The future starts now

I’m neither a traveller nor a tourist these days WdB. I only seem to leave town once every 3-4 weeks, but on the occasion that I do go somewhere it’s usually a 250-mile same-day round trip. So Al’s 300-mile range future EV might suffice. (Need some extra margin for all the hills here).

Then again, at this rate I will just keep the ICE A1 for another 5 years, or sell it and not buy anything to replace it!

It might well happen, especially at the beginning of a long homeward journey if there was no charger at the destination.

I don’t get the airliner analogy. That’s a balance between safety (range to alternative airport plus 90 minutes) and weight. I once kidded a colleague showing off his ultralight laptop that it would get heavier as the hard disk filled up, but I don’t think a charged battery weighs more than an empty one. The balancing demand with a BEV is time: wait for a full charge or settle for just enough to get there.

Range anxiety is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, as the quantity of chargers expands pretty much exponentially. The increase in them since I first had my first Leaf is phenomenal. Look at something like Zap Map, you're never more than a a few strides from a public charger of some kind these days.  They even seem to have expanded the national electricity grid to Manchester these days.  Who knew.  And you can see them all on your inbuilt satnav, or your phone satnav/ZapMap type app.

Is there a problem of tethered cables being nicked from charge points? Wouldn't that be a kind of self regulating crime in that the culpirt probably wouldn't survive the crime?

You don’t often find petrol stations closed, vandalised, or too busy to take more cars do you?! How many public charging points are unavailable, fully-occupied or broken at any given time?

I need not have range anxiety. But charging anxiety is all together different!

Yes, I agree that the charging infrastructure will catch up in due course, but until then I can wait. Even so, sparsely populated countries like NZ will probably lag way behind European countries for several years.

I got an efficiency score of 4.3 miles per kWh (14.45km / 100km for BPG) for last night’s 55-mile return trip to Hampshire. This with cabin cooling on the daylight way out, and preconditioning, heating and lights on the way home — which was chilly enough to trigger a 3°C frost warning ping.

So I did a bit of looking up. 1kWh is about 3.46MJ, and there are 34.2MJ in a litre of petrol and 38.6 in a litre of diesel fuel. Convert these to kWh equivalents and 45mpg in a diesel car equates to about 0.9 miles per kWh; 35mpg in a petrol car more like 0.8. My 35mpg diesel takes that down to 0.7. So the CLS requires six times as much energy per unit distance as the i3.

This is the bit we don’t hear about fossil cars: the problem is not just that they burn fossil fuels, but that they burn them so wastefully. (And yes, while there are undoubtedly conversion losses in the electricity generation chain, they will come nowhere near accounting for this much difference.)