/mode ... in-in-july
and a Prius is a hybrid so you have ZERO range issues.....the trick is getting the correct hybrid with a decent EV only range for your specific situation.

Ford jumped into the fray early with its plug-in hybrids, and the C-MAX Energi has remained one of the most economical options with 19 miles of electric range. EV mode gets drivers traveling at 88 miles per gallon, while hybrid mode means economy of 38 miles per gallon. Between a full charge and a tank of gas, C-MAX drivers can roam about 550 miles before filling up or finding a plug.

I said specifically its ideal for exurb and suburb not urban.

19 miles EV only is a very decent range for many - there is no range anxiety and some of the more expensive hybrids get 72 miles on EV.

Hydrogen is a non-starter ....try figuring out the extraction and storage cost. Until they get a high density low pressure storage medium it's not going to fly .
I've been following the hydrogen economy for decades and it may have role to play as storage for renewables and public transport.
Electricity has a grid ....hydrogen does not,

Macdoc wrote:Why ever would you RENT a battery for 10 years ....geez - talk about distorting the picture. EV cars are getting into the 200 + miles range for the Tesla 3

Model 3 achieves 215 miles of range per charge while starting at only 35,000 USD before incentives.

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/mode ... in-in-july
and a Prius is a hybrid so you have ZERO range issues.....the trick is getting the correct hybrid with a decent EV only range for your specific situation.

Obviously, you wouldn't rent a battery for 10 years, but then you'd be paying £5k to have one fitted as standard, so you're still paying either way. There is a reason why they don't fit it as standard and it's either to fool people into thinking that the car is cheaper than it is, or because they can't be trusted to last the life of the car. I'd rather stick to the price of cars that are actually available, rather than the predicted price of a car that's not gonna be available for another year, which we don't know the quality of. I think a hybrid is an entirely sensible option for someone who's concerned about buying an environmentally friendly car, and it's definitely a good thing to encourage people to buy them if they can afford it (although often a hybrid isn't any better than the top diesels). But my argument is that price is not a good reason to buy one at the moment. Hybrids and electric vehicles are substantially more expensive than the equivalent petrol or diesel models, and we see that when manufacturers make two versions of the same car. The petrol and diesel Volkswagen Up is priced at between £9k and £12.5k. The electric version is nearly £25k (£20.5k after the rebate).

The other issue you have with these vehicles is how do you actually charge them? In North America, it might be okay with everyone having a drive or a garage, but in Europe or Japan, a large number of people (especially in towns and cities) park on the street outside their house. Are they expected to stretch a wire from their house across the pavement to their car and leave it there all night? Assuming of course there is actually a space outside their house. And what about people who live in apartment buildings? I'm sure that some of the more modern ones have charging points, but what about the rest? And who pays for that electricity? And what about when everyone has an electric car and there are only a few charge points in the communal car park? At the moment this isn't an issue, because the only people who buy brand new electric cars are pretty rich, but presumably the aim is to encourage everyone to make the switch eventually?

Electricity has a grid ....hydrogen does not,

You say that like that's a reason why it will succeed. Petrol doesn't have a grid. As far as I can tell, literally every problem with electric vehicles is caused by them necessarily being tied to a grid.

Ah, but petrol/diesel does have an extensive network which I suppose one could call a 'grid' - but not in the same sense as an electric supply grid.

Now, I have seen charging points as part of new parking areas being constructed, but I haven't heard of any new houses or housing estates with built-in charging points (I haven't searched).

Charging is no problem here. Within the city there are plenty of charging points. There is one just across the road from my apartment on the street. It is for two cars. It is activated using an app. You cant pull the plugs out. The next point is just a 150 metres away.
This is a photo of the actual point:

So that red ICE car is preventing an EV from being charged. So, it would be OK if I parked my car by a petrol/diesel pump and walked off to do some shopping...

I'm With Stupid wrote: What's the point of owning a car that can only take you places that public transport already goes?

From where I sit, none.

Scot Dutchy wrote:Charging is no problem here. Within the city there are plenty of charging points. There is one just across the road from my apartment on the street. It is for two cars. It is activated using an app. You cant pull the plugs out. The next point is just a 150 metres away.
This is a photo of the actual point:

This is part of my problem with some of the transport solutions. If you live in a big city, it's usually OK for you. There's public transport available more frequently etc, more likeliehood of charge points being both installed and used. If you live outside of the city limits so to speak, you're treated to second or third rate public transport etc. and then penalised for using your car if you want to drive into the city. It doesn't really affect me too much at the moment because I avoid going into either of my nearby city centres like the plague.

My old address closer towards the city centre, I'd be lucky if I could park within 200m of my house more than 2 days per week. I'd have had to run a charging cable across the pavement to my car from the house, which I assume is cheaper than using a charging point. Just charging it at home would have been nigh on impossible much of the time unless they installed the chargers but then just how many of the cars parked on the road shown could reach one if they wanted to? Every one? It's what's going to be needed if electric is the way forwards.

I like heading off into the countryside though and I don't imagine rural spots will be littered with charging points, there simply isn't the room in many places. We're years into the cable TV era and there's many a place where they haven't provided it yet even if you did want to link in.

The set up is going to have to seriously improve in terms of cost and accessibility before I'm willing to make the jump. I currently need my car, reduces my travel time to work and back to 30 mins each way compared to over 2hrs each way on public transport. The car hire idea is currently way out of my price range and totally impractical for my usage, maybe when I retire and the kids are grown up but for now? No.

My current car (2014 Ford Focus 1.6l diesel) is hitting over 50mpg in general usage and well over 60mpg on a long run, 70 if I really treat her nice. I've made the 700 mile run to my inlaws in France on a single tank a couple of times (usually do fill up again part way just to be on safe side). Same trip would take days in an electric car.

monkeyboy wrote:My old address closer towards the city centre, I'd be lucky if I could park within 200m of my house more than 2 days per week. I'd have had to run a charging cable across the pavement to my car from the house, which I assume is cheaper than using a charging point.

Nah, charging points are free of charge.

Get rid of your diesel quick btw. That's the next one to be targeted after years of telling us to buy them. A lot of European cities have already committed to banning them in the near future.