EV's are definitely the future, one of the reasons I bought the RR was because I felt like now's the last era when owning a car like this won't be seen as being anti-social.

As someone who lives in Barcelona, we already have limitations on cars being able to drive into the city centre depending on their CO2 output - Paris and London have similar situations, I think we'll be seeing more of these type of restrictions in the coming years, rather than all-out bans on cars already owned by people.

I'm excited by the fact that EV's become the norm, it'll mean the rare/classic cars we enjoy driving can still be enjoyed on a weekend or on limited mileage, rather than us leaving things too late and there being an outright ban on ICE vehicles.

I think the problem for some of us (especially L322/L405 owners) is that our cars won't be seen as "classic" and are already targeted for being polluting SUV's, so we're likely to fall through the gaps in legislation and driving our cars ostensibly for recreation won't even be allowed :\

Hope I'm wrong about that!

(Personally, I cycle lots and have electric scooters and will buy an EV for our next "family car", but I hope to be able to keep the RR for weekend camping/ski-ing trips and enjoying the pleasure of driving it for a long time to come)

Another thing that needs fixing is towing options, I would have an EV now (I can charge at home) but I prefer a bike rack that fits to a towball - I'm sure it will be sorted but there are precious few pure EV options with towing capability at the moment. There are a few type approved Hybrid options but I thought all new cars had to be pure EV by a certain date or has that changed as well. Geoff

I will be interested to see how far an electric car will tow a cattle box up and down the hills, might need a seriously big battery and a 3 phase charger. Driving around town electric is fine, not carrying any passengers, fine, doing long distance heavily loaded I think Hydrogen fuel cells might be the way to go.

Tesla Model X has towing capability and long distance with passengers no problem. Alko are working on trailer / caravan chassis that are self powered which would present very little additional load to the towing vehicle. BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

Same reason here as for some others; I went for a 5.0SC as in my opinion it is like what Mad Max said - The Last of the V8. So I am enjoying it, and going a bit crazy with it as there is no doubt in my mind that my next will be either full or partial electric. And to top it off, the 5.0SC is low emission zone exempt for London, so great result in the mean time

Well EV wouldn't work for me, my current house is too old to allow the fast charge option (main fuse isn't rated high enough), my place of work currently has no EV charging points but 2 are scheduled to be installed some time next year. I notice there are polite signs on some of the charging points asking that you remove your vehicle once charged to allow others to use it, however, in reality people don't seem to do this, they just go back to their car once they have finished whatever they were doing. There have already been issues in California where the EV take up has been high and there are still not enough charging points leading to queues of cars waiting for a charger to become free and then the usual arguments that ensue once they do. EV to me is an ideal city centre car as you are unlikely to need to charge it on a daily basis so could use it as you would an IC powered car. Self charging hybrids to me seem the next sensible option but I read that these are to be phased out too. What isn't advertised is that a standard EV vehicle has a carbon output of 50g per km, a study looked into the CO cost of the production and this was the calculation. If you consider that the raw materials have to be dug out of the ground then transported to a number of sites around the world to be turned into the end product, it's easy to see how this figure came about. Sadly, whatever we do, there is no such thing as carbon neutral so to advertise anything as such is just misleading. 2011 TDV8 Vogue SE

No to be too contraversial, but the PM's partner is a lefty green, she may be pushing this agenda , and he just wants to keep getting his hole.

Red Hot one wrote:

I will be interested to see how far an electric car will tow a cattle box up and down the hills, might need a seriously big battery and a 3 phase charger. Driving around town electric is fine, not carrying any passengers, fine, doing long distance heavily loaded I think Hydrogen fuel cells might be the way to go.

I am luck, I live in the south of Spain with lots of land facing south- I am building a solar system to power my home and workshop, with the idea to get a EV once range has got to 300 miles average (not max range on a Sunny down hill day driving like miss daisy at 50 miles an hour lol)

We are retired so have the luxury of not doing big miles, approximately 10-20miles a week over one or two journeys just for shopping or to pop to the beach for a coffee.

