UKH

A friend recently plugged her car into a charging station but on her return someone had remover the plug and connected their own car. 
I know nothing about EV charging but it got me thinking, does the charger display whether or not the car is fully charged and more worrying, if you put your car on charge can someone come along in a couple of minutes and plug in their own car using electricity that you are paying for?
 

When my car (BMW) is locked you can't remove the charger. Not sure about other manufacturers? 

Some do, some don’t*. Also, the owner/manager of the charge point can override/disconnect. Some chargers have emergency stop buttons and this would allow opportunity to unplug. Most modern cars can’t have the plug removed by anyone just pulling it out (without breaking something.

Not that I’m aware as the act of disconnecting by whatever means causes the charge point to stop.

Edit: *Some EV cars display state of charging inside whilst charging and some actually have an LED display showing SofC outside (at the connection socket) even when locked. If one of those cars it can be seen by anyone if the charge point itself doesn’t show SofC.

My friend’s car is a three year old Mercedes. She did say it was fully charged but don’t know if this was displayed in the car or on the charger. If displayed on the charger I suppose he was ok to swap out plugs so long as he did no damage. Just wondered if the charge would carry on if swapped mid charge. 

Our van can be unplugged by anyone, but our Zoe can't. If a car has finished charging and they haven't yet returned, I always try to see if I can unplug it so that I can plug in. Some people get very offended by it, but if you are going to be rude by hogging a charger while not actually charging, then I reckon it's fair game. 

I don't know if that was the scenario in your friend's case or not

Don’t know about Mercedes, but would pretty safe to assume being a three year old one it would lock the plug in place. Will be easy for her to check if lock pin was damaged - next time she plugs in she should know if it locks or doesn’t.

I’ve heard (online reports) that some cars unlock the plug when the car initially reaches fully charged state for at least a limited time period. I’ve not experienced this, not heard from anyone with an EV I know, but if it happens with that Mercedes car then there would be time for someone to unplug to then charge their car. Charger/charge point wouldn’t restart without authorisation though (or I’ve never heard how this could happen without point owner/manager restarting).

I was at a charge point station yesterday where a car was blocking the only 50kw charger. That had been unplugged so the charger could be used by others, but no idea who or how it was disconnected. 

Was it a "tethered" charger that had it's own wire or had she plugged her own wire into a charger with a socket? You get both types. In either case did they unplug it from the car end or (only in the non-tethered charger case) did they unplug her charging cable from the charger end and plug their own cable into the charger? 

We have a Kia and the cable gets locked into the car end but there is no lock on the charger end (in the charger, at least in none I've seen).

My Leaf had an option to unlock the cable automatically when charging was complete, so that someone else could use the charge point.

I’ve no idea about charging cables. We were a a hotel with only one charger out of four working and my friend was very conscious of not hogging the charger. I would have swapped plugs myself in this position. 
My main worrying take from this though was whether someone could change plugs whilst you were paying for the electricity, though if the charger resets when a plug is unattached this would stop this happening. 
 

The charger will reset when the plug is pulled.  

Low life proof then, cheers

Yes, but there have been recent cases of low life’s nicking the big cables off Rapid Chargers, to the massive inconvenience of folk wanting to use them.

We've got an EV and there's an LED charge indicator behind the windscreen, so you can tell if it's fully charged.

On ours (Kia) I would guess that once it reaches full, the charger will stop and you can unplug that end, but the cable can't be disconnected from the car end until the car is unlocked (it's part of the central locking system), so no-one can steal the cable. We don't really have a lot of experience charging away from home when we've left it unattended past when it would have reached full. Most will give an estimated time until full, so we're back to unplug it around then - mainly to avoid overstay charges in supermarket car parks!

Only issue we have had was when my wife plugged the car in when away in Warwick, came back a bit later to check it and found someone had turned off the charger, so had to re-start it. Probably local kids messing around, but if she hadn't checked, it would have ruined the following day's activities!

Mine will lock the charger lead in if I want (I don't, just another thing that could ruin my day). I expect most now auto-lock and release when finished charging.

The user interface on the public charger I go to is embarrassingly bad, like my first school programming project bad, no idea if it'd let you hot swap without ending the card debit session but I wouldn't be surprised. They can't all be so bad. Then again, it's hard enough to persuade them to let the electricity out I would hardly begrudge someone else sidestepping that pain at my expense!

jk

None of the above is encouraging me to get an electric vehicle. I thought that the main problem was range but it looks like there are ancillary problems with chargers etc.

