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> because your average Joe in the UK simply doesn't want one and the cost of recharging one is pretty bad.

On average a UK petrol car needs 1 gallon of fuel for 36 miles of travel. Maybe that's your commute round trip. That fuel costs about £7 in the UK.

You can fill the electric car up overnight, on say, Eon's "Next Drive" tariff that costs 9.5p per kWh, which means with a typical home charging setup (7kW) you can charge it for 10 hours and still spend less money than on a gallon of petrol.

Of course in reality after a couple of hours it'll be done. Which leaves you with about £5.50 per night extra in your pocket compared to ICE drivers.

But let's talk about poisoning children. Because that's the long term effect of ICE, intolerably high levels of air pollution. You can't really pay for that, no matter how expensive we make it, you can only stop doing it.

I'm not sure what's the price of a kWh where you live.

Where I live (France), at 0.22 €/kWh:

- If I use Tesla Superchargers (ie. a long-distance trip), my expenditure in power is half of what I'd pay for petrol.

- If I charge at home (ie. 95% of my car use), my expenditure is between one half and one third.

and the ride is so much more fun.

My car battery is 4 years old and retains almost the same charge as when it was brand new. How many are "a few years" in your opinion, and what observations have you made to form that opinion?

Also, let's imagine that my battery drops to a 60% charge retention when it is, say, 12 years old. Why would I have to "inevitably replace" it, while it is still largely adequate for almost all my needs?

And by the way, when I do long-distance trips, I take longer to change my toddler's diapers and/or feed him than it takes for my car to be topped-up for the next leg of the trip. If anything, I'm inconvenienced by having to move the car away from the charger because it's ready before I am.

Last, but not least, it only takes a couple days of workers' strike at an oil-related industry for people to spend hours queuing at the one gas station that has not run dry yet.

Cheers!

According to my "smart" meter, my electricity tariff - which is variable rate - is currently 28.59 UK pence per KWh, which roughly translates to 0.33 of your Euros/KWh.

Plus a ridiculous "standing charge" of 68 UK pence per day.

As to the rest of your points, if your EV works out for you, good for you, but not everyone is living in your particular circumstances. I'm based in Scotland in a particularly rural area. We recently went on a trip to the Isle of Skye, and made a >500 mile round trip on one tank of petrol in my Prius, which included driving around the island in it, without having to top up numerous times or having to even try finding a charging station if we were in an EV.

And say everyone switches to EVs - there surely must come a saturation point at which the demand for a charging station is greater than the availability of one. Compare that to popping into a petrol station for a few minutes, filling up, and setting off again, and not having to worry about filling back up again until a long time later compared to having to top up a battery more frequently.

The "top-up numerous times" is actually "once every 200 km or less often" for most EVs. You might even not need to top up your battery if your sleeping arrangements include a destination charger.

About the saturation point, I fully agree. There are two mitigating circumstances though:

1.- EV drivers with an option to charge at home will do that most of the time; apartment dwellers don't have it so easy, but at least in France the law is on their side to set up charging spots if they have a private parking spot.

2.- Building new high-speed charging stations is not very expensive, and does not require a large amount of maintenance in the long run.

One last point: the convenience afforded by ICEs and petrol stations should become stigmatized, and I wish for a tipping point in public perception, where driving an ICE where an EV would do is seen as a selfish and disrespectful choice.

Where I live electricity prices are about 1/8 the price per kilometer compared to gasoline. And I have rooftop solar, so for me it's even better. And I have not had to suffer a gas station in over a year - that in itself would be worth it even if not for the cost per kilometer.

Not to mention no oil or filter to change, no plugs or coil packs to go bad, no catalytic converters to steal...

> no catalytic converters to steal..

I predict that within 10 years gangs will start stealing EV batteries. With a grinder, trolley and 5 minutes you could remove one from a car. Then take it away and connect it to the grid as stationary storage and earn a few thousand dollars a year in balancing fees.

I really doubt this. Messing with high voltage battery packs will get people killed very fast. It's not an inert part with barely any risks.

That doesn't take into the account the software required to safely and properly charge these packs that will likely be factory or dealership locked to a vehicle if thefts start to happen on a larger scale.

