UK switching to electric vehicles discussion

[jon0844]

Myself and a load of Tesla owners went to the Elveden Tesla charger and although the power was on, none of the chargers were working. The app didn't say they were offline for whatever reason and we all had to drive, convoy-like, to the next nearest Tesla location.

So Tesla superchargers do fail sometimes!

 

[birchesgreen]

I tend to find the Tesla haters have never driven one, or lived with one.

Yeah i'll forgive Elon all the harm he has done if his car is awesome.

 

[meld3]

Yeah i'll forgive Elon all the harm he has done if his car is awesome.

Well his cars are bloody awesome, and after 40 years/1m miles/70 cars, its by far and away the best I've had in so many ways, and most of mine have been New, German, and usually with a 6-cyl diesel or performance Petrol engine, so I'm not comparing it to a clapped out Corsa/Fiesta.

Also, its not HIS car - he merely bought into a failing company and hired clever people to design/develop/build the cars, same as he didn't make a Spaceship or design X.

He only owns 13-20% of Tesla depending on your source, so its hardly HIS company either. Vanguard / BlackRock / State Street own more than him and your pension is probably propped up with a good bunch too.


I've said before, wife has an Ioniq5, one of the very best rivals, yet its so far behind in every aspect its quite embarrassing, and it never improves itself or add functions overnight like the Tez does....

 

[Noddy]

By not buying a Tesla you would be punishing Musk. But only in so far as his holding in Tesla is around 20% - what about the other shareholders that have not put their foot in it so to speak ?.

They have put their foot it in, not only by not voting him out as CEO but by approving his ludicrous pay deals-the last one being worth $1 trillion dollars.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Sunday at 14:19 ==

I find people are fairly selective about which particular aspect of a manufacturer they dislike. The people I speak to at work moan about Elon "being a nazi". I'm not sure anyone believes that.

They seem to have forgotten the role German manufacturers played in WWII, and of course the disgraceful Diesel-gate scandal that VW found itself embroiled in.

Does buying a german car support the third reich? No
Does buying a VW enable diesel gate? No
Does by buying a Tesla financially support Musk?
Yes

You cannot change history, you can only act today to influence the future.

 

[johncrossley]

Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.

 

[jon0844]

Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.

Rear wipers are important to me, but given how many Teslas I see driving around and in my local supermarket car parks, I'd say they're fine for British streets in towns and cities!

Just look how many Range Rovers and other large SUVs there are, as well as more and more commercial vans that seem to be used as normal cars going by how many get parked up on residential streets and retail parks on weekends etc.

I recently watched a video of someone in a converted truck doing the North Coast 500 and even that got by on the narrow west-coast roads.

 

[JamesT]

Teslas are very long and quite wide and so too large for many garages and not very suitable for urban British streets. The shortest Tesla is 4.7 metres long. Most of them don't even have a rear wiper.

Many garages seem to be designed for an average car from the 70s. When I was house hunting I did look at a few with garages. I had a 2005 Toyota Corolla, not an enormous car by any stretch of the imagination, but even with that I thought I might struggle to get it into some.

 

[Vexed]

It's maybe time to drop my experiences in this thread. I recently got a high mileage Polestar 2 Single Motor Long Range (72 plate) and it's almost all positive. I previously drove a diesel (no surprises why I didn't want to buy another one looking at fuel prices!).

I regularly do 3-400 mile journeys and the charging is quick enough (it can max out the 400V architecture at 160kW real world speed) that I've overcharged twice already on the way home when getting food or watching stuff on my phone. All my public charges have worked first time through the Electroverse app (mainly Ionity). I do have experience charging EVs from my friend's car which probably helped.

With ~10% battery degradation over 135k miles it's getting around 260 miles on motorways at 70mph. It integrates well with the cars built in Google Maps and I tend to arrive within a couple percent of what it predicts when I leave. It even automatically removed a charging stop it previously suggested when I'd driven a little more economically at 65mph.