I’m certainly not anti EV’s but can’t see how they will work out on council estates near me or on flats in the nearby city. If chargers become street furniture they will get trashed like other street furniture. 

If you have off street parking then it's not an issue for the most part. But I would be very hesitant if I didn't have off street parking and had to rely on public charges.

100% this. We've had an EV for just over three years now and I have only had to use public chargers a handful of times (literally), we always charge it at home. The first time we used one (back in 2021) our cable got locked into the stupid bollard and I had to call some call centre up to reset the device and unlock it. That's the worst that's happened though. I will 100% get another EV in the future but only because I can charge it at home, if I didn't have off-street parking and home-charging I wouldn't even consider it (unless I knew 100% I could charge it at work 5 days a week or something equally guaranteed).

For all that the public charger I use has a horrible flawed user interface it does still work. It's exactly the sort of thing that annoys me but even I can't bring myself to care that much. Rushed out bad products will get upgraded and replaced over time. We don't still hand crank petrol pumps or have to go to the apothecary for bottled mineral spirits when the fuel light comes on.

Then they'll get repaired. Think phone boxes and bus stops. If that's not long-term viable in some bad areas it'll be charging at work or visiting destination fast chargers, like we do now for petrol. That might end up being the norm more widely anyway, hopefully not as we'd miss out on the virtual (or real) storage benefits of vast numbers of grid connected EVs.

jk

Our van is first gen EV, so a teeny weeny baby battery, and we live in the depths of Mid Argyll. So anywhere we go other than very local requires multiple public chargers. Largely, this is absolutely fine. I have never yet been stuck. I have once or twice had to use a slow charger as the rapid was broken, but mostly they work fine. Maybe England is more problematic, but in Scotland they are generally fine. Not perfect, but fine 

It will be something that will improve as time goes on. In your situation I assume the vast majority of the juice is gone charge, so cheap electricity. If all your charging was using public chargers you loose one of the great benefits of EV which is cheap fuel.

I suspect my next car will be an EV. I'm just waiting for used prices to come down a fair bit more.

In our area of Scotland, the rapids are still reasonably cheap. Not quite as cheap as home charging, but still cheaper than burning dinosaurs. It might well change, but that's still the case for now. 

But yes, the daily use of the van in a relatively short commute, so the many public charge stops are for longer journeys rather than the daily ones

Incidentally, your friend should be made aware that charging to 100% on a public charger is generally seen as poor etiquette.  

The last 10% is much slower than the first 90%, so by going all the way she's occupying a charger for a long time for little extra benefit.  If there's a queue of people waiting they won't be amused.

It’s the queue of people waiting that would put me off, it would be 2 or 3 minutes at a petrol pump. 

Presumably that means being able to sell it on isn't very likely.

That would mean that an awful lot of (at least the early) EV's are going to be scrapped in the not too distant future. Rather depressing for the environment.

Batteries are subject to wear and tear, their ability to hold charge diminishes over time. However, there are valuable materials in them, making them good to recycle. E.g A ton of batteries will give you more lithium, and for less money than mining a ton of lithium ore.

Also, as battery technology evolves, there will be after market batteries available for older cars, improving the range. It might be that this is a standard operation, at some point. Much like a timing belt is changed after XX thousand miles.

Finally, degraded car batteries can be used for other purposes. Cars need to draw huge amounts of power quickly, for acceleration, or going up a hill. In a less stressful environment, where they deliver constant current, they can be used. So a home battery pack, for those with solar, might be a good use for older car batteries.

But until these practices becomes common, there's going to be an impact.

Don’t go inventing problems that don’t exist.

Low range BEVs sell perfectly well - there are sufficient people for whom they work well.  Just watch autotrader…

When they are scrapped, the batteries are in demand for other uses and recycling.

Also, an awful lot of ICE cars of similar age to the BEV girlymonkey is taking about are going to be scrapped in the not too distant future…   Because they’re old and it’s not economical to repair them.  

I've never had to queue for electrons. Regularly do for diesel.

jk

It'll sell to someone with the same, quite particular, use case. Mine has the same running gear and restricted range, it's perfect for commuting and weekend runabout jobs. We have another car in the family so the range issue is a non issue, we use that for long trips.

