UK: Half of young people want electric cars - Sensationalist Headlines

yeah I'm gonna do some pulls in my fuel inefficient car today just for you buddy those giant batteries will have to be disposed of and pose a pretty substantial environmental threat when EVs catch on. the majority of pollution and CO2 emissions come from freight ships, not from cars

Batteries are pretty much entirely recycled. I doubt it will be more than a few years until you can find some old banged up EVs for that cheap. A lot less to go wrong on an EV and outside of the motor and battery a lot of it's the same.

entirely? seems that the EU only recycles 5% of li-on batteries

Gotta disagree with you. I use public transport for any kind of commute to an ordinary work place (i.e. city or town based) and I know for a fact I am not the only one who would rather offload the hassle of rush hour driving to someone else. Of course, the field I work in does mean that I don't often have that luxury and need to take my car, and I hate every minute of being stuck in traffic when I could be on a bus reading my book or anything else more productive.

There hasn't been enough demand to warrant recycling plants prior to EVs. They can be pretty much entirely recycled, but like the rest of the industry it's still upcoming. The Tesla Gigafactory will have battery recycling capabilities.

Cringe

The fact that you could just charge it at any moment is the coolest shit. Maybe if you live in NYC, but having your own car is freeing because you are limitless in where you can go and when you can go there.

Half of young people in the UK can't afford to power their homes lol

When we get EVs in the budget range it will be a major plus to younger people. They are so much cheaper to run it's crazy, electricity is almost free in comparison to fuel. It's predicted that once we get batteries (at the pack level) below < $100 kWh then we will see EVs becoming cheaper than ICEs.

Lol sounds like your sole experience with public transport was a trip to Auschwitz in a cattle wagon. Once in a while you'll have a bad experience with public transit, but in my experience stop-and-go car traffic can be equally or more infuriating.

Don't forget that a lot of modern cars now have autonomous systems that will do stop and go traffic for you.

Doesn't exactly sound like he's driving that kind of car.

Yeah he's driving some shitbox, but if someone chose to drive a new car (ICE or EV) they would have a lot of options that removed the stress of stop and go traffic.

Electric car would be pretty cool to own, but until I can buy them used for 500€ like both cars I've had so far, I'll keep combusting. (currently driving a '