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Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:54 pm
by nekomatic
bjn wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 3:35 pm
Also, make sure your house is well insulated before you do any of those.
Yes, very much so
However, if you are buying a car because of need, shouldn't a BEV be an option even if you haven't done any of the above?
Well, if you have a choice between buying a petrol car for £x or an electric car for £x+y, then I suggest the best choice might be to buy the petrol car and spend the £y on insulation, solar or renewables investments. But as Ivan correctly notes, this will depend on what £y is and how much you drive.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:05 pm
by nekomatic
IvanV wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 4:47 pm
Some back of envelope.
I’ve just checked against my back of envelope (which is actually a spreadsheet because of course I did a spreadsheet) and my figures aren’t so far off yours, given I used a lower annual mileage for the car because I calculated for our own usage. However what I don’t think you’ve accounted for is the useful lifetime, which I guessed at ten years for the car and twenty for the panels, and that makes the total CO
2 abated per pound look much better for the panels. Again, different people may have different values for the various terms.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:26 pm
by Grumble
nekomatic wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:05 pm
IvanV wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 4:47 pm
Some back of envelope.
I’ve just checked against my back of envelope (which is actually a spreadsheet because of course I did a spreadsheet) and my figures aren’t so far off yours, given I used a lower annual mileage for the car because I calculated for our own usage. However what I don’t think you’ve accounted for is the useful lifetime, which I guessed at
ten years for the car and twenty for the panels, and that makes the total CO
2 abated per pound look much better for the panels. Again, different people may have different values for the various terms.
We are used to scrapping cars when the engines die, because the engines are so unreliable and costly to replace. It’s not that common to scrap a car because the body has fallen apart. Not modern cars anyway. I think electric car lifetimes might be a lot longer than ICE cars. It’s a bit hard to say because they haven’t been around for long enough really.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
by Boustrophedon
Grumble wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:26 pm
We are used to scrapping cars when the engines die, because the engines are so unreliable and costly to replace. It’s not that common to scrap a car because the body has fallen apart. Not modern cars anyway. I think electric car lifetimes might be a lot longer than ICE cars. It’s a bit hard to say because they haven’t been around for long enough really.
I very much doubt it. Already dead batteries are enough to scrap a car and the electronics will be as complicated as possible. If my low mileage Skoda is anything to go on, a simple duff sensor can still be extremely expensive to diagnose, any major electronic disaster might well reduce the car's value to Zero.
Then there's repairability, right to repair hasn't really reached the UK, well not since Quinton Hazell won the right to make and supply generic replacement parts. Tesla are really against self repair and should you try, you can find yourself locked out of the supercharger network (In the US that is.). Tesla also make US owners re-certify their cars when the warranty expired, else they will not allow cars to be repaired by certified repairers and unwarranted cars can be denied access to the super charging network. Re certification and extended warranty is expensive. So a little like the Japanese situation where their equivalent of the MOT is so expensive that cars become next to worthless when the need for the test kicks in.
https://electrek.co/2021/08/16/tesla-ag ... situation/
Now consider the product liability for a self driving car, once that reaches a certain age and the warranty expires.
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:56 pm
by Grumble
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
Grumble wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:26 pm
We are used to scrapping cars when the engines die, because the engines are so unreliable and costly to replace. It’s not that common to scrap a car because the body has fallen apart. Not modern cars anyway. I think electric car lifetimes might be a lot longer than ICE cars. It’s a bit hard to say because they haven’t been around for long enough really.
I very much doubt it. Already dead batteries are enough to scrap a car and the electronics will be as complicated as possible. If my low mileage Skoda is anything to go on, a simple duff sensor can still be extremely expensive to diagnose, any major electronic disaster might well reduce the car's value to Zero.
Then there's repairability, right to repair hasn't really reached the UK, well not since Quinton Hazell won the right to make and supply generic replacement parts. Tesla are really against self repair and should you try, you can find yourself locked out of the supercharger network (In the US that is.). Tesla also make US owners re-certify their cars when the warranty expired, else they will not allow cars to be repaired by certified repairers and unwarranted cars can be denied access to the super charging network. Re certification and extended warranty is expensive. So a little like the Japanese situation where their equivalent of the MOT is so expensive that cars become next to worthless when the need for the test kicks in.
https://electrek.co/2021/08/16/tesla-ag ... situation/
Now consider the product liability for a self driving car, once that reaches a certain age and the warranty expires.
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
The batteries may deteriorate fast enough and be expensive enough to cause scrappage, but if anything batteries are lasting longer than anyone thought they would and each generation of batteries improves.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:24 pm
by headshot
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
Surely that engine will be a bit Ship of Theseus* by that point.
*Or “Trigger’s Broom” if you like, Rodders.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:40 pm
by Millennie Al
Gfamily wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:36 am
The infrastructure isn't there yet - in an ideal world, there would be charging points on the street, but it's hard to see how that would work without people hogging the charging points overnight.