It's slightly shorter (15cm) than my old car and so much easier to park with cameras. However that brings me on to the parking sensors which are broken. Every time I go below 6mph I get a message on the dashboard telling me they need cleaning that needs manually dismissing. Modern technology!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Thursday at 23:36 ==

Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.

 

[BananaRepublic]

Many garages seem to be designed for an average car from the 70s. .....

The garages of some new houses, must be designed for the Austin 7, never mind the 70's.

In the 1990's, we were looking at some houses on a very recent new development and were astonished that the garages didn't have much room even for a 1990's model Fiesta or Polo.
It would have been a very tight squeeze to open the drivers door of a family sized car in one of those.

Luckily, the house we ended up buying (and still here) had a very spacious double garage, with plenty of width for two cars, with room to spare.
The longest car I've parked in there, was my Mk2 Mercedes CLS at just a couple of centimetres short of 5 metres long, with only about 300mm or so to spare at both front and back.
However, it has always been very tight driving through the door openings.
A few years ago, we took the plunge and had the double doors converted to a large single door opening.
With hindsight, we should have done it years ago.

By contrast, about 15 years ago, a one-off large house was being built just around the corner, on a secluded plot down a private track.
Having a sneaky a look around the deserted site one Sunday afternoon, I was surprised at the size of the double garage.
It wasn't very wide for a double garage to start with, but the front to back depth looked unusually short.
Sure enough, when the people moved in, they couldn't get a car in at all, so they just used the garage for storage and their son's motorbike.
A couple of years ago, they had it completely knocked down and a larger replacement built.


.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Yesterday at 00:15 ==

........Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.

It makes me laugh when car reviewers or designers excuse the lack of a rear wiper, with some guff about the aerodynamics carrying the rain away.
No mention of a stationary car, moving forward at urban speeds or slower, or reversing in the rain.
Who do they think they're kidding?

.

 

[The Ham]

On garage sizes many local authorities set quite reasonable minimum internal sizes, what's fairly standard for new builds is 3m wide and 6m long.

To put that in perspective parking spaces being designed in a 2000's supermarket car park would have been 2.4m wide and 4.8m long, although again many councils will now require that to be 2.5m wide and 5.0m long.

Either way, garages should give enough space for many cars to fit in them, as long as there's not too much stuff stored in them (which might be as little more than 4+ cycles for a family with older kids, especially if that includes teenagers).

 

[Harpers Tate]

The majority of single garages, in my local experience, are not used at all for storage of a car; rather for bikes, garden tools and other "storage". My double garage serves as space for our one and only car, alongside bikes, lawnmower, hedge trimmer, DIY tools etc. And, of course, there are many that have been converted into an extra interior room.

 

[Mawkie]

It's maybe time to drop my experiences in this thread. I recently got a high mileage Polestar 2 Single Motor Long Range (72 plate) and it's almost all positive. I previously drove a diesel (no surprises why I didn't want to buy another one looking at fuel prices!).

I regularly do 3-400 mile journeys and the charging is quick enough (it can max out the 400V architecture at 160kW real world speed) that I've overcharged twice already on the way home when getting food or watching stuff on my phone. All my public charges have worked first time through the Electroverse app (mainly Ionity). I do have experience charging EVs from my friend's car which probably helped.

With ~10% battery degradation over 135k miles it's getting around 260 miles on motorways at 70mph. It integrates well with the cars built in Google Maps and I tend to arrive within a couple percent of what it predicts when I leave. It even automatically removed a charging stop it previously suggested when I'd driven a little more economically at 65mph.

It's slightly shorter (15cm) than my old car and so much easier to park with cameras. However that brings me on to the parking sensors which are broken. Every time I go below 6mph I get a message on the dashboard telling me they need cleaning that needs manually dismissing. Modern technology!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: Thursday at 23:36 ==

Oh, no rear wiper either but my old car didn't either. I think it's a poor design choice, especially at lower speeds when rain does land on it and there's no way to get it off. It's not an issue when going at speed.

Thanks for this, it's always good to hear real world experience of recent EV buyers. You did say "almost all positive", could you elaborate a little on what hasn't worked out well, or you don't like? Is it specific to the car, or the infrastructure, or something else?