>I really doubt this. Messing with high voltage battery packs will get people killed very fast.

I dont think the safety argument holds much weight. For comparison, there is a lively market in Europe for WW2 relics. People dig up former front lines by night (sometimes even with heavy equipment) and burn out any explosives they can find to sell the "decommissioned" shells to collectors.

That's not nearly as easy as removing a catalytic converter. You can walk off with the catalytic converter. But a battery pack can be a quarter of the vehicle's considerable weight. EVs weight more than fossil fuel cars because of this. You're not going to casually walk off or moped away with 1,000 lbs of battery.

The thieves I see have a truck with 50 catalytic converters in the back.

They could equally have a truck with 3 EV batteries in the back.

A single man can throw the catalytic converter in the back of the truck. It can also be sawed off with a 50€ battery angle grinder in a few minutes.

A single man cannot throw a 500kg battery bank on the truck. The battery bank in many EVs is a structural part of the car and very well protected from the underside for a reason.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that the weight and economics of it seem a lot less favourable. By an estimated ratio of 3:50, or 6%.

LOL :-))

EV batteries are under the car and connected to many other components. They'd basically need to steal the car itself to do it.

It's far from a trivial thing.

> With a grinder, trolley and 5 minutes you could remove one from a car.

No, you cannot. Look up SuperFastMatt's video about the construction and layout of the Tesla battery he had to "chop up" for this custom build.

I am honesty surprised to not already see massive theft with bike and scooter batteries.

Having been to car boot sales and seeing people selling 50 damaged (ie. ripped out) ebike batteries at once, I can tell you they are actively traded...

Thieves currently make more money stealing entire sport and touring motorcycles, or lightweight high end bicycles.

Maybe EV's dont currently make sense in the UK, I dont know, but for rest of europe its not true.

Most summers we take a road trip from denmark to south of france. After we have gotten an EV the cost is soo much lower compared to our previous gasoline cars.

The extra time to charge is not much, esp if you plan just a little bit and fx charge while you are eating lunch.

There's no fundamental reason why electricity prices be rising. Solar and wind have been dropping at nonlinear rates for a decade,and likely will for another decade. They are already the cheapest power sources by LCOE than even natural gas turbine. I don't live in the UK, but in the US the electrical cost of recharging an electric car was far less than fueling a gas car even before the current rise in gas prices. Long term even moreso.

Replacement of an EV battery will likely get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. If you read anything about the sodium ion and LFP technologies that are coming to market and the sulfur techs that will likely eventually replace them, the battery replacement will get cheaper and cheaper. Meanwhile I recently replaced my ICE transmission for $6000.

As for long range trips, the recharge times are dropping. Battery distances are increasing so people with long range requirements will probably be able to get 500 mi or longer battery capacities. For some vehicles that want to go even further than that, it will probably be some sort of generator, additional battery trailers or other mechanisms. This will likely be the soul use case that internal combustion engines have an advantage on. The other thing that is pointed out by EV users is that by charging at home you save more time on a daily basis not having to go to the gas station. So overall, unless you drive daily very long distances in the end you'll have more time.

Every modern car is filled to the brim of computers and Carrington events will likely wipe out all of them as well. However, what would you rather have a vehicle that could charge off of potentially solar cells you have on your roof in a disaster? Or would you rather have an IC vehicle that is useless without fuel, and the fuel supply logistics have collapsed in the Carrington event?

You sound like a shill for British Petroleum. Don't worry, you'll be able to buy an ICE and refuel on ICE, likely for several decades if you so choose.

Cheaper at what cost? Two wrongs don't make a it right so putting aside issues with fossil fuel, let's not ignore an elephant in the room in terms of the human rights issues involved in the electric vehicle supply chain? This is no minor matter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/electr...

Oil is completely conflict free and has never caused any human rights issues ever. /s

Sorry but nobody talks about that elephant in the room in terms of the human rights issues involved in the gasoline vehicle supply chain. Plus there are big overlaps between the supply chains of electric and fossil fuel car. This whole argument is inane.