The sensible place for commuters to charge their cars is at work in the company car park. That also means they can be charged from solar arrays, which is obvioously a lot less useful for overnight charging. Hopefully that leaves the number of people on a street who must charge at home small enough that there is space of on-street chargers for everyone.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 12:12 am
by dyqik
Grumble wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:26 pm
nekomatic wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:05 pm
IvanV wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 4:47 pm
Some back of envelope.
I’ve just checked against my back of envelope (which is actually a spreadsheet because of course I did a spreadsheet) and my figures aren’t so far off yours, given I used a lower annual mileage for the car because I calculated for our own usage. However what I don’t think you’ve accounted for is the useful lifetime, which I guessed at
ten years for the car and twenty for the panels, and that makes the total CO
2 abated per pound look much better for the panels. Again, different people may have different values for the various terms.
We are used to scrapping cars when the engines die, because the engines are so unreliable and costly to replace. It’s not that common to scrap a car because the body has fallen apart. Not modern cars anyway. I think electric car lifetimes might be a lot longer than ICE cars. It’s a bit hard to say because they haven’t been around for long enough really.
The body falling apart or the overall electrical harness failing are the main reasons I would scrap a car.
I can buy an engine, rebuild it and put it in a car for about $2000-$3000 - less than the value of any car that passes inspection here. An automatic transmission would be around the same price. As would a complete suspension system replacement.
Replacing rusted bodywork, chunks of the interior, or ripping the entire car apart to replace the harness would cost more than the value of a car though.
All of the recent expenses on my car have been ICE related - head gaskets, camshaft cover seals and exhaust/Cat replacement - as have all the breakdowns (both O2 sensors, variable valve lift, 12V battery too weak to start the car). Once I can get an EV, those won't be issues.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:28 am
by Boustrophedon
headshot wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:24 pm
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
Surely that engine will be a bit Ship of Theseus* by that point.
*Or “Trigger’s Broom” if you like, Rodders.
With the particular vehicle I was thinking of, the engine was untouched and when checked was still within tolerance. My point, long windedly expressed above, is that the mechanics and structure of the car no outlasts the electronics.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:47 am
by Grumble
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:28 am
headshot wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:24 pm
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
Surely that engine will be a bit Ship of Theseus* by that point.
*Or “Trigger’s Broom” if you like, Rodders.
With the particular vehicle I was thinking of, the engine was untouched and when checked was still within tolerance. My point, long windedly expressed above, is that the mechanics and structure of the car no outlasts the electronics.
Was it a non-turbo diesel? Turbo diesels are a bugger to repair and have lots to go wrong.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2022 1:37 pm
by dyqik
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:28 am
headshot wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 10:24 pm
Boustrophedon wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 9:46 pm
No I think the days of the 20 year old 400,000 mile Skoda Octavia are long gone.
Surely that engine will be a bit Ship of Theseus* by that point.
*Or “Trigger’s Broom” if you like, Rodders.
With the particular vehicle I was thinking of, the engine was untouched and when checked was still within tolerance. My point, long windedly expressed above, is that the mechanics and structure of the car no outlasts the electronics.
That's not the case in my experience. Engines and transmissions need major work before the body goes, even in the rust central that is Massachusetts.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 7:58 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Seemingly now considered largely adequate for last-miles delivery use-cases - in the US, where those last miles are generally more than in Europe:
Postal officials’ plans call for buying 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” from defense contractor Oshkosh, of which 45,000 will be electric, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told The Washington Post. The agency will also purchase 46,000 models from mainstream automakers, of which 21,000 will be electric.
The Postal Service will spend $9.6 billion on the vehicles and associated infrastructure, officials said, including $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden and congressional Democrats’ landmark climate, health-care and tax law.
By 2026, the agency expects to purchase zero-emissions delivery trucks almost exclusively, DeJoy said. It’s a major achievement for a White House climate agenda that leans heavily on reducing greenhouse gases from vehicles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... -vehicles/
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:31 pm
by Imrael
Anecdata and all that, but coming up to 2 years of EV ownership and the only issues I've had are a cracked windscreen (stone impact) and filling the washer bottle. Rear tyres just changed at 22K miles. But whats most noticeable is how relaxing a drive it is.
Most of my charging is at home (with solar and battery to make it as cheap a possible) and public charging (Tesla mostly but some others) seems to have come on a lot.