It makes me laugh when car reviewers or designers excuse the lack of a rear wiper, with some guff about the aerodynamics carrying the rain away.

Yes, no rear wiper on the Tesla, a bit annoying., but if it was good as the automatic front wipers then I wouldn't miss it anyway. I noticed the new Jaguar didn't have a rear wiper, but it didn't have a rear window either!

The majority of single garages, in my local experience, are not used at all for storage of a car; rather for bikes, garden tools and other "storage".

The absolute limit on my garage is a Mk7 Golf, and getting out of that after parking depended on how big a dinner I'd had!

 

[Vexed]

Thanks for this, it's always good to hear real world experience of recent EV buyers. You did say "almost all positive", could you elaborate a little on what hasn't worked out well, or you don't like? Is it specific to the car, or the infrastructure, or something else?

It's the broken parking sensors (hopefully I can get these fixed soon) and the Polestar software is a bit buggy. I've had the speakers stop working twice. The software problems are well documented online, some bits fixed and others not.

Nothing about the public charging infrastructure has come as a surprise, on the contrary I've been impressed as I've been comparing to my friend's Fronterra which is a horrible electric vehicle* with almost half the range and 3x slower charging.

*if you have to regularly charge away from home

This afternoon I'm going to do 430 miles (!) with a starting battery of 92%. After 166 miles I'll stop for an hour. There's a convenient car park with 50kW chargers that the hour or so I'm busy should bring me from 19% to ~90%. Then 261 miles with a suggested 18 minute stop adding ~40%, arriving home on ~18%.

I'd want to stop anyway on the 261 mile stretch for a coffee so driving an EV has maybe added 10 minutes to my day. Probably close to none if me or my passenger needs to stop twice as I can do a 10 min charge twice (but this might be a bit more expensive as I have an IONITY Power subscription through Electroverse - so I'd pay more if I charged elsewhere). Google Maps on the car lets you select preferred charging networks it uses when auto planning.

I also don't have a 7kW home charger installed (rental property; I know there are grants available) so for my mileage I hang a granny charger out the window for ~30 hours a week.

 

[Mawkie]

It's the broken parking sensors (hopefully I can get these fixed soon) and the Polestar software is a bit buggy. I've had the speakers stop working twice. The software problems are well documented online, some bits fixed and others not.

Nothing about the public charging infrastructure has come as a surprise, on the contrary I've been impressed as I've been comparing to my friend's Fronterra which is a horrible electric vehicle* with almost half the range and 3x slower charging.

*if you have to regularly charge away from home

This afternoon I'm going to do 430 miles (!) with a starting battery of 92%. After 166 miles I'll stop for an hour. There's a convenient car park with 50kW chargers that the hour or so I'm busy should bring me from 19% to ~90%. Then 261 miles with a suggested 18 minute stop adding ~40%, arriving home on ~18%.

I'd want to stop anyway on the 261 mile stretch for a coffee so driving an EV has maybe added 10 minutes to my day. Probably close to none if me or my passenger needs to stop twice as I can do a 10 min charge twice (but this might be a bit more expensive as I have an IONITY Power subscription through Electroverse - so I'd pay more if I charged elsewhere). Google Maps on the car lets you select preferred charging networks it uses when auto planning.

I also don't have a 7kW home charger installed (rental property; I know there are grants available) so for my mileage I hang a granny charger out the window for ~30 hours a week.

I had heard from a colleague at work (Dale Charman, YouTube sensation!) about some small technical issues with his Polestar infotainment system. I guess updates will sort them out eventually.

Good to see you are using that car! 460 miles a day is way above what most people will do, so it's good to read real world experience.

It's good to have a charging plan, and the best thing about EV software these days is if something doesn't go to plan, it just replans everything for you!

I was chatting to someone yesterday about charging on long distance travels and he said "I don't want to be told when to stop and for how long". And of course, you don't have to do exactly what the screen tells you to do, you can simply carry on past the suggested charging site and it redirects you to another one en-route. It seemed like a revelation to him.

