I think I mentioned my views on finance for cars (makes an expensive thing more expensive for questionable benefit).
I could do with changing my current car which is over 15 years old (though still < 100k on the clock). Performance is OK, handling is good and it is fun to drive along a twisting B road but the suspension is best described as unforgiving and I need physio after anything over a 100 mile drive. My wife finds it even worse and although technically a four seater the back is not much use for anyone over 12.
So, I want a well appointed car with a decent amount of performance and I’d like it to last, as I said, another 15 years. As I will be over 70 by then in fact I’d actually quite like not to have to buy another car at all.
Which means I need to get it right when I do change the car.
Yep, I can echo those comments except I’ll only be 74 and 9/10ths by then. Hoping the drudgery of lower speed limits etc means self driving will be here before then. There will be monitors in all cars so exceeding the limit will be a thing of the past.
The reason this otherwise fairly mundane video is interesting is that it is the first time I have heard hard figures for CO2 production for car manufacture - the claim (made about 15:20 in the video) is that manufacturing a Volvo XC40 takes 14 tonnes of CO2 whereas the equivalent figure for its EV cousin - the Polestar 2 is 26 tonnes.
The entry level petrol engine is officially 158g/km - at that level the 12 tonnes difference takes 48,000 miles to emit.
That would be fine if you could run on 100% renewable/low CO2 (as in France) electricity - but the UK is only managing a bit under 40% - so you have to drive a whopping 118k miles in a Polestar 2 before breaking even - 15 years at the UK average of 7400 miles a year.
Kind-of takes the gloss off of EV’s saving the planet
There’s a reference here (don’t know how reliable) which suggests 720g/l for petrol and 640g/l for diesel - obviously that should be the same whatever make of car.
There are “hidden” CO2 costs in electricity generation, even from renewables, of course.
As there are for the extraction and refining of fossil fuels to be used just the once. Also cobalt is used once as a catalyst to remove the sulphur from fuels ( as that is often mentioned with EV’s)
Can’t say too much about the author in case I end up working at the British Museum. Traveling in a car with an illegal cracked windscreen??
I do agree the UK half bottomed charging structure needs to improve.
I think this needs looking into more thoroughly to see where the extra occurs, would it shipping? The thousands of extra ICE parts that require casting and forging then machining to my mind doesnt correlate to those figures. More information needed.
I didn’t spot that - as I said I found the whole thing pretty mundane and interesting more-or-less only because there was an actual figure from a manufacturer comparing an ICE model with its EV “twin” - I haven’t see/heard that data anywhere, just vague figures. Oh and, as you say, the comparison between the state of the charging networks in the Eu and UK was somewhat enlightening.
Which was discussed in that article I linked which starts to put an actual figure on it which is useful for trying to make meaningful comparisons.
I’ll bet the excess is predominantly the battery.
The bottom line is that it is not quite as straightforward as “EV good ICE bad” - in fact there was another thread about this here - not sure that came to any useful conclusion
There are other advantages of EVs though - just wandering past a line of petrol engined cars the other day I was struck just how obvious the pollution that they produce is (at least every other vehicle was diesel) - so air quality benefits enormously.
They are also cheaper to run but, whether than will last remains to be seen - fuel duty nets the government £28 billion/year long term they might want that back.
Absolutely!
You only have to look at the UK’s shift to gas a few years ago and now the country is gas reliant what is happening to the price of gas, up up up!
It doesn’t need an Einstein to work out what will happen to the price of electricity when used for EV’s.
Of course it would be short sighted to think otherwise, there has to be income for the government. Charging from your own PV panels would definitely upset the gov.
That said oil will also rise in cost especially as it begins to run out so better to begin changing before it does.
