Tag: Electric Cars

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Electric car myths: Mike Parry spouting rubbish to Jeremy Vine – Useful as the electroheads do a good job of putting it right (if your hesitant to buy an electric car – this should help)

Jeremy Vine should know better. Mike Parry is an english broadcaster and journalist, I do not know how good a journalist he was, but if he had given his answers in writing for a newspaper article, he should have been fired as it is all rubbish. Look below for a list of the myths and a short outline of the rebuttal (watch the video for the full information)

  • Politicians invented the electric car as a half way house to getting rid of all cars- apart from the absurdity of suggesting that politicians (UK politicians at that) invented the electric car to help control us and get rid of cars is ridiculous. Apart from anything, the electric car was invented in 1832, so they have left it a long time. Furthermore, if politicians were putting their finger on the scales, perhaps they would have stopped combustion engines in the first place. we are unfortunately almost 200 years since the invention of the electric car and just 0.4% of worldwide cars are electric. In 1900 38% of cars were electric in the USA, it is only underhand behaviour that got rid of them (in the same way that the EV1 disappeared in the USA in the 1990s
  • All electric cars require cobalt, and all cobalt is mined by children – obviously false. It is true that in artisan mining in places like the DRC child labour is involved, however more cobalt is used in de-leading petrol. In other words, the combustion engine market is requiring more child labour for mining the cobalt. Furthermore, being expensive, most if not all car companies have reduced or taken care to buy from the right places. Tesla has removed cobalt from its batteries entirely.
  • “Batteries are heavy, electric cars twice the weight of combustion engine cars” – this is rubbish. The video could not find a single car park which had banned electric vehicles. Experts have suggested that heavy cars may require stronger car parks etc. however the simple fact is that all cars have got heavier. The Nissan quashqui is 1600kg, and while a tesla 3 is about 150kg more a bolt weighs less. Furthermore, given the move towards SUVs, the average car has got far heavier. No car park in the UK has banned electric cars from their whole car park (though some have banned from specific sensitive areas).
  • On a similar vein, he suggested that tyres would get shredded into the air, and therefore create particulates. While all cars do slowly wear down, Kwik fit has found that tyres are lasting longer on electric cars. Also using the break pads less (regenerative breaking does much of the work) means less particulates from this, which is thought to produce the majority of the dangerous particulates in the air.
  • Not enough chargers – It is true that it takes more planning to drive an electric car, however it should be remembered that the majority of people charge at home, while they sleep. As such far from having to wait for a charger, it takes less than 30 seconds when you get home to plug in, and 30 seconds to unplug in the morning. It is true that the situation is not the same for everyone – I drive a 2014 tesla, and charging on the go is incredibly simple. The video shows a supercharger stop with a long line of cars, but this is incredibly rare. The car knows when you need a charge, and if you are on a journey that will need a charging stop, it will place it on its route – given they are all their chargers, it also knows which chargers are in use, so generally will reroute you on, to a less busy charger. I think I have only waited for a charger once or twice in over 2 years of driving.
  • Suck all the electricity out of the grid – this is just stupid. Apart from the fact that this is not how chargers work, Were everyone in the UK driving electric cars, their electricity demand would account for roughly 1/3 of UK electricity. While this seems a lot, it is far less energy which is consumed by combustion engines. Through simple time of use charging of electric cars, demand is moved to low use times, like the middle of the night. It is true that if there is 100% adoption, we will need a few more power plants (or indeed a few hundred more wind turbines). The fact of the matter is that while Mike Parry might believe that he is the first to come up with this issue, he is not, and mitigation is already in place. He suggested we would need 10 new nuclear power stations to run the cars.
  • Largest lithium mine in peoples bottom drawer – this is simply stupid. The Tesla s p85d has 7104 batteries in it, so to put this in perspective, if every house in the UK had one of these in a bottom drawer, we would have enough batteries for 3998 tesla s. Even if we were generous, and said that all the cars were tiny with half the battery size, we are still talking about only 8000 cars. Given the UK has sold between roughly 2 million and 3 million cars each year (over the last few years) this means that we would have the batteries for between 0.33% and 0.5% of the batteries required – not to be sneezed at, but not going to make a big difference.
  • Slow charge from a 3 pin socket – this story started talking about someone who bought an Ipace, and was bothered by the fact that its battery took 2 days to charge. Now, if you have jaguar money, you can easily buy a wall connector, which will charge your car overnight – in other words another issue. Of course it charges slowly from a 3 pin socket, an electric car does require a lot of power (moving people does require a lot of power) but far less than the alternative combustion engine car
  • “the battery takes 45 minutes to charge and then 100 miles later bang its empty” – this is another absurd lie. Our car is over 10 years old, we still have 200 miles of range on our car. Do we ever charge for 45 minutes on the road? no, our average charge is perhaps 20 minutes. Shortly after buying mine, I drove to north-west Spain. Most of my charging stops were 10-20 minutes, and generally I was ready for a break. Have we had to change how we drive, well yes, because before a long road trip would only include stops to charge and go to the loo, however on that long journey, I was probably only stopped for an extra hour or so on what I might have stopped, and anyone wanting to eat on route or with children would have needed to stop anyway. It may well mean you have to stop at specific motorway rest-stops but this does not seem a big sacrifice. Now, here is one place where your choice of electric car is important. Should we buy another electric car at some point, we would look for another Tesla. This is because they are so efficient, they have fantastic range. If you have a car which can drive over 200 miles (many can do over 300 miles, the most recent tesla S can do over 400 on a single charge) how often will you actually have to charge on the go? I know there are people who do crazy drives across Europe (as someone who has in the last 15 years driven to Romania Sweden North west spain and Croatia) and therefore will drive more than 400 miles in a day, but it really is not a big hardship to pull into a rest-stop and go have a bite to eat (after all, most people at this point are on holiday).