 

[Lucan]

The majority of single garages, in my local experience, are not used at all for storage of a car; rather for bikes, garden tools and other "storage"

Chicken and egg situation? Perhaps because the garage is so small that the owner can't get their car door open far enough to get out easily, so they gave up.

I have an older house with a detached garage added by the previous owner around 1980. Despite plenty of room for it, it is minimally small. I suspect the houseowner just told the builder to "Build me a garage", not specifying the size, so they did it using the least materials they could.

 

[Harpers Tate]

Somehow I suspect that it's more to do with modern(ish) properties not having enough interior space for such stuff, nor a garden big enough to erect a suitable alternative shed etc.

 

[jon0844]

Somehow I suspect that it's more to do with modern(ish) properties not having enough interior space for such stuff, nor a garden big enough to erect a suitable alternative shed etc.

We converted our garage into a spare room/home office, with a smaller section kept as-is for storage and a second freezer.

Since moving in to the new-build house in the early 2000s, I probably parked a car in the garage about 20-30 times max.

The car did fit, albeit with rubber mats on the wall to stop marks on the door which would touch the wall, but it was the time to open the garage door (manual), reverse in and make sure I hadn't left anything out that I'd have to move. There was just no point when modern cars can sit outside in the rain and snow just fine.

Today, with the ability to pre-heat the car while I'm in the shower, even frosty or snowy mornings aren't a problem as it will have all melted away by the time I step outside. Obviously there's a hit on the battery (if it isn't currently charging), but it's well worth it for the convenience.

 

[bspahh]

Its 40 years since I parked my car in a garage at home. That was a Mini, so it was a bit easier.

My EV3 has a 360 degree camera, although some of the cameras are on the wing mirrors, which means they don't work so well if the mirrors are folded in. To get out of a tight parking space, there is a remote control, so I don't need to be able to first get inside. I don't think I would trust that to move into a tight parking space though.

 

[johncrossley]

Am I nuts to want to prefer a small car? We are supposed to be in a cost of living crisis, so why are people actively choosing larger cars than they used to? There are fewer small cars to choose from these days but they are still there. Why can't Tesla make a B segment hatchback?

 

[Welly]

Small cars are a lot less profitable for manufacturers hence the loss of new small cars on offer since 2020.

 

[Mawkie]

Why can't Tesla make a B segment hatchback?

They make that gold cyber taxi thing in America, not sure what platform it's based on. As far as I know it doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals, but could it be adapted to personal use? A 'Model 2' would suit me better.

 

[johncrossley]

Small cars are a lot less profitable for manufacturers hence the loss of new small cars on offer since 2020.

You can still get them though and if people actually bought them they would make more of them.

 

[jon0844]

Small cars are a lot less profitable for manufacturers hence the loss of new small cars on offer since 2020.

They're coming back. Okay, not the very smallest cars (A-segment) but you're now seeing a huge number of B-segment vehicles with prices as low as £8-9000 for a pre-registered, minimal mileage, Dacia Spring that's perfect for a lot of people.

 

[BananaRepublic]

……….Why can't Tesla make a B segment hatchback?

Tesla were talking a lot about a “$25k“ small car, just a few years ago.
Commentators speculated that it would become the Model 2, but Tesla never used that name.

They abandoned the plan and came out with the very expensive and wacky/novel Cybertruck instead.
IIRC they cited the difficulty in getting the price of a cheaper car down to their target price.
They have probably lost a lot of money on the Cybertruck, when the $25k car, even if it turned out to be nearer to $30k, would have been a gold mine.

More recently, there‘s been speculation that a “drivable” version of the Robotaxi, with a steering wheel and driver controls, will appear at some stage, but Tesla haven’t hinted at that themselves.


.

 

[jon0844]

Elon wouldn't want to use Model 2 as he'd presumably want to continue the S3XY formula. Maybe a Model A and Model F so you could have the S, 3, X, Y, A, F?

The manbaby will probably focus more attention on the naming than the car design!

 

[birchesgreen]

I don't think Elon really cares about cars anymore, all he really seems interested in is robots and AI.

