Talk Morgan Forums Thread Like Summary - EV Journey

My Polo is 11 years old and at 57 k miles still a good car but with only 2 doors it is getting harder to get in & out due to my old knees and fatter newer cars filling car parking spots.

My wife is also having a thumb joint replacement on her left hand so needs an auto car for a while, probably 3 months.

I did a bit of research on EVs and found MG heavily discounting their ZS EV cars so have bought a new one for a third off list and comparible with buying a 3 year old id3. I collect it on Thursday from a dealer far far away in Leamington Spa. I would recommend Car Wow to get a great deal.

Now whilst the Morgan & our other ICE will be used for longer trips & the EV locally I did look at the economics of long distance EV travel. Which is fascinating if the UK Govt really wants us all in EVs after 2030.

My Polo does 40 mpg consistently so costs in fuel 15p or so per mile. Ditto the Morgan.
Charging at home on an Octopus EV tarriff (which is 7p per kW with Intelligent Octopus Go) and with the MG doing 3 miles per kWh, this cost per mile 2p

On the long trips though the public chargers cost around 80p per kW. Thus it costs 27p per mile or roughly double an ICE car.

There are plenty of charging stations and the excellent Octopus Electroverse app can route plan them in. The trick it seems is to only charge publically the minimum whenever possible. This so called splash & dash means typically a 10 -15 min stop after 3 hrs. So not so bad.

But you will say you pay no road tax. Wrong from April it will be £190 thanks to that nice man Mr Hunt. I'm happy to pay in the delusional view that the roads will improve. My Polo was and remains £20 pa , go figure.

The MG service plan including AA cover costs less for 3 years than an annual ICE service.

Despite horror stories on insurance and the MG being group 28A the increase is only c £70 pa

Mixed messages all round then.

I'll post more as I learn the joy of zero emmission (powered by Drax) motoring

Here’s a nice little runabout:





https://www.austinmotorcompany.com/

The opposite ..... takes up to 50,000 miles to make good the extra co2 making an EV takes over making an ICE car .... keeping it less than that costs the planet.

It's how I justify my 50 year old Morgan (and 30 year old Defender) ... how many new cars have their longevity saved from being built ?... not to mention how little there is in an old trad compared to a modern behemoth .... and it's all honest wood and steel so wonderfully recyclable 🙂

K

Ps .... though, as it will eventually succumb to wood-rot and rust, it's more composting than recycling 🙂

One advantage of my 2023 Volvo V60 is that nanny can be kept in her cage at all times. Lane keeping has to be activated after switch on.

Looks like a good bit of local fun could be had in one of those Jon, a new one to me.

The major problem that hydrogen has is in efficiency, especially if you burn it.

If you take electricity, use it to crack water to get hydrogen, and then burn it in an ICE engine the efficiency is really low, about 25%. It's better if you use Fuel Cells, it can get up to 40 to 60%, but then fuel cell life is much lower than electric motors. When you add in the costs of transporting hydrogen to fuelling points the cost/benefit analysis gets even worse.

The efficiency of putting electricity into batteries and then powering EVs is much higher, at around 80 - 90%, which is why they are attracting more development investment than hydrogen vehicles.

There are use cases where the efficiency argument doesn't count for so much, most notably Heavy plant/earthmoving and heavy goods transport, but for personal transport the sums don't add up for most people. Imagine having to pay 4 times as much per mile for a hydrogen vehicle over a BEV.

Tim,

Thanks for that, what I find disappointing in all of this, is when we do have such spare capacity when the wind blows and the sun shines, nobody thought to turn it into stored energy whether batteries or hydrogen. I know batteries are an expensive option, but stored energy such as hydrogen, would seem to make sense. If you can't use it, either domestically or exported, then store it ,I'm sure there is a ready market for green hydrogen.

Efficiency is less important than cost, and cost has 2 dimensions here: production/transport/storage cost, and planetary/CO2 cost. Hydrogen produced by wind/solar when producing beyond other demand is "free", and burning H / running H through a fuel cell is planet-friendly. But the latter really needs the former, and there does not seem to be much action on that at a political level.

I do note there are a few domestic solutions appearing - eg https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ so maybe there is hope after all!

Good read Jon, Eden Project are using a fair bit of Geothermal and are further developing the system for others to benefit, not on this kind of scale though and it doesn't need to be.
Looking ahead there will be different solutions largely dependent on your geography I think but I find it encouraging that people are taking the future seriously now and are no longer viewed as vanity projects or vote catchers.

If you go on car wow you can see MG is discounting most models by 9k upwards. The Chinese have a long plan & by you could say dumping cars are buying the market.

Sadly the real culprit here is the British people who have long regarded foreign as "better" whether it be cars or electronics or even food and beer and cider. French people still loyally buy French cars despite their poor quality and Italians still buy FIATs. We buy foreign.

Sadly its all over now and no going back. The Vauxhall plants will close as soon as the French factories are short of work, just like happened with the Rootes Group. The Mini factory is not to get the investment to keep it operating fully as EVs come along - again it will eventually shut. Even Honda, in shutting its UK plant, switched production back to Japan.