A further misleading video came from Rowan Atkinson a while ago. As such, while I am writing this article, I thought I would include a dissemination of this video as well

  • Electric car batteries only last 10 years – rubbish. Our car is 10 years old, and it has lost around 10% of its range. This still gives the car over 200 miles of range. It should be noted that the initial article stated that electric cars only last about 10 years, but it was changed to say electric car batteries last upward of 10 years. The article had another 4 big changes, which change what it meant – it is too late. Furthermore, even after taking them out of a car they then have a second and often third life.
  • Greenhouse gas emissions when making electric cars are 70% higher than combustion engine cars (this was changed just 5 days later) – a Volvo stat produced for a COP in 2021. Unfortunately this figure does not take into account carbon payback (or improvements, which are reducing this extra carbon). The so called carbon debt will almost always payback long before the death of the car. Some payback periods can be as low as 6 months. Comparing a long range tesla 3 to a BMW 3 series, the tesla would have to drive 13000 to reach carbon equality, which took less than a year. On a cleaner grid ti can come as low as 8400 miles. If 100% of your electricity comes from coal power plants it takes around 78,000miles ( in other words during the lifetime). On a UK electricity mix, an electric car will emit around 1/3 of the carbon of a combustion engine car over the full lifetime of the vehicle from manufacture to end of life. I should note, that our car was already carbon negative compared to a combustion engine car when we bought. So long as the car lasts 7 years, its cost will also be lower than we would have spent on petrol over the same period
  • the car park claim comes up again (look above to see my explanation as this came up in the last article).
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Electric cars roundup: recent news

For a variety of reasons, over the last few months, I have not written as often as I would like. As such, I have accumulated quite a few articles that I wish to mention. While the animal articles require their own space, others do not. As such, this post will include electric car news from all over the world. Dates are a little muddled (and may be relatively out of date), and it is possible that with some of these, changes have been made. We are working hard on improving the website, which is taking much of our time, we hope to have a breakthrough soon. Below is a list of articles written, click on read more to read each of the articles listed.