At the moment I wouldnt buy an EV without either home or work charging. And they definitely do cost more to buy, so somewhat of a luxury spend. (And for Tesla specifically used car prices are tumbling almost as fast as the stock price - mostly I think the enormous bubble of cars shipped 2 years ago beginning to enter the SH market, plus a bit of Elon's antics)
There are a few Tesla's around with north of 500K miles on their batteries and still doing OK. Typical age-related wear seems to be suspension (which is pretty conventional) and minor electrics. It kind of seems like batteries either fail fairly quickly or last a very long time, though I've no figures or explanation for that.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:32 pm
by bolo
To be clear, this is the outcome of a long political battle. It may or may not be a good decision -- I have no idea -- but either way, it's not a decision that the postal service made on its own after dispassionately analyzing the alternatives.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 9:22 pm
by FlammableFlower
All the Royal Mail vans I've seen delivering in our area for a long while, could even be a year, have been EVs.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 9:29 pm
by dyqik
bolo wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:32 pm
To be clear, this is the outcome of a long political battle. It may or may not be a good decision -- I have no idea -- but either way, it's not a decision that the postal service made on its own after dispassionately analyzing the alternatives.
Although it's also been a long political battle to undo what seems to have been a political decision to buy all gasoline vehicles in the first place.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 9:50 am
by TopBadger
Imrael wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 8:31 pm
And they definitely do cost more to buy, so somewhat of a luxury spend.
We were looking at buying one in the summer - glad we didn't, not because we wouldn't like an EV, but because we're also one of the millions of households coming off a 5 yr fix in April. So the money we were going to spend on indulging ourselves with a new car will now be used to chunk down the mortgage when we move to our new deal.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:00 pm
by noggins
How many kg of Co2 does it take to build a new car?
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:07 pm
by shpalman
noggins wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:00 pm
How many kg of Co2 does it take to build a new car?
gosh I bet nobody has thought of that
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 2:59 pm
by IvanV
Nearly all the hits on the front page fail to answer the question. The first hit does attempt an answer, but is an article from 2010 and so is hopelessly out of date.
The key to getting some useful hits on this question is to use some suitable technical terms for the concept in question. "Embedded emissions" is the formal technical term for emissions in manufacture, before usage. Though inconveniently a lot of people use the similar-sounding "embodied" instead. Another option is "life cycle emissions", which specifically includes both manufacture and running emissions.
So here's a more useful link, that let-me-google-that didn't produce, at least not on the front page.
better link
It is actually a very difficult question to give a very specific or even reliably approximate answers to. A lot of the embedded emissions are from mining and producing the materials for manufacture - the metals and plastics - but these emissions vary considerably according to where they came from.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 3:35 pm
by dyqik
OTOH, it's a very well known problem that I've heard discussed for at least 20 years, with various answers for different producers.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 3:48 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Detailed comparisons of embedded vs consumption-based emissions for ICEs vs BEVs are certainly available and have been discussed here before. Can't find it now of course.
The point at which it's worth replacing an ICE with a BEV can be surprisingly short, obviously depending on how much you drive.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:11 pm
by shpalman
bjn wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:49 pm
This is getting off topic.
From my understanding about Teslas, drive train excellent and possibly still best in class, fit and finish ok to very poor, self driving a complete fantasy.
Yes, so I'll continue in the thread we already have for electric vehicles and also point out that all users have permission to start new threads if they want to.
Who actually makes electric vehicles which are stylish and desirable and not just boxes for carting people around in? I drive an MX-5 because I actually want to enjoy the experience of getting there and electric cars (and hybrids for that matter) have their main advantage in stop/start and hard-acceleration-and-braking styles of driving (i.e. sporty) rather than cruising thanks to the torque-from-zero thing and the regenerative braking.
Electric vehicles and hybrids may have originally been marketed to people already conscious of fuel economy, i.e. boring people, when it's the petrolheads who need to be won over.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:22 pm
by FlammableFlower
shpalman wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:11 pm
bjn wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:49 pm
This is getting off topic.
From my understanding about Teslas, drive train excellent and possibly still best in class, fit and finish ok to very poor, self driving a complete fantasy.
Yes, so I'll continue in the thread we already have for electric vehicles and also point out that all users have permission to start new threads if they want to.
Who actually makes electric vehicles which are stylish and desirable and not just boxes for carting people around in? I drive an MX-5 because I actually want to enjoy the experience of getting there and electric cars (and hybrids for that matter) have their main advantage in stop/start and hard-acceleration-and-braking styles of driving (i.e. sporty) rather than cruising thanks to the torque-from-zero thing and the regenerative braking.
Electric vehicles and hybrids may have originally been marketed to people already conscious of fuel economy, i.e. boring people, when it's the petrolheads who need to be won over.
At the moment, probably only the Porsche Taycan and Audi e-Tron, both of which are well over £100k.
Re: The Age of Electric Vehicles
Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:33 pm
by lpm
? Teslas, and loads more EVs, are marketed for performance. Acceleration is inevitably superior to fossil fuel burners. Petrolheads should love them.
Not sure whether this is worth targeting, though. Even my box for carting people around in does 0-62 in 7.3 seconds, which is far more than anyone could ever need. Most Teslas seem to be 4 to 7 seconds, with the Tesla Plaid labelled at 2.1 seconds.