Transitioning to a low carbon life

[Martin Dance 1]

Well, I changed to a pure BEV three year ago July 2020 since then I've covered juist over 40,000 miles. Drive battery range/ capacity no detectable reduction. Tyres replaced at about 36000.  Quite expensive as it is a good idea  to uise EV specific tyres, issues , oddly enough the 12V battery, this battery powers the vehicles systems and just like  an IC car, no battery no go. You can jump start an electric car if it uses a 12V  battery, not all do. Overall energy consumption over three years 4.8milesKwh (I'm quite light footed)  My driving is a mix of Motorway A road n urban driving. That roughly equates to 50mpg, Using Octopus Go off peak is 7.5p/kw. You can do the maths on overall cost. I'll not mention the fools paradise of no VED, soon to end.  Installed solar PV just over a year ago. This year which has been a more typical year weatherwise most days I take zero from the Grid unless I charge the car. I have 5Kwh storage and on a reasonable spring/ summer day the battery is charged by 11 am. I need another 5Kwh of storage to stop me feeding the grid for free. 

[Paul De Tourtoulon]

1 hour ago, EvilC57 said:

Agreed. However if no one has any children in future, who’s going to pay us oldies state pensions?!

I paid in  the state's pension scheme for 46 years, I am now getting a small amount of it back.

3 hours ago, MattyB said:

 

Are you advocating for mileage based road pricing? It's almost certainly on the way; Mayor Khan has already been advertising for roles in the TFL road pricing team, despite ruling it out within his tenure...!

It is already there, in France petrol tax at over 65%,,,

 

 What is the carbon print of a human being living for 75 years ?.

[Nigel R]

2 minutes ago, Martin Dance 1 said:

oddly enough the 12V battery, this battery powers the vehicles systems

 

The car industry parts bin is chock full of electronics that run from 12V. I doubt they have any desire to switch to HV for things like interior lights and dials and screens and suchlike 😀

[Learner]

3 hours ago, Martin Harris - Moderator said:

Informed opinion seems to be tending towards a useable battery life, for sensibly charged systems, approaching 200000 miles or 20 years.  Time will tell of course…

If thats true the car manufacturers are missing a trick.

They should be guaranteeing the batteries for fifteen years and 150000 miles to show how good they are.

I wonder why they dont!😉

Edited August 31, 2023 by Learner

[MattyB]

42 minutes ago, Nigel R said:

Nissan did very little battery management and zero cooling in the early Leaf, so that's kind of reverse cherry picking... literally the worst case 🙃 

 

36 minutes ago, Jon - Laser Engines said:

kinda my point. If they can screw it up once...

 

Current Leafs have a 100k / 8 year battery warranty - that's a lot longer warranty than the majority of ICE cars get. Even so, unlike most current EVs don't use liquid cooled packs so I admit they ren't ever going to be the gold standard in EV batteries. Compare that to Teslas, who have a lot of data points to work with and are showing very low levels of deg on their more recent vehicles. The move to LFP batteries should make this even less of an issue in the future.

 

Having said that, an 8 year old Leaf with 30% less range than new (i.e. it still has a real world range of ~105 miles) is still perfectly usable for lots of use cases, so it won't be worthless. You can see that now - you may not buy one, but even the oldest first gen Leafs that had the battery issues are still commanding decent prices. The cheapest one on Autotrader is a 2012 with 60k miles at over £3k, whereas a Note (a reasonable approximation of a petrol Leaf) of the same age is ~£2.5k, though mileage mileage corrected it would probably be a very similar price.

 

 

 

[MattyB]

Final point... The fact the first mainstream reasonably priced EV (the Leaf Gen 1) of modern times had some issues should be no surprise. The battery tech was new, and it was essentially a rolling science project versus ICE cars which had had >100 years of development to refine them. However, the speed of development in EVs since then has been dramatic, so comparing a Gen 1 Leaf against a Tesla 3 or the latest and greatest from Kia, Hyundai, VAG et al is like comparing a DC3 against an A380. Sure, if you want to buy a new one today and run it for 20 years, no, I'm not sure that will be possible, but we are probably within 5 years of that being possible. Besides, how many people do you know who actually do that with their ICE cars today? It can't be more than 1-2% based on my friends, family and work colleagues...

[Frank Skilbeck]

1 hour ago, Martin Dance 1 said:

 Overall energy consumption over three years 4.8milesKwh (I'm quite light footed)  My driving is a mix of Motorway A road n urban driving. That roughly equates to 50mpg, Using Octopus Go off peak is 7.5p/kw. You can do the maths on overall cost. 

Just for comparison, a litre of diesel contains roughly 10 kwh of energy, so a gallon 46 kwh, so the equivalent would be around 220 mpg if it used the stored energy as efficiently as the EV.

[David Hazell 1]

This thread started out as promising to discuss low carbon homes and turned into bashing leccy cars. Can we split the thread in two?

[Learner]

3 minutes ago, David Hazell 1 said:

This thread started out as promising to discuss low carbon homes and turned into bashing leccy cars. Can we split the thread in two?

Home and lifestyle was the first post, I would say a car comes into most peoples lifestyle.

[J D 8]

To limit the amount of carbon released all we need do is find a way to limit one common type of carbon.

         That is the carbon lifeform that infests this planet.

         

[Don Fry]

21 minutes ago, David Hazell 1 said:

This thread started out as promising to discuss low carbon homes and turned into bashing leccy cars. Can we split the thread in two?