Unlikely, they're just becoming more affordable more quickly for people who only need a local runabout.

You can still go cross country if you need to, it just takes a bit more planning and time than in something with longer legs.

jk

I just wish people whose journeys are really quite short would stop using cars and either walk or use 2 wheels. I know that there are those who are unable to do so due to ill health, but mostly it's down to plain laziness.

Not only that, the exercise would keep people healthier longer.

(68 year old who walks, rides a bicycle and also a small motorcycle - as appropriate. And this is after a nasty M/Bike accident that gave me some metal to hold one leg together)

I live in a flat and own an EV. It's fine. The charge cable locks both ends, and cannot be removed. If it is somehow removed, the charger session will stop and won't restart without a new payment. I can get a notification on my phone when the car is charged.  

I do about 30 miles a day in mine. If I were super organised, which I'm not, and charged it each end (still just at 13A from a normal socket) I could do comfortably 50 miles each way for 100 round trip all seasons, rain or shine.

There's a gulf between walkable and *needing* 150+ mile range.

For perspective the average UK car commute is apparently ~20 miles, small/old EV's have plenty of value left in them.

jk

When ours reaches that stage, I would imagine we will add it to the battery storage for the solar. I have no idea how that is done yet, but we can find out when the time comes!

However, recycling of batteries is a thing and it will grow and become more mainstream as more vehicles reach that stage

Sounds like the old days when you had to plan your trips around the locations of coaching inns.
Maybe they could resurrect the idea with charging inns?

This is in respect of 1st gen EVs. We are already past this stage for most cars now.

Our Zoe easily does 200 miles in one go, and that is not a fancy car. I often charge en route because I need to stop anyway to pee/ stretch/ eat. I don't actually need the charge quite often, but if I am away for a few days and I know I will need to charge sometime anyway, then I just do it when I stop for other things. I get bored too easily of driving to do 200 miles non-stop. 

The dogs love the van having a tiny range though as they get so many more walks on the journey!

Charging infrastructure has come on a long way but there's absolutely no way you could fit one in your hand.

Or just have busy lives and/or don't want to arrive at their destination soaking wet.

I think electric scooters needs to be embraced. Doesn't solve the wet issue however. You're not going to stop people making short journey's in cars, but can can give them a cheaper and more convenient option.

Cycle/e-scooter lanes should be the norm.

Well many hotels and AirBnB hosts are adding chargers so you can charge over night. Makes sense and if I'll choose somewhere with a charger over somewhere without all things being equal.

However although some old EVs (not EV's, can we please make this punishable by death?) have limited range, most new ones (so pretty much all future ones) have 300 mile range and rapid charging. Pair that with integrated satnav and internet connectivity and long road trips really aren't a problem.

A couple of weeks ago we drove from Grenoble to Oxfordshire in one go - 1200km, 5 charging stops. We could have done it in 4 but we stopped in line with baby feeding routine. It cost 65€ in electricity (OK we left home on 90% and got to our destination fairly empty).

But ultimately each stop was only around 20-45 minutes. Never once did we have to wait for the car, we needed the break and it was ready to go before we were. We used Tesla superchargers and these were plentiful, reliable, fast, cheap and also connected to our SatNav so we were just routed to the most convenient one, so that we arrived with the optimum level of charge (remember low batteries charge quicker) to minimise time spent charging. If chargers were busy or we used more energy than expected then we automatically got rerouted.

Many of them are also situated in hotel car parks, so a lot more tranquil than service stations (the one at Font had forest and park with goats and ducks where we sat out for a picnic) with restaurants and kid/baby areas so all in all much more civilised.

Obviously not everyone uses Tesla although they're opening up many of their chargers. However the point is that all those Tesla charging stalls represent hundreds of thousands of examples of how charging can work seamlessly and practically for long road journeys and people are just getting on with it. Not everyone has that experience but that's more a sign of the wild west state of charging, and customer lack of familiarity - both of which will improve.

"A couple of weeks ago we drove from Grenoble to Oxfordshire in one go - 1200km, 5 charging stops"

Isn't that an oxymoron ? Isn't that - you did it in 6 goes?

No, just not clear. I meant no overnight stop. Just the equivalent of stopping for petrol. 