Way behind reality. In 10 years batteries will mostly run without rare earth metals.

> Every modern car is filled to the brim of computers and Carrington events will likely wipe out all of them as well

This isn't particularly likely. Large-scale structures like power grids are much more susceptable to issues from such an event: smaller electronics are unlikely to be damaged.

> You sound like a shill for British Petroleum

Please read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have mixed feelings about that rule. It's from 15 years ago, I think, and HN wasn't as astroturfed as it is now. There are literally internal Slack channel with automation that monitors HN and alerts marketing teams to react to keywords being mentioned (companies, products).

For example: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-relati...

And GitLab is just very open, plenty of companies do the same and frankly many are actually scummy about it, GitLab is actually playing by the books.

It seems like a very naive rule these days.

What are your electricity prices? If I assume 34p/kWh and 150p/L for gas, 3.3mi/kWh and 30mpg, and plug it into a unit converter, the EV is almost half as much to fuel. Are your electricity prices higher than 70p/kWh now?

https://chooseev.com/savings-calculator/

What? EVs are still way cheaper to run than petrol. Apart from the electricity being cheaper (substantially so, if you have any clue and charge when it's cheap), they also require much less maintenance. The batteries are lasting a lot longer than anyone expected as well. One of the reasons battery recycling isn't really happening yet is there aren't enough batteries from the first few generations of EVs that are in a state where they need recycling. The main blocker with EVs has been the up-front cost, which is still high compared to ICE, but rapidly falling as mentioned above. Charging speeds and range are one of those things which people worry about when they buy an EV and then don't worry about after they buy and drive one: even with the fairly barebones charging infrastructure that exists now it's not actually a big practical problem.

And if I were around for a carrington event, I'd much rather have a big EV pack that can run my house for a while than an ICE, especially since I could recharge it with solar. The renewable transition, with a big shift to more local generation, is even more resiliant to a disruption of the power grid, and that resiliance is further enabled by EVs.

Also from the UK (and recently converted petrol head), and anyone sensible who is charging at home is not paying the average day rate on their electricity. For example, we currently pay on average 7.5p p/kwh on our electricity. We can fully "fill" our car for around £4.50 which will buy us between 240 and 300 miles depending on type of driving. For comparison, I took our 3 year old relatively efficient ICE car to top up the fuel last night - quarter of a tank cost me £20 and only added about 100 miles of expected range (and that's at a push).

Battery packs don't need replacing "after a few years", that's hyperbole.

Having to stop on longer trips is getting better over time - granted, still nowhere near a decent diesel engine but there are plenty of EVs that can do 200-300 miles realistic range now - how many people are honestly doing trips longer than that on a regular basis, and for the ones that are, how many wouldn't already be stopping for a loo break, lunch or a coffee? I'd argue the majority of the population would manage just fine.

Not saying EVs are perfect, but there is still a lot of misinformation out there and they're getting better everyday.

Of course, if you can't charge at home then they simply don't work especially at current public charging prices (seen some stations charging ~80p kw/h which is insane!). Infrastructure still has a long way to go.

As for a Carrington Events, I have thought about this recently and yep, I guess we'd be pretty stuffed. Then again, if such a catastrophic event were to happen, I can't imagine I'd be needing the car for much - we'd likely have much more major things to be worrying about.

I live in the Netherlands. I wish I had the right conditions to switch over from my VW Golf Diesel :-(

My home electricity costs 0.4EUR/kWh. I live in a terraced house/townhouse with no dedicated parking - this means I cannot charge my car at home/residential electricity rates eventhough I have solar panels in my roof that generates more electrcity than I use in a year. So, for my constraints, I will only consider an electric car when it becomes more economical to fill up at a public charger than a diesel car, and purchase costs come significantly down than what they are now.

I know I should not be contributing to the problem by warming up the planet. I'd instead control my urges to use the car and use public transport as much as I can, bike as much as I can(it gets me some exercise and fresh air, so why not?!). But, I'll hold on to my existing diesel car for those occasional IKEA trips, longer trips to vist the in-laws (Netherlands <-> Austria) instead of buying a new electric car which will certainly contribute to more emissions during its manufacturing.