As others have mentioned most people don’t have off street parking or access to off street parking at work, I agree towns and city centers seem like the most obvious location for EV ownership but in reality the lack of charging infrastructure is much worse than in the suburbs

Remember charging requires approx 60-100kw per car so a car park or street quickly becomes a massive supply problem, offstreet parking or even on your drive. While the early adopters may not have an issue yet, by the time of the IC ban people will start seeing brown outs or complete blackouts

Supermarkets, offices, factories, car parks, filling stations, restaurants etc etc will all have charging points, many do already. BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

I agree but it will be a few and capacity will be met quickly then what? Power distribution has been designed and installed for normal house hold and business use, one person or business exceeding this may be manageable but 100’s, the problem just gets bigger with scale, each time the numbers go up the further upstream the problems reach, from the consumer unit in your house or business, to the cable supply, then the low voltage local transformers, on to the high voltage transformers and transmission lines.

Home owners and businesses can pay for their end upgrades then everyone gets to pay for the national grid upgrades, but this all takes time... I don’t see 10 yrs even remotely getting these upgrades into then budget stage let alone being auctioned.

All this policy does is mean the rich move over and the poor carry on with IC but cannot buy EV even if they could afford too so used IC’s will go up in value.

The upgrades in power transmission and supply will cost billions and needs to be signed off now to be ready for 10yrs time.

Also the scheduled closing coal and nuclear power stations only being replace by wind and solar power means our capacity will be made unreliable and not scaleable to meet demand reliably, again meaning brown and black outs becoming commonplace.... just check out what is happening in Australia.

ur20v wrote:

Remember charging requires approx 60-100kw per car so a car park or street quickly becomes a massive supply problem, offstreet parking or even on your drive. While the early adopters may not have an issue yet, by the time of the IC ban people will start seeing brown outs or complete blackouts

The video at the start of the thread has a guy from the national grid who is saying this isn't the case.

The reality is that most of those cars won't need 60kwH's plus of electricity as 80% of them won't move each day. The other 20% will only do a few miles and need a little charging.

There's plenty of capacity in the grid to cope with that, in fact, the reality is that the more EV's plugged into the grid the more resilient the grid becomes as we can leverage all of those cars as local storage and balance usage out. It actually will allow us to much more easily make use of unpredictable sources of power such as solar and wind.

If you think about your own situation in Spain, you can leverage solar during the day to charge your EV, then if needed, pull energy from it's battery at night to power the TV and lights, no need to rely on the grid overnight, saving you even more money.

Obviously, you need to still have the car charged in the morning, but you can see how having a big chunk of batteries at your disposal is going to be handy, even if it's just an addition to another battery bank installed in the home.

There's some very cool ways to use these technologies, but it's going to take a shift in our mindsets to see it as an opportunity and how to best utilise it all

The biggest hurdle for EV's will be charging points because they will not be available tor many at home.

The other hurdle will be grid capacity - neither the distribution or generating capacity is capable of sustaining 100% EV without major investment & upheaval whilst it is being done.

I'm all for EV's where practical but we don't have to go 100% electric to "save the planet". cut emissions by a decent amount & nature will take care of the rest.

The cheap running costs of EV's will soon be eroded as HMG has finally woken up to the loss of revenue from RFL & tax on fuels.
Cheap nightime electricity is already being reduced in savings due to the night time demand for charging EV's.

So, it's not all smelling of roses. 2003 Range Rover Vogue TD6

Siftah wrote:

[quote="ur20v"

The video at the start of the thread has a guy from the national grid who is saying this isn't the case.

The reality is that most of those cars won't need 60kwH's plus of electricity as 80% of them won't move each day. The other 20% will only do a few miles and need a little charging.

There's plenty of capacity in the grid to cope with that, in fact, the reality is that the more EV's plugged into the grid the more resilient the grid becomes as we can leverage all of those cars as local storage and balance usage out. It actually will allow us to much more easily make use of unpredictable sources of power such as solar

Obviously, you need to still have the car charged in the morning, but you can see how having a big chunk of batteries at your disposal is going to be handy, even if it's just an addition to another battery bank installed in the home.

I haven’t seen that particular parliament session; but I’ve worked long enough in central government to realise that when ever a participant says something can’t be done during the sessions that they mean they will need funding. Whenever policy gets discussed they all come out of the woodwork with their begging bowls.

Secondly Tesla already has got a home power station. Their PowerWall. Currently only excess solar power gets exported, but it is not secret that Tesla would like to network them and provide some “grid balancing”. It’s only a natural progression in my opinion. And a matter of time.