If you live in a city 99 times out of 100 it is quicker to cycle than drive. And we have this thing called waterproof jackets and trousers. Maybe try them sometime. 

Regardless, there are plenty of non-Tesla chargers around which allow you to do exactly the same thing. Personally I like to stop every 2-2.5 hours anyway, which perfectly aligns with the 220-300km range my car has between 20 and 80%. It's invariably charged by the time I've been to the bathroom and stretched a bit. I agree with you the need for such charging stops vs a petrol/diesel car is a non-issue - nobody should be driving for the 4+ hours straight it takes to empty one. 

I spent over twenty years (until redundancy) cycling to work across town, throughout all weathers, and including floods. Waterproofs (and wellies) proved perfectly adequate for arriving dry, and the exercise did me good.

Unfortunately due to a combination of increased age, a leg bolted together, and a new job with increased distance (and over a hill) means I can no longer cycle to work.

I really do think far too many people nowadays are just plain lazy - or maybe they're just wimps.

Commercial drivers work 4.5hrs straight. Have a break then do it again. I often enough drive 600km without stopping.

Ye and let's not overlook the fact that driving and ev is considerably less taxing than a ice. Set the cruise control to 65 and sit back while the car steers itself down the inner lane. Just a pity that my ev can only achieve 160 miles 

Why would driving an EV be less taxing. Adaptive cruise control and self steering aren't limited to EVs.

It's a subtle hint that one UKC'ers concept of what is humanly achievable (or even normal) isn't actually reality. In the season our forager driver normally works 18 hour shifts and that is neither relaxing nor do we expect him to screw up a half a million quids worth of machinery.

+1 for that.. cars should be banned in cities except for the infirm or vulnerable. Fortunately in Southampton at least we are moving away from the car. The hospital operates a park and ride, the uni has no parking and my employee has embraced wfh and has been able to release half of it's parking bays. 

Exceptionally quiet and smooth ride and driving with regenerative breaking is incredibly nice compared to brakes or engine breaking.  The ensemble makes them so very nice for long distance stuff, which is ironic given their more limited range.  

5 x 20-45min motorway stops for a trip across France still seems like purgatory to me, being used to 1 fuel stop and a driver change, although I haven’t got to cater for babies, dogs, weak bladder, bad back, emails etc! And there’s the finding charging at the other end – Airbnb, parking at the head of a valley etc.  

I think we have different ideas of what constitutes purgatory. I find with pretty much every objection to EVs (range, cost, charging etc) people's worry about those issue largely evaporates once they experience the reality. 

It's also the 1% issue. I admit that those charge stops are mildly more inconvenient than with petrol but the rest of the 99% of the time I spend with my car there's no comparison. 

I think that very much depends on what you mostly use your car for.

I hired an EV on holiday recently; it was certainly lovely to drive, and I'd like to think I will never buy another ICE vehicle, but I think the limitations are still more than mild inconvenience.

We have two vehicles, a car and a van.

My partner uses the car for work, it rarely goes long distance, and buying a BEV when it needs replacing seems a no brainer. We have solar panels and cheap overnight tariff, so the car would rarely need anything other than being plugged in at home.

I used to live full time in the van, now I'm housed and cycling to work/gym/shops it mostly sits outside waiting for long weekends and holidays, where i'll be loading up with rack, bikes, surfboards, etc., and driving a long way. 

If the only thing a vehicle for is long runs, it means a significant amount of time charging. Especially if you want to carry heavy loads. If I had £70k spare I could get an electric Citroen Relay, but I would be stopping every hour or so at motorway speeds.

I still think a comprehensive green hydrogen production and distribution system for HFEVs is what will really bridge us from ICE to Fusion for low carbon personal transport.

This is certainly true from my N=1 sample. I have had to occasionally queue for chargers and I'd like to see a bit more consistency in pricing but I wouldn't go back.

I recently had to revert to a manual 6 speed Kia whilst the e-tron was getting some work done. It's amazing how quickly you get used to the instantaneous response of an electric drive train.

Hydrogen is lunacy vs battery electric, the end to end efficiency is horrible. Unless there is a huge breakthrough in production efficiency, making it almost free, I just don't see it being competitive for road transport, it creates as many issues and it solves and many of those are largely imagined anyway.

For sea and air transport the advantages of chemical fuel are harder to overlook. I still doubt it'll be H2 that wins the synthetic fuel race though.