I wish the EU countries see the elephant in the room and act sensibly by ramping up electricity generation at break-neck pace to 1. reduce the electricity prices, and 2. make people choose electric cars because it is the more convenient and economical choice than just wanting to save the planet out of good heart.

I think that parking spaces will eventually come with slow charging systems - combined with better "standby" power draw from electric cars everybody might suddenly get away with just plugging in the car every time they park. Maybe they could be even made "free" or very cheap in the sense that you mostly pay for it by wear and tear on your battery (it would only charge to 70% guaranteed and everything above it could be used by the system at any time while its plugged in).

A system like that would be something that probably needed to be implemented at a level that works in several countries.

eventually such a setup could be a large component of the buffer renewables need together with storage in houses and at the municipal level.

One thing at a time... Even requiring the power utility companies to install a standard slow charger at most road side parking spots would go a long way to encourage adoption of electric cars in the cities(where it makes the most sense already for short commutes). This is simply an additional avenue for the power companies to sell electricity to consumers. Why wouldnt they jump on the business opportunity?! The regulatory hurdle and safety of design needs to be moved first, and then the market can take over.

I dont think using electric car batteries as a distributed grid storage is ever going to fly though. Every consumer will worry about the battery cycle degradation and not sign up for such a thing.

At the scale at which storage is needed in the grid, it would make sense to make huge energy storage facilities with cheaper/lower density energy storage solutions like redox batteries, compressed air energy storage or closed loop compressed liquid solution etc supplemented by a buffer of LFP banks to get through the variations in energy supply by day/night or even through a week.

Seasonal variation is a bit of a harder problem though. What do we do when the winds dont blow and the sun doesnt shine for more than 10 days at a time?! We need to build out _modern_ CNG power plants that can be utrned on at high capacities ONLY at such times, while they idle out the rest of the times abd not pollute unnecessarily.

I believe this is a technically solvable problem. However, we need political will to not look at the short term and think for the long term good to back such efforts and see it through.

> until and unless electricity prices come down

checking price on my mobile app

My current electricity price is -0.08c/kWh. Yes. That is a negative number. The price has been close to or below zero for a week now.

Dunno how much lower it could go? The only thing missing here is a legal framework that would allow me to charge a local 50-100kWh battery bank with free electricity and sell it for a huge profit when the price goes up.

Your first point about price, I think is skewed by the high energy prices in UK and Europe. Elsewhere in the world, it may be a lot more attractive.

Your point about having to "inevitably replace an EV battery after a few years", did you mean "incidentally", instead of "inevitably"?

The rest of your points may be valid or not, I don't know. But I feel like the picture is more nuanced.

The price point is wrong. Even charging at peak times EVs are cheaper. Charging overnight EVs are far cheaper.

Which country are you from that you still have cheaper night rates for power? Or is that something specific to EV charging stations?

Germany had this for a while with storage heaters but it got phased out a decade ago.

In the UK, there are a number of tarrifs targeted at EVs ranging from around 7.5p to 11p p/kWh. Some are type of use (i.e. they monitor exactly what goes into your EV and give you a rebate for the amount that went to your EV) and others are time of use like the traditional night time tarrifs.

I'm on Intelligent Octopus which gives 7.5p p/kWh guaranteed on any electricity use from 11.30pm to 5.30am. Outside of that, if you allow it to manage your EV charge schedule, you can actually get the lower rate at other times of the day I'm guessing subject to general grid load or wholesale costs dropping. For example, I've had my EV charge until 7.30am on a couple of occasions, still at the lower rate.

Thanks for the detailed answer!

That sounds like part of it is subsidies. I talked with somebody at a electricity supplier a few years back and he mentioned possibly adding tarrifs aimed at grid load balancing in the future. So cheaper power for stuff like freezers if you turn their control over to the supplier. What you describe sounds similar.

If you’re on the national grid, this simply isn’t the case. If you’re, like, the only resident of a remote island with no grid connection and run your own diesel generator, then perhaps not, but you are the edgiest of edge cases. (Also you probably don’t have that much use for a car, such an island being unlikely to have a car ferry service).