 

[The Ham]

It's the broken parking sensors (hopefully I can get these fixed soon) and the Polestar software is a bit buggy. I've had the speakers stop working twice. The software problems are well documented online, some bits fixed and others not.

Nothing about the public charging infrastructure has come as a surprise, on the contrary I've been impressed as I've been comparing to my friend's Fronterra which is a horrible electric vehicle* with almost half the range and 3x slower charging.

*if you have to regularly charge away from home

This afternoon I'm going to do 430 miles (!) with a starting battery of 92%. After 166 miles I'll stop for an hour. There's a convenient car park with 50kW chargers that the hour or so I'm busy should bring me from 19% to ~90%. Then 261 miles with a suggested 18 minute stop adding ~40%, arriving home on ~18%.

I'd want to stop anyway on the 261 mile stretch for a coffee so driving an EV has maybe added 10 minutes to my day. Probably close to none if me or my passenger needs to stop twice as I can do a 10 min charge twice (but this might be a bit more expensive as I have an IONITY Power subscription through Electroverse - so I'd pay more if I charged elsewhere). Google Maps on the car lets you select preferred charging networks it uses when auto planning.

I also don't have a 7kW home charger installed (rental property; I know there are grants available) so for my mileage I hang a granny charger out the window for ~30 hours a week.

First up 430 miles in a day is a lot (7 hours of averaging 61mph). Far more than most people would ever do in a day, probably more than many do in 2 weeks.

Even where we do 240 miles in an evening (circa 4.5 hours of driving due to not being much motorway), that's done enough times that it surpasses the average number of times a UK driver does more than 50 mile long trips.

Yet, guess what, we have a Fronterra, the speed of charge isn't of concern given that we rarely need more than about 20 minutes of charge, the frustration for us is the lack of charging point in the right location to be sure of always being able to do it in one change.

Even this summer where we were away from home for the working week staying in hotels with no charging facilities, and doing some reasonable milage each day, we just ate whilst it charged or took our time buying our lunch stuff for the next day whilst it changed. However, given that "lost" time would have only been sat in a hotel before going to bed, it's no big deal.

That included, driving to Warwick Castle, on to Birmingham City Centre, then Cadbury's World and Alton Towers for two days either side of cycling the Monsal Trail for a day before driving home.

However, in the grand scheme of things, even with such a "horrible" car, charging away from home isn't as big an issue as many fear.

Yes it would have been nice to get a car to be able to do it without needing to charge or only for a few minutes for our regular trips or which gave us a few extra minutes sat in a hotel, but we weren't ready to take the risk with a very high milage car to get the maths to work vs our fuel costs.

Even then we'd have needed to pay the full 4 years of the lease cost, including deposit, up front for it not to have cost us much more - we may have been able to do a 24 month credit card balance transfer to maybe make the numbers work to get a better car for a reasonable extra cost, but as a first EV the risk of that not paying off wasn't something we could justify at the time.

Add to that the Fronterra has a larger boot (+10%), which with kids and often going camping was a key need (yes a Polestar 2 with towbar would win, but that just adds to the complexity of finding the "right" one, which could have also added to the cost, not least needing a trailer too).

That's not to say that you've done the wrong thing for you, just to say that for a lot of people something "horrible" might actually be more than good enough for their needs. Especially if it comes with a lower risk.

For the cost of a Polestar with 100,000 miles you can get a nearly new Fronterra with 1/10th the milage (maybe less) and 7 years of battery warranty second hand.

Some will opt for the safety net others won't (that safety net will include on a lease that if something goes wrong under the warranty the lease company has an interest in that being sorted).

I suspect that if we were looking now we possibly would have done something similar to you, but things have changed in the last 12 months for us and in the prices of EV's.

However, it doesn't change the fact that a slower change speed and smaller battery isn't such an issue as it might appear when you look at the numbers on the page, unless you are someone who does a lot of driving (and probably more than the 12,000 miles a year we do) and you need to cram a few more minutes of stuff into your day (spoiler, unless they are driving for work that's just not the case for most people).