-The Tesla s P100D has a 0-60 time of 2.28 seconds

–Department of Transport in the UK has a new scheme which will help with the cost of installing charging points in places like schools and similar

 –China wants us to buy its electric cars

  –2023 best selling car was the Tesla model Y 

 –A new possible battery breakthrough would both cut the cost of batteries, and bring down the length of time it would take to charge to something similar to that of filling up a petrol or diesel tank 

 –when will all UK cars be pure electric 

–Volkswagen is loosing the electric car race to China and Tesla 

–EU has set a target of 30 million electric cars on its roads by 2030

 –The Chinese government is promising to rein in the number of electric cars its companies are making, so as to not flood the west

–Freezing temperature are known for reducing electric car range, caused long queues for charging  

 –Autocar published an article looking at how green electric cars actually are

–Paris Mayor plans to triple SUV parking tariffs to cut air pollution

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Ford has made clear its aim to take on Tesla and BYD by launching cheap electric cars

Is this news to anyone? It is known that the car industry is in a race to move to electric. Given the vast saving for the end line consumer, the huge reduction in pollution, and the fact that many countries have already set dates where combustion engine car sales will be banned, surely the response to this news is ” why have you not made this move before?

What is clear, is that ford is developing a smaller and cheaper EV platform. Well this is great, but everyone is trying to create small affordable electric cars.

Now, how many of these small cars is ford aiming to sell? Currently, ford makes a $28,000 loss on each electric cars. Which means that they need to bring this down, or 2 million electric cars sold my ford would cause a huge loss.

Tesla is making progress on their own cheap model – the so called tesla model 2. This is aimed to hit the target of $25,000, or around £18,000, and they are expecting to make millions of this model, which does not seem unreasonable.

We need to remember, that while we look on ford as an old car company (and they are) at the current moment, they are not bigger than tesla. So in 2023 tesla sold 1.81 million vehicles, all electric, while ford sold 1.99 million, however only 72,000 of these were electric. If in the future, only electric cars count, then perhaps we should already be looking at ford as the minnow in a pond with a huge shark that is tesla. If we look at profit, this might make this clearer, Ford made profits of $4.3 billion, while Tesla made profits of 15 billion.

So, is Ford a tiny electric car maker, or not? Is it going to become one of the most profitable electric car makers, or is it going to become a small car maker? Time will tell, however, the problem is that the 2 million small electric cars that ford says its is targeting, is also the same number that Tesla is going to be targeting. Can the world demand sustain 2 million from each? Possibly, in the future, but Ford may well find that diving into the pond of small Electric cars is a hard place to make money, and finding enough demand for 2 million electric cars may well prove to be the harder part of the transition.

Time will tell, but they certainly have their work cut out for them.

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Should Hertz dumping 20,000 electric cars be a warning to car buyers?

So Hertz is downsizing its electric car fleet, just a few years after buying them. Should this put off electric car buyers? Well, I would argue no, and I suspect that Hertz will live to regret this day.

So have Hertz abandoned electric cars? Nope, it is true that in the current climate, they have scaled back their electric buying car program from 100,000 cars to just 50,000 cars, but this is still a significant number.

Given that in the USA they own around 500,000 cars (elsewhere it is mostly franchise so they do not own the cars) suggesting that at the current time, Hertz will have around 10% of its fleet as electric.

What has prompted this? Well, largely a higher cost of repair cost.

The problem for Hertz is simple. They get paid a rate, to rent the car, they save nothing by it being electric, on the other hand, the renter, might save plenty of money, as refueling can be far cheaper (though admittedly, with currently high electric prices on this side of the Atlantic, public chargers are often just as expensive as petrol.

So, no, this does not (as business insider suggests) mean the end of the electric car. In fact, given that they are selling around 20,000 electric cars, it is quite likely that it will boost the number of electric cars in public hands.

It is true, that some fixes are far more than they should be (we have found that) but it is also clear that overall, electric car owners save money. Whether this will accelerate the change or slow it down, time will tell. It is often the case that once experienced few want to go back to a fossil fuel car, so renting them is useful. Unfortunately, given the price, Hertz treated them as premium, which meant this had less affect than might otherwise have been the case.

I think they will come to regret this, the world is going electric, and the transition is accelerating around the world. It seems likely that they will have to reverse this change within a decade.

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“EU must cut carbon emissions 3 times faster to meet targets”

A new report has calculated that the EU is only cutting carbon emissions at 1/3 of the rate which is required in order to meet the 55% cut – from buildings, transport and agriculture by 2030

While emissions are falling, they are not falling anywhere near fast enough

Over the last 30 years, carbon emissions have dropped by 32% . while this is an impressive amount, it is far short of the promise.

