Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Time for Electric Power?

Peter re taking power from your car.

The cars internal charger needs to be built for the functionality, currently only chademo facilitates that.

Smart wall boxes can facilitate automated solar use and load balancing don't let the energy paranoia take hold before you have your car

I can understand the environmental move to EV’s even though I am not convinced. Charging a vehicle on your drive or in your garage is a viable proposition but what about the millions of householders who live in terraced streets?

I am not convinced either. But I suspect I will keep my Tesla for 10 years or so and will clock over 100,000 miles easily - costing me around £3,000 in volts, Vs around £35,000 in fuel. By that time (in ten years) I will have been a little greener, but that's not the reason I bought the car. The tax and fuel saving is almost a free car. Road tax would cost an additional £6,000 over this period making an ICE car £41,000 Vs £3,000 in running costs - setting aside the servicing which is not required for an EV.

The second point you make is a good one - I am not sure how those in terraced streets or apartments will manage. I could argue that those in terraces and apartments are likely to do low vehicle mileage (city dwellers who mostly use public transport) and therefore could be served by public EV charge points. But I am not really convincing myself with that one!

I did read an article recently saying that green behaviour was for the wealthy. There's some truth to that.

The push is to actually break people's car usage and use public transport bicycles scooters walking etc (good luck with that) what did people do before private cars proliferated? There are models for shared vehicles a bit like the rental scooter schemes you see not sure a lot of us are ready for that, however it plays out I think there are a lot of problems to overcome in the coming decade's, given the woeful current state of public transport frequency it's difficult to see where the options like for those that don't have easy access to private charging facilities.
When I grew up in Brum during the day there were WMPTE busses every 10 minutes where I lived and after midnight until 5 one every hour. When I lived in a little village in Cornwall apart from the school bus, there was one bus a week that went to St Austell, there wasn't a bus back.
The car has given people a lot of freedom and flexibility dragging people away from them could be an uphill struggle then throw into the mix how do you fuel them conveniently will be a struggle, I have often thought that s larger batteries fuel cell car would strike the right balance but no one seems to be thinking along those lines. Interesting/difficult times ahead.

I cannot see the EV economics and current taxes levied remaining the same going forward. The current tax revenues raised from ICE cars on petrol and RFL will at some point have to be found. How they replace them has yet to be seen, whether it is charge per journey or whatever, they will raise those current levels of taxes eventually on EV's and the economic costs will change without question.

They are considering to tax private vehicles per mile time of day and by route, a lot of EV owners are pretty peed off about the idea.

My answer to them then take a bus, get over it.

Revenue will always need to be raised.

I know lots of other countries give larger grants than the UK and in Norway no vat on EVs (fine green policy getting the revenue from selling oil around the world ) but at the end of the day that money comes from somewhere, Germany and France have vested interests in their large automotive manufacturing to support, at the end of the day if revenue from other sources dwindle then those grants will diminish.

The UK gov came in for criticism for lowering the threshold and the grant on EVs here, but the knock on effect was that car manufacturers managed to find wiggle room and reduce the cost of quite a few EVs! The EV grant is a limited pot in the UK and always was.

A lot of Americans are calling for the us tax incentive to only apply to us made cars, if we did that here there'd be all sorts of accusations and legal wranglings over our right to do that. (In which case only the mini and leaf would qualify)

At the end of the day the books have to be balanced. At least with the charging infrastructure a lot of that is private investment.

I have seen a few options for homes without off street parking which look like the old fashioned petrol pumps with an arm that holds the electric charging cable way above head height over the pavement so pedestrians are not inconvenienced.

As for the costs, the advantage of being an early adopter is the free supercharging throughout Europe. It meant that with the tax breaks my first Tesla actually earnt me money rather than cost money compared to doing the same journeys in any of my petrol cars. What I mean is, with what I sold it for and the tax rebates and the difference in fueling costs meant I was up £3,000 over the original purchase cost! The second Tesla broke even. My third and current Tesla will cost me something as I bought a a private vehicle this time rather than through the business but as I plan to keep it longer than the others it will still end up being a very low cost overall.

Of course, that will only work if you get to park outside your house - before I had my dropped kerb done, it was often a lottery.....

They'll use the Tesco carpark charger

[Soapbox comment: I was truly annoyed that the local (guess the type) council objected to a local infill housing development in a suberb ... as the developer had included driveways for offroad parking!!! As if someone paying £600-900K for a house wont have 1or 2 cars (or even a Morgan!)! Naturally the councillors seemed unconcerned that there was no provision for solar power / energy self-sufficiency in the house layouts... ]

John
I think the problem we got is that we need cars, motorbikes for getting to work, shopping etc. If we can just stop everyone using Aircraft for holidays, we will be on the road to being green. This does not mean no more holidays, it just means a new mine set, using the Channel tunnel/cars. Of course Aus, NZ, USA etc has to be off the cards
But go back 60 odd years and we didn't have the chance to go anyway. If you want to see what it looks line, Google/Bing it!