Jk

I would expect a £50k+ car to be a nicer drive than say a £2k one, but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's beyond any comparison with any petrol car!  

The efficiency is horrible, but you get the convenience of an ICE with the ease of driving benefits of a BEV and zero emissions at the point of use.

We have enough sun, wind and tide in the north sea to generate huge amounts of electricity, there's plenty of water around to generate hydrogen from, there are empty oil and gas reservoirs to use as storage, and a network of pipes to deliver it to shore. We could create an environmentally sustainable solution if we wanted to.

IMO we need huge breakthroughs whatever way we go, but convenience is a tricky barrier to overcome - I think that if we suck up the cost of development HFEV will give us a system that overcomes the convenience barrier.

“But you get the convenience” - not without the largely absent filling infrastructure!  Meanwhile, BEV recharge rates keep increasing, as do battery capacities, ever reducing the convenience gap from ICE; a gap that doesn’t really exist for many BEV users who can fill up at home.  Who’d want to swap from home charging to going to a filling station?

The ongoing incremental improvement of battery technology continues with no end in sight.  There’s a deep and wide pipeline of battery development and it’s looking healthy at all stages.  Aluminium ion continues progress, and can be transformative in cost, mineral usage and energy density (range).

Horrible efficiency of H2 means many times more power being consumed than is needed for BEV.  Under no circumstance imaginable does using way more power speed up decarbonisation.

Indeed, my point was that we should invest in the infrastructure if we want to fully decarbonise our roads, sorry if they wasn't clear.

EVs are still doing a fairly low percentage of the miles driven on our roads. The infrastructure required to switch everything to BEV will be huge. Hydrogen fuel stations could take the same sort of footprint as petrol stations. If we all switched to EV tomorrow, vast tracts of land by motorways would need to be set aside for charging stations.

It still exists for anyone who mostly drives long distances, road freight, large vehicles (lots of campervan drivers on this forum), etc.

If we want large, long distance vehicles to decarbonise, we need more than incremental changes, we need a proper game changer.

Perhaps you're constrained by imagination then. How about vast amounts of solar energy being harvested in space, beamed down to electrolysis plants for hydrogen fuel for long distance transport, and distribution to BEVs for inner city driving? 

Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.

I can imagine that’ll be easier than bumping new battery chemistries up a TRL or 4, but it wouldn’t make me right.

Oh no, how will you cope with a small change in patterns which adds to your safety, the safety of others, and drops your fossil fuel use? But a less sardonic and more honest question: how do you go 4.5 hours without needing to piss?

Your driver needs a better employer

Most people go the whole night without emptying their bladder.

Rare for me, these days. A piss bottle discretely stashed gave good service during my spell van driving 

Show off.

Well yeah, incomplete emptying of the bladder is one of the downsides of getting older, that prostate just keeps getting bigger! Having had half a dozen operations on some of the bits down there in the past years and regular check-ups it's always interesting when the urologist tells you how much urine is left in there. I was prescribed Tamsulosin which helps turn the tap on fully!

Can't say there was ever a time in my life that having a piss was long enough to charge a car up either!

The fastest, cheapest and easiest way to decarbonise is a greater focus on plug in hybrids.

Small batteries mean that limited resources using current battery chemistry will be available to circa 6X more cars (since plug in hybrids can get away with 6x less battery capacity).

All small and local journeys can be on electric only.

Longer journeys will be unaffected.

In the background slowly increase the proportion of the fuel that uses synthetic fuel from green sources.  

As the battery tech improves further, sales will naturally lean towards EVs as the range and battery costs issues slowly reduce.

It also introduces the fearful anti EV group to EV's in a package they will be comfortable with.

Many often argue that the infrastructure for hydrogen is achievable as we've done it before, but with petrol and diesel a hundred years ago. The difference here was that a horse wasn't a viable alternative for the end user.  Given that hydrogen won't be a game changer for the end user, they are not going to put up with the inconvenience and infrastructure costs.

isn't this exactly what is happening at the moment? +1 vote for the world as it is.