The best predictions for the future, are that by 2050 the EU will have cut emissions by around 43%. While this is an important step, it is far short of what has been promised.

More importantly, at the current rate, we will have only met a further 1/3 by 2050.

The job is not done – much of the carbon emissions from the last 3 decades have been easy to achieve. They have been achieved through efficiency gains, and moving production offshore. Very little change in the EU behaviour has been required.  

An easy gain, both for individual cost, and emissions is electric cars. A faster transition is likely to save countries much money too (though it is true that at the current time, there is an issue with the tax revenue coming from fossil fuel sales.

It is far cheaper to run clean alternatives, so we must make that show in the figures.

Some governments are making efforts to help, but not in every way. For instance, in the UK, you can get money towards an electric car, but not a used one (which given the reduction in price, is likely to go further and help more. On heat pump the government is doing better – with the increase in the air-source heat pump grant, the cost to individuals has reduced to around 3500 (on average buying a heat-pump as well as installing and changing radiators to work with the lower temperature (bigger) the cost is around £11,000. However, many people have missed the advertising, and are unaware. It is true that new build homes will not be allowed to install boilers after 2025. 

However, older houses with gas boilers will be unaffected by the change until 2035. But the average cost for a new boiler, plus installation is thought to be around £4000, in 2023, meaning that for many homes, it will be cheaper to replace now.

Furthermore, while an air-source heat pump is thought to be around £50 more to run each year, should something like a thermal solar panel be added, the cost is far lower.

With carefully designed rules for builders, the switch to low cost private transport, and low cost private house heating can be cheap and obvious. At the current rate, though, this is not being met.

In the UK, clearly better understanding and education is essential, and builders need to see that adding things like thermal solar panels is a must.

Will it happen? will the EU meet our 55% target? at current speed, it is clear that this will be hard work. However, if this money is not found, we are likely to need far more in the future to adapt to the world we are creating.

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Is the COP conferences a waste of time, if climate change deniers are able to lead it?

At the current time, countries in the region in which the COP is held will chose a president. In theory, that is fine, however, in practice if this is going to continue then the middle east should be banned from hosting the conference.

So, what precisely did Sultan Al Jaber say, which was so troubling?

Firstly, he claimed that a ‘phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves'”.

He then claimed that there is ‘no science’ to suggest phasing out fossil fuels is the only way to achieve 1.5C.

After being laughed at, over this utterly insane statment, he suggested that the comment had been misinterpreted. It should be noted, that this was in response to a question from a woman, which he was relatively rude about.

Do you think this woman misunderstood?

He even had the gall to suggest that the misrepresentation was undermining his desire to reduce carbon emissions (perhaps if this is true, it can start with his huge fossil fuel company can show this?). More than 100 countries are already supportive of this.

The worlds uptake of electric cars must accelerate. This is partly underway – last year around 67 million cars were sold, but 14% of these were electric, up from just 9% the previous year. The uptake is accelerating.

It should also be noted that apart from extreme heat in the UAE, continued global warming will also damage the UAE in extreme ways. The UAE economy is 0.5% of the global economy, in the end, places like this may refuse to accept the end of oil, and will have to be bankrupted, as cars move to 100% and many other industries clean up their act.

 

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Europe is heading towards it net zero goal but electric car costs might be a stumbling block

While an increasingly large number of people are switching to electric cars, there is a growing concern that this change is not happening fast enough.

Currently the EU sells 10 times more electric cars than just 6 years ago, which is impressive, so what is the concern.

Might this be the future of motorway rest stops?

For many people, they believe that their next car will be electric, but a large portion of people are awaiting a big crash in prices. This forgets two things, firstly that with electric cars, much more of the cost comes at the beginning, so it may well be that electric cars are always slightly more expensive. One of the things being learnt is that it is not enough to incentivise electric cars, you also have to disincentivise combustion engine cars.

There are places where this is working well, such as central London, which has a congestion charge, but this is not charged on electric cars. It is true that this is going to end soon, but still should give a reduction for those driving electric cars. However, it means that in places like South Kensington, the number of electric cars is shooting up.

There are a variety of help across Europe, with Romania offering over 11,000 to help, or France having a scheme for poorer households to allow them to rent an electric car for only 100 euros a month.