In all fairness the thread title is “transitioning to a low carbon life”. No mention of houses. Not even the ones destroyed by catastrophic freak storms. 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Don Fry
Still can’t spell

[MattyB]

21 minutes ago, David Hazell 1 said:

This thread started out as promising to discuss low carbon homes and turned into bashing leccy cars. Can we split the thread in two?

 

14 minutes ago, Learner said:

Home and lifestyle was the first post, I would say a car comes into most peoples lifestyle.

 

I have no problem with personal transportation being part of the discussion - they make up a significant percentage of most peoples carbon emissions. However I'd rather stay away for the topic "Why an EV would never suit me", because a) that way we have to rehash a lot of the FUD that goes with the topic and has been discussed at length in the EV thread, and b) we all know this current generation of EVs won't suit everyone, so stating that repeatedly is not really adding much.

[ken anderson.]

i thought a while back now.............why dont all new builds,council properties and all existing builds that are suitable have solar panels fitted to them....why dont all new build homes be made super efficient so they use nxt to nothing?

 

ken anderson...ne..1...why dept..

[Learner]

1 minute ago, ken anderson. said:

i thought a while back now.............why dont all new builds,council properties and all existing builds that are suitable have solar panels fitted to them....why dont all new build homes be made super efficient so they use nxt to nothing?

 

ken anderson...ne..1...why dept..

Cost

[Rich Griff]

Interestingly I see Gove has had a change of mind, and the government is re vamping heat pump grants to £6k...

 

 

[Shaun Walsh]

1 minute ago, ken anderson. said:

i thought a while back now.............why dont all new builds,council properties and all existing builds that are suitable have solar panels fitted to them....why dont all new build homes be made super efficient so they use nxt to nothing?

 

ken anderson...ne..1...why dept..

Two reasons:

Not mandated by building regulations.

Adds extra cost which has to passed on to the buyer or it comes off the bottom line.

[EvilC57]

2 hours ago, Nigel R said:

 

Nissan did very little battery management and zero cooling in the early Leaf, so that's kind of reverse cherry picking... literally the worst case 🙃 

 

 

But at the same time you also had your clutch done. Or at least you should have. And most of that cost will have been the labour in dropping the box to get to the flywheel.

 

We had our diesel Passat's DMF and clutch changed about a year ago, and it's at around 130k now, so I guess both lasted until 120k miles for us.

Better than my diesel Tiguan then. The clutch went at just over 40k miles.

[Don Fry]

12 minutes ago, Shaun Walsh said:

Two reasons:

Not mandated by building regulations.

Adds extra cost which has to passed on to the buyer or it comes off the bottom line.

God forbid, a 

 

16 minutes ago, Shaun Walsh said:

Two reasons:

Not mandated by building regulations.

Adds extra cost which has to passed on to the buyer or it comes off the bottom line.

so a long term saving for the user, gets ignored, or I assume, the profit margin is a simple fraction of cost. More cost more profit. Government policies that produce this rubbish are substandard. 

[Ron Gray]

1 hour ago, Shaun Walsh said:

Not mandated by building regulations.

Not really their domain, that tends to be the structure / fabric of a building. Yes they would be able to mandate how they are fitted but other than that...................

 

1 hour ago, Shaun Walsh said:

Adds extra cost which has to passed on to the buyer or it comes off the bottom line.

The additional cost as a % of the total purchase price is not that onerous, especially if living savings can be made. Most new builds now have air source heat pumps so having Solar PV is a considerable benefit for those installations. IMO all new builds should have either house specific Solar PV or, where there is an estate then ground source heat pumps for the development.

[Jon H]

5 hours ago, David Hazell 1 said:

This thread started out as promising to discuss low carbon homes and turned into bashing leccy cars

 

if an objective look at the merits (or not) of anything ends up looking like bashing it then perhaps there is an underlying issue with that product. As Mattyb pointed out, we know the current crop of evs will not suit everyone so discussing the use cases where they are and are not good is hardly bashing them. The only thing i will bash about them is the notion that they will solve the climate problem. 

 

I suspect the fastest way to fix the climate problem is to develop a computer keyboard that generates power as the human race furiously types forum posts. That would sort it over night 😉 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by Jon - Laser Engines

[Paul De Tourtoulon]

9 hours ago, Jon - Laser Engines said:

I suspect the fastest way to fix the climate problem is to develop a computer keyboard that generates power as the human race furiously types forum posts. That would sort it over night 😉 

Spot on.

 

I see that the leccy's are converting old 60's cars to electric, why not use those engines to convert Nissan leaf's to proper fuel ?.

 

Ok I have already gone,,,😄

[Learner]

1 hour ago, Paul De Tourtoulon said:

Spot on.

 

I see that the leccy's are converting old 60's cars to electric, why not use those engines to convert Nissan leaf's to proper fuel ?.

 

Ok I have already gone,,,😄

Now there's a thought, a Tesla with a 7 litre v8.

I could park outside a JSO protesters house just revving it up for hours😉

[Jake Bullit]

Cordless Tesla 😄

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 1, 2023 by Jake Bullit

[Ron Gray]

Honda are working on a Wankel generator in an EV.

[MattyB]

2 hours ago, Jake Bullit said:

Cordless Tesla 😄

 

 

 

That is an awfully complicated and expensive way to make a "self-charging hybrid" (Toyota, I bloomin hate that term, go sit on the naughty step...! 🤣), but I admit quite amusing!

Edited September 1, 2023 by MattyB