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Has anyone any experience of these vehicles? Are they as hopeless as I suspect them to be?

I notice that M&S in Ellesmere port has provided a couple of bays for charging them in their car park, but I've never seen anyone using them.

We used to call them milk floats when I was a lad.

Asda Wallasey has a couple charging points and yes I've seen on or two cars plugged in, but Iv'e seen them same spaces use as car park spaces, when a single charge can take 5mins and they have a 400 mile range then I suppose they will be worth getting, there's always someone needed as the guinea pig.

Spot on !!

Doing a few simple sums I think they are a disaster. You need at least 25kW to run even a small car at 50 mph. If you want 400 miles range at that speed, you'll be running for 8 hours so you will need at least 200kWh in your battery.

Getting that into the car in five minutes (even if the battery would stand it) implies a power level of 2.4 Megawatts. Maybe 100 Amps at 24,000 volts! Believe me, you don't want to be anywhere near that sort of power!

However if you want to compete with the performance and comfort of a conventional large car, and expect to have the heater on whilst you're driving, you can easily multiply these figures by three or four, so the charging point will have to supply maybe 10 MegaWatts.

The filling station which might have - say - 12 charging points would require 120 MegaWatts. The cabling and generating infrastructure to supply this rules out any possibility of electric cars. You'd need a new power station just to supply the filling stations in Birkenhead!

Look at it another way. There are 30 milllion cars on uk roads, and they do an average of 40 miles a day each. to supply each with its 25KWh needed to do this, run the heater etc needs 750 GigaWatt hours. If this is supplied over a ten hour period during daylight, the demand would be 75 GW.

Currently, the total UK electricity consumption is about half this! In other words we'd need to treble our electricity supply!

Battery cars are a ridiculous joke!

Another good case for fracking then, we will need to get the juice from somewhere. All the objectors just don't want it where they are, get it somewhere else. We really must think things thru. I was on diesel boats and the batteries being topped up was a constant pain in the arris but had to be done. Wouldn't fancy an electric car myself.

Another problem with them is that when the batteries wear out it will cost more than the original cost of the car to replace them. Things will improve if / when hydrogen cells come along:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/214129-the-coming-fuel-cell-revolution-what-you-need-to-know

Used a battery forklift truck years ago. Great but one main problem you could drive up behind some one and they where unaware you where there, until you blow your horn.

I think it's important to separate oil as a very energy dense source of power from its origin in petrochemicals.

You can make oil, given electrical energy or heat or even light, using as feedstock, water and carbon dioxide.

My bet is that we will continue to use the internal combustion engine for the foreseeable future, but to synthesize the fuel. Diesel in the UK contains quite a high percentage of biodiesel. I think its about 30% but could be wrong.

One of the most interesting approaches in my opinion is by a company called Joule ( http://www.jouleunlimited.com/ ) which is using genetically engineered bacteria to produce ethanol, diesel, jet fuel etc from carbon dioxide and water. (It doesn't even have to be particularly clean water) The energy source is sunlight.

scalectrix

Hydrogen is the way forward, no expensive batteries to wear out, easy to produce, very high energy density.

Batteries are slow to charge and nobody seems to be going down the cassette route (replace battery with charged ones), hydrogen is faster than petrol to re-fuel.

How long until lithium starts going up in price again because of shortages?

Initially hydrogen has to used in combustion engines but fuel cells are progressing very fast and so it can't be far off the day that we have electric motors powered by hydrogen.

Battery cars are being promoted because they are expensive and so profit margins generates better returns.

My goodness, how many misinformed answers can a single post receive?
Every single point raised so far is hearsay, Top Gear, Clarkson clap trap.

None of the respondents have even sat in one I guess, let alone driven an electric car.

To answer the original question.
Have driven a few EV's.
Owned one since March.
Far from hopeless, my wife and I battle over who gets the short straw and takes the "other" car. BTW the other car is a brand new car, prior to that it was a different brand new car so its not like we are slumming it in an old banger.
I have used the charger (for free) at M&S Cheshire Oaks.
I have been to Abersoch and Shrewsbury and Nottingham in the EV using the (free) Ecotricity rapid chargers on motorways and major A roads.

Milk float? if I choose to it can beat pretty much any normal car away at the lights. BMWs Audi Mercs left behind.
Instant power from zero, loads of torque.
Have a look at a Tesla P85D, eats Ferraris for acceleration. Unbeatable over the quarter mile.
Asda Wallasey, don't think you will have seen anyone charging there as they have been switched off not long after installation. Problem with the earthing on the supply I am told. No plans to fix them.
Battery reliability? There are several taxi companies that use Nissan Leafs, some have done over 100000 miles with no loss of battery endurance. They are guaranteed not to lose beyond a certain capacity for up to 8 years or they will be replaced or repaired.
How on earth can a replacement battery cost more than the original car cost? How ridiculous does that sound. IF you were buying one (why would you) is about £5K.
Hydrogen is the way forward? Hydrogen is here now. Toyota Marai is £56000. Good luck with getting to one of the 14 hydrogen stations in the UK. Hydrogen so you have no batteries? Hydrogen creates electricity to charge a battery to run what is basically an EV. The electricity required to make hydrogen massively outweighs the electricity generated when it converts back so if there is not enough capacity to power electric vehicles how on earth will there be enough to create all that hydrogen?
To create 1 kg of hydrogen requires 56kwh electricity.
Hydrogen pumps are taking 30 mins to fill a vehicle as the connectors are freezing due to the high pressure i.e. 10000psi.
As to EVs being pushed due to being expensive? Renault Zoe is around £13000 similar if not cheaper than a Clio and pennies to run. Especially if you have solar panels.

That is as much here now as public space travel, its very early days.



The battery is there for ancillaries that need continuous power and also to store regenerated power, they are equivalent power to a caravan leisure battery and are pretty cheap.



But it can a classic use of surplus/off-peak electricity, electrolysis also produces oxygen at the same time which offsets the cost somewhat. Production of Hydrogen by electrolysis can be done very efficiently, the inefficient part of the process is the compression but some of that energy could be made recoverable and has been demonstrated.

Most Hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis at the moment anyway. There are also solar methods of producing hydrogen in the pipeline.



That's a minor technical issue, there are ways round it eg by initially filling the receiver with water, that way there doesn't need to be any significant decompression and hence no freezing. In any case they have already got filling down to 3 minutes, the technology is already around in NASA etc, they shove far greater amounts of liquid gas around pretty fast.



£13000 doesn't include the batteries, you have to lease the batteries separately which costs up to about £11,000 over 8 years.

The great advantage of hydrogen is its energy density (way over 200 times greater than lithium batteries) and as the weight depletes with usage it that makes it the equivalent of 400 times greater than lithium. So you could have a range 400 times bigger the EV for the same weight, or trade it off with a much lighter vehicle.

Hydrogen could be used to drive a stirling engine and avoid the need for fuel cells, that would be a neat combination.