Hybrids sales are due to be banned in 11 years. I doubt EVs will be at a price point, or have the battery tech that they will be suitable for everyone by then. EV sales are falling quite rapidly. Early adopters where the use case worked, and the price wasn't an issue are running out it seems.

plenty of time then to adjust if batteries aren't forthcoming then hybrids will remain. My understanding is that a hybrid can achieve 100mpg which is a damned sight better than anything else other than battery electric (here I assume that Green Hydrogen is just greenwashing for the fossil fuel industry)

I've never understood the argument for hybrids, they're the worst of both worlds. They had their place (back in the Prius days) when they helped boost MPG but we literally have a proven, practical alternative with BEV after 130 years of tinkering with the ICE.

I hope we'll have a better alternative within my lifetime, BEV isn't perfect but if we were inventing cars today we wouldn't design them to be powered by a finite resource drilled out of the ground in autocracies, refined and shipped across the world at great expense and environmental costs, then ship it to places you literally had to drive to (burning more of it) to manually fill it up. I'll have to explain this to my 4 month old daughter one day and I hope she'll see it as a quaint historical relic when we're watching films a bit like landlines and cassette tapes. 

If most of your journeys can be done on the battery of a hybrid, then you obviously have a lifestyle that suits BEV anyway. It's the whole "I couldn't possibly wait 15 minutes on my drive up to see Auntie Doris" brigade that worry about 'long' journeys - forgetting that the car is charging while you're doing all those other ancillary things like food, stretching your legs etc. How far can you actually drive in the UK without dropping off into the sea anyway?

A modern BEV puts zero, to marginal extra time onto the longest of journeys. Carrying around an excess tank of fuel or battery just seems a waste of resources. 

They're also a pain for BEV owners as people plug them onto slow chargers here, hogging power more critical to someone in a BEV. 

Essentially they're just an excuse to carry on selling ICE cars and they're the desperate last gasp of the vested interests that have done so well with the world of private transport barely changing over the last 130 years. 

I would argue they offer the best of both worlds.

This is true for most people. I'm sure I've read that 90% of miles (or journeys, can't remember) are local trips. But it's the 10% that ends up dictating which car you buy. You're not going to drop £35k on a new car tat only meets 90% of your reequipments.

I think you're missing the point where we simply don't have access to enough raw materials to make all new cars electric using current technology unless you drastically reduce the battery sizes (even then, we probably still fall short). If you reduce battery sizes so much, that they wouldn't appeal to the masses (unless you add an engine and fuel tank, which we  already have a supply chain for all the parts and materials).

An ICE is only a viable alternative until it is banned from the roads. 

A mixture of BEV (cheaper to run) and HFEV (more practical for heavy loads and long distance) on the roads would allow us to cover all use cases and get rid of the horse.

I don't think they'll ever be banned. You can still drive a 130 year old steam powerd tractor on the road if you can stomach the coal bill. 

It will be the same with petrol/diesel, only that fuel will continue to get more expensive so they won't be a daily drive.

This will never happen. hydrogen trucks will cost twice as much as EV trucks to buy (fuel cells are silly expensive due to precious metals in them), and cost three times as much to run due to the inefficiency of hydrogen.

Whilst I don't think on will happen, I'd bet on continuous under road wireless charging before hydrogen. £7B to convert all national highways (based on £1.6M per mile). It could be done, but would be a hell of commitment from the government.

My wife bought a new car this year, a Fiat 500e was €9300 more expensive than a Fiat 500 mild hybrid, she will have to drive 147,619km at the current petrol price before she saved up enough to be ripped-off at the first charging station. She is unlikely to live long enough on the annual mileage she manages.

As Montyjohn says for many users it's the 10% that makes the decision, I drive two or three times a week a round journey of 48km and in the middle have half a day to charge for free. BUT some weekends and the holidays I'm doing round trips between 450km and 2000km and what I'm carrying I'd need a van (or tow a trailer) which with a BEV is just a joke, both time-wise and financially and at a ludicrous capital cost compared with my current wheels.

And no I don't cycle to work, I walk and I heat my house with renewable wood from a local forest which is processed using surplus renewable energy.

is that really how car decision are usally made? personally I decide how much money is available (X) and then decide which one of the available cars at that price point I want to buy. 

so for X > 10,000Euros  do I compromise a bit on style, status and comfort and very occasional range in favour of not emitting particulates into the city I live in , and also in favour of reducing the climate heating impact afaik, and in favour of choosing a car that is not likely to go wrong in so many ways as a ICE. Yes of course I do.

but if your wife is dead set on a Fiat 500 then she's going to have a hard time justifying the extra 9300 euros. 

However, if I can find a BEV at my price point then by being flexible I am definately going to be able to save, over its lifetime,  a considerable amount of money by going BEV.

It was red and cute. Sold.

If you had gone for used, which is better environmentally whether you are going with ICE or BEV, then the 500e seems to be only about £3000 more ( on the ones which just popped up on my first google search. Maybe better deals when looking around). First one which popped up was a 24 plate with fewer than 3000 miles on the clock for just under £13k. That doesn't seem like silly money to me for what is essentially a brand new car!!

I had nothing to do with it's purchase.

Fair enough. But it still illustrates the point that cost really needn't be a particular barrier to EV adoption if you would be buying a newish car anyway. 

Have you seen the state of the roads at present ?

The likelihood that any under surface electricity source would be exposed to the elements - and hence a major danger, let alone producing a power cut - must surely be heading towards 100%.

Oh it’s great way of getting research funding for academics in the field too…

I expect synthetic hydrocarbons will have a bigger role for heavy/long distance transport (any medium) than hydrogen, less inefficient to make, much cleaner burning (less polluting) than fossil hydrocarbons because the fractions and non-hydrocarbon content are tightly controlled and, unlike hydrogen, 100% compatible with all existing fossil burning engines (ICE and aero and naval turbines) and 100% compatible with all current distribution networks.  There is a massive infrastructure cost needed for widespread H2 distribution and filling, and a massive vehicle (road) or power plant (air/sea) replacement program to be able to use it.

Assuming it uses carbon capture from power plants or the atmosphere it seems like a no brainer.  A much lower roll out cost and it can gracefully decline with the gradual end of combustion engines.  Also good news for people with collectible vehicles…

Another solution I’ve seen for HGVs is smart auto-guided pantographs - suddenly the vehicles aren’t laden with either a high fuel mass or high battery mass.  

Although liquid hydrogen has a place in air breathing hypersonic in-atmosphere flight perhaps where the coldness of liquid hydrogen is critical to pre-cooling the intake air…

There’s an Abarth 500e now.  I’m going to watch the used prices with keen interest…

You would only need it on trunk roads. Our motorways aren't filled with potholes. It's local roads that are falling apart and there's no point spending the money to electrify local roads when car batteries can easily handle that part of the journey.

Fossil fuels are much cheaper per litre than coffee or bottled water even after transporting across the world at ‘great’ expense.

An elongated stop for 'petrol', several times , surely?

Somebody still needs to buy the new version at full price though for you to be able to buy second hand, so that's not really a very good argument.

I see no shortage of people rolling around in absurdly expensive new cars of all sorts, often parked outside homes they're cost comparable with. While people are willing to burn their money on the never never to have something flashy (or less so but still new and daft money to me) parked outside there will be a healthy pipeline of heavily depreciated used vehicles. The only real disruption we've seen to this in decades was the pandemic and the follow on semiconductor crunch.

jk

The A38 is a trunk road, and I use it daily going to and from work, amongst other things.

There are a rather noticeable number of potholes and gashes (where 2 loads of tarmac were put down separately), particularly at junctions. This road is also where everybody escapes to whenever the M5 is blocked due to an "incident", so frequently becomes the only route for traffic.

I agree, but the vehicles still cost more than the equivalent ICE version when new. 

Ours was a former lease vehicle. I think that's not uncommon. 

Also, some people like to flash the cash and will happily pay silly money for a new car. I have never understood why anyone buys new, whether ICE or battery, as they lose value so quickly. But there always have been people who do and therefor I can buy second hand.

Each to their own!

If I had more money than I knew what to do with I'd buy a new car. What baffles me is juniors at work, who I know earn significantly less than me buying new cars. 

How can they justify such a significant chunk of their salary going on a car when there's an option to buy second hand.

That's a lot of holidays or a house deposit just to have a new car.

Newest car I ever bought was 11 years old. I still have it and it's now 18 years old. So maybe I go too far the other way.

So what? The point is people are both willing and enabled by existing financial products to spend silly money on cars. ICE vehicles are being phased out by regulation, change is coming. Also, prices of modest BEVs are likely to fall in real terms as the Chinese makers gain market share and as battery pack size inflation stabilises or even reverses in response to improving infrastructure and sustainable charge rates.

jk