WDB
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Post by WDB on Jun 10, 2022 6:02:57 GMT
Yikes, bpg ! I like a bit of orange but that’s extreme even for me. Is the headlining orange too, or is it just reflecting the orangeness of everything else? But yes, that’s the brown. I like those wheels too; I think they’re the 18-inchers that weren’t offered here — although they’d be easier to get tyres, especially all-seasons for. Curious that that’s a post-facelift car with the bigger nav screen but has a plain black grille like mine, rather than the sequinned thing that recent UK Mercedes get. I like Totwinkel Ass’t , though. Mine hasn’t got that, even in English. (But it doesn’t have ugly-kids glass either, so I can look for myself.) One to add to my German vocabulary. |
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bpg
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Post by bpg on Jun 10, 2022 8:30:00 GMT
Mmmm, the literal 'dead angle' has a more final ring to it than blind spot.
If we switched to dead angle on HGVs it might make car drivers and cyclists think twice about sneaking up the inside.
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Post by EspadaIII on Jun 10, 2022 8:52:32 GMT
I'm not overly sold on the wood trim of the brown car, but otherwise it's nice. Espadrille would divorce me if I brought it home though. She hates wood trim.
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Post by EspadaIII on Jun 10, 2022 9:06:34 GMT
I didn't really understand the 'price cap' stuff as the media keeps talking about the 'average household'. So I checked with Ofgem Price Cap and I suppose it is obvious- the rates are capped. It helps me to work out my energy cost for the Ioniq. 28p/kWh is my standard price for charging. If I do 3.6miles/kWh, 40 miles costs me £3.11. A car doing 40mpg costs £8. Also some of that electricity is generated by my solar panels, so being conservative my car is 2.6 times as economical in money terms than an ICE car. I doubt many cars the size of mine better 40mpg on average doing the sort of driving I do. However if the energy I buy from fast or rapid chargers is over 75p/kWh then my economy is similar to an ICE car doing 40mpg. When I went to North Yorkshire the charging prices were 56p/kWh or less for 50kWh speed. Next week I will be down the A1 and looking to charge up at a new Ionity place in Nottinghamshire with 150kWh speed and will cost 69p/kWh. But of course I will not need to 'fill the tank', just enough to ensure I can get home with a good marging to charge up at my standard rate. I could fix a rate now with either BG or Octopus but the fixing rate is going to cost me over £1,500pa more - without car charging factored in - so I think I will stay on the variable capped rate until things settle down. |
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bpg
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Post by bpg on Jun 10, 2022 9:26:13 GMT
I've no idea how long your fixed rate is for, don't forget that cap is going up again for October.
Octopus I believe is one of the companies that offers preferential rates for EV owners.
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WDB
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Post by WDB on Jun 10, 2022 9:27:01 GMT
…but whatever you pay, your energy usage is 40 MJ in the EV and more like 170 MJ in the fossil car.
I looked at Octopus. The cheaper rate is at night for charging. Probably works if you’re exhausting your EV every day or two but isn’t worth the higher daytime rate for lighter users like us.
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bpg
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Post by bpg on Jun 10, 2022 10:07:09 GMT
I know there's a lot of price gouging going on at the moment.
I got a quote for solar panels for the house roof and an 11kWh battery. The battery alone was 9k€ I expected it to be somewhere between 5 & 6k.
The overall estimate was some 30+% higher than I expected.
9k€ for 11kWh puts the battery in our car at 54k€, we got the battery and a free car for a list price of 45k€ and paid considerably less after incentives.
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Post by EspadaIII on Jun 10, 2022 10:30:45 GMT
Wow - Although my 8.5kWh battery is not yet delivered its cost is only £1,500.
bpg - I now the cap is rising in October but I still think that fixing now is not good value for money over the next 12-18 months.
WDB - Yes, light users who only really need to charge weekly have no real use for night-time lower rates.
Can you explain the 40MJ -v- 170MJ calculation? Forgive me for being thick..
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2022 11:56:53 GMT
I like brown.
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WDB
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Post by WDB on Jun 10, 2022 12:54:58 GMT
Can you explain the 40MJ -v- 170MJ calculation? Forgive me for being thick.. ICE first. Over 40 miles at 40mpg, you burn — gasp — one gallon or 4.54 litres. If that’s petrol (typically 34 MJ per litre) that’s about 155 MJ; diesel oil is physically and energetically denser, so it’s more like 170 MJ. (Makes you wonder whether selling fuel by volume makes any sense other than convenience but that’s an argument for a passing age.) Whichever the fuel, most of that chemical energy is converted to heat and noise, not motion… …as the EV shows. Your kilowatt hour is 3.6 million joules (1 joule/sec x 3600 sec x 1000) so at 3.6 miles per kWh over the same 40 miles, you use 40 / 3.6 kWh or 40 MJ. That’s why I keep hammering the efficiency point; EVs simply use vastly less energy. You could run your EV on electricity produced entirely from coal (not that you should!) and still yield far less CO 2 than even a super-economical petrol car. |
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Post by EspadaIII on Jun 10, 2022 15:04:41 GMT
Ah I see.... Thank you.
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bpg
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Post by bpg on Jun 10, 2022 15:20:54 GMT
That's not the full story though is it though ?
Power stations have not suddenly become more efficient with 60% of energy lost in conversion. 8-15% lost in power line transmission and 11% lost between the plug and battery in the car to heat and keeping the battery at the right temperature while charging.
Also, when using 175kW chargers you'll here massive fans whirring away dissipating heat from the charger itself.
Electricity is a secondary energy source.
The point of use may be cleaner but the overall impact to the environment not so.
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WDB
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Post by WDB on Jun 10, 2022 15:32:21 GMT
Maybe, but petrol doesn’t appear by magic in filling station reservoirs, does it? We burn fuel to deliver fuel, and to extract, ship and refine the raw materials.
I’d agree, faster and faster charging is wasteful and not the solution. We need more readily accessible chargers and lighter, more efficient EVs that need to use them less often. And more and more renewable generation; there’s still a huge amount of free energy going begging.
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Post by dixinormus on Jun 10, 2022 18:44:40 GMT
MJ? Who honestly really cares WdB?! Can’t imagine that any member of the motoring public ever considers their car or its fuel efficiency in this manner..!
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WDB
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Post by WDB on Jun 11, 2022 6:38:27 GMT
Well, there’s one example of a huge problem. Scientific and numerical illiteracy, even among those who consider themselves educated, is a blight on western society. Brexit, Trump, antivax, climate denial — you name it, it is due in large part to people being unwilling or unable to do the numbers and work out that they’re being fed moonshine by bad actors. It’s infantilising and deeply corrosive.
Nothing I’ve mentioned here should be unfamiliar to anyone with a GCSE in physics, but mention it even in a group where you’d imagine people give more thought than average to the technicalities of transportation and they look at you like you’re ‘speaking Chinese, with some of the letters missed out’, as Suzy Bogguss put it. And you’re right, it never gets a mention in the mainstream press. But it ought to.
It’s why we need more people like Hannah Fry and Tim Harford, who challenge the bollocks and hold us all to a higher standard. But more than that, we need more people to pay attention.
Incidentally, this is also a reason for resisting any return to archaic units. The SI system isn’t really about factors of ten or the French Revolution or ‘Brussels’; it’s about convertibility. It lets us see and calculate the relationship between mass, time, energy, power and all the quantities our lives depend on. Try doing that in cubit-fortnights per bushel and you get the Mars Climate Orbiter — or what’s left of it.
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