The dramatic rise in electricity prices since the start of the invasion in Ukraine has also not helped, as if there is not cheap electricity at night, the saving are far lower than they used to be. Will Europe hit its targets? I think there is still work to be done, but it is certainly moving rapidly in the right direction. I look forwards to every motorway stop being like the all electric gridserve (look at the fullycharged episode below).

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The UK has said that pure petrol and diesel cars will be banned from sale – impact? Electric cars are increasingly affordea

Arguments against electric cars continue, from suggestions that the range they have is not high enough, the batteries do not last long enough, they are worse for the environment, they will break down too much or there isn’t enough choice as well as many more.

Would you rather fill up with petrol or electricity?
Continue reading “The UK has said that pure petrol and diesel cars will be banned from sale – impact? Electric cars are increasingly affordea”
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AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true

So at the current time, tesla charges 50p per kwh (for almost everyone charging at home will account for most, so supercharging probably only accounts for about 10% but we will look at this later).

How does this compare? in the UK fuel is currently 165p for diesel and 147p for petrol.

Now one needs to compare like for like – it is unreasonable to compare a tesla s with a fiat punto, these are not comparable cars. So We will do it car by car. Please note, as teslas are only every electric, I will be comparing them to their nearest petrol BMW competitor – BMW does have electric cars in competition – though generally these get lower miles per kwh.

As such, I have compared the 4 main tesla cars to their nearest equivalent BMW (fair warning lots of numbers below

Continue reading “AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true”
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Resolution to ban the sale of electric cars in Wyoming from 2035 effectively dead

A group of republican state lawmakers introduced a resolution that called for the sale of electric cars to be phased out by 2035. Apparently, the resolutions sponsor does not want them banned (in which case a very poorly worded resolution) he just wanted to make a statement about the phasing out of gas-powered vehicles in other states.

So why was all this undertaken? Apparently a group of the states republican lawmakers are aiming to safeguard the oil and gas industries.

It was suggested that the bill would hinder the states ability to trade with other states “Wyoming’s vast stretches of highway, coupled with the lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, make the widespread use of electric vehicles impracticable for the state” so the bill stated.

This is frankly stupid: at the moment there is little charging infrastructure, because there are few electric cars. However, the ban is intended to come into force in 2035 which is roughly 2 whole car cycles into the future. Do these people really believe that there wont be more charging infrastructure by then?

Among the reason cited are the following:

  • Batteries used in electric vehicles could contain critical minerals whose “domestic supply is limited and at risk for disruption”
  • Minerals used in electric batteries are not easily recyclable or disposable, meaning that municipal landfills in the state could be required to develop practices to dispose of these minerals in a safe and responsible manner
  • The proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will have deleterious impacts on Wyoming’s communities and will be detrimental to Wyoming’s economy and the ability for the country to efficiently engage in Commerce

Lets take these points in turn:

Point one, suggests that there will be a problem supplying the minerals required for the batteries. This is pretty ridiculous, as if this is true then they have nothing to worry about. Having said that, with the advance of sodium batteries and the increasing quantity of lithium that can be captured from many sources, it is simply not true.

Point two is also false: many of these minerals are very valuable, and it is far cheaper to extract minerals from former batteries than from the ground. There is a rapidly growing industry to extract as much of these minerals as is possible for reuse. Will municipals have to be able to deal with some of these issues, of course, and they will adapt easily as they have many times in the past.

Point three is likely to be true, and is I believe the sole real reason. This move was intended to stop the electric vehicle industry before it got going in the state to protect the oil and gas industry (and the large contributions that flow to politicians from these businesses. I would argue that it makes the politicians look both stupid and corrupt.

The resolutions sponsor said that he did not really want to ban electric cars, but merely make a statement about phasing out gas powered vehicles in other states. Of course what should really be remembered, is that while the environmental catastrophe that we are facing needs an end to combustion engine cars, the cost savings are so extreme, that the number of combustion engine cars people want to by in 12 years is likely to be extremely low.

It is fact that, not only are electric cars quickly reaching similar sticker price to combustion engine cars, but even now over the lifetime of the car, they are vastly cheaper – with most people paying hundreds rather than thousands to fuel them each year.

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