Phone & car battery charging situations are different.

I typically charge my phone when it is down to 5-10% (if I'm at home). If having to go out, I know I can charge it inside car.

I would not go out in an EV with 5% charge remaining. When I refuel my car, I always fill up to full tank. The time it takes from 80% to 100% full is just few seconds - not something EVs can match, yet.

EV’s don’t like sitting at sustained higher speeds

Government should re-introduce motorail scheme where EV owners can carry (& charge) their cars inside freight trains to reach their destination with full charge.

This is a short video (under 6 minutes) explaining why China is marching ahead on EV.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW_SXIVQT5I

The summary is, Europe was expert in making ICE engines while China is way ahead in making batteries.

Just come across the latest data from Tesla (they’ve the largest data set of all EV manufacturers) and it’s showing a 15% degradation after 200,000 miles in their Models 3 and Y. The earlier Models S and X, interestingly, fared a little better at a 12% loss. It’s working out at approximately 1% per 13,333 miles, or 1% every 53 theoretical full charge cycles (based on 250 miles per charge cycle). A car in Europe is recycled after, on average, 150,000 miles. If anyone fancies a bit of light reading, here’s their impact report - www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2023-tesla-impact-report.p...f

I wonder how much of that data is skewed towards the huge historical market in the US, particularly California where miles driven is far larger than in Europe and under nice warm sunny skies? The report doesn't exactly give the breakdown, especially as most Telsas in Europe have been made/bought in the last few years.

Apparently (from what I read a couple of years ago, if I recall) over in the US there are still problems sourcing spare parts for older Teslas, where supposedly 'dealerships' also give customers owning them the cold shoulder at the 10 year mark, refusing to maintain them.

Sound to me a bit like what happens with household white goods, computers, tablets and mobile phones. That was one of Jeremy Clarkson's biggest gripes about EVs, aside from them being 'soleless' - saying that they are rather like household white goods.

Ironically with such things, nowadays they appear to have smaller lifespans 'designed in' to encourage people to buy replacements, which is hardly 'green'.

What would be far better, especially for EVs, is for them to be very 'modular' so that you could 'swap out' broken or 'tired' old components, even a body shell and the interior, whereby the old parts would be (hopefully easily) recycled.

I suspect we're still quite a way away from that, especially as many components (like the batteries) are incredibly labour and energy intensive to recycle, not helped by many parts using rare earth metals hoarded by few and/or very unpleasant nations, and or mined using slave/child labour and/or in terrible working conditions.

The smaller Merc we have can do 160/170 miles driven well, or 110/120 driven badly, attitude makes a huge difference.

What's the range of a 'normal' (diesel ICE) bus of that size for comparison. 170 miles doesn't look that far for a bus route over a day

I'm surprised that (non battery, but electric) trams and trolley buses haven't ever been considered again as an alternative, which then would remove the issue of battery fires, range and charging, battery life and replacement cost issues.

I mean, it's not as though anyone at this point is considering battery electric trains.

As a side note, I remember back in my days at university working on an ongoing project to design a flywheel-powered bus, rather like a 'hot wheels' toy car, charged up at each bus stop. If I recall, it appeared to be better suited to areas with lighter traffic levels and more space for the equipment at the roadside than really congested cities with little space. Still...

The addition of all those solar panels made it look top heavy to me. Un-seaworthy.

On the topic of electric buses, London has a new "IETRAM" Bus which is fully charged overnight at the garage but gets a topup at the end of each trip from a specially adapted bus stop. The stop has a pantograph arm which swings over the bus and provides enough charge in about 6 min for the next 15.7 mile trip (longest of TfL's routes).

Edited by misar on 15/12/2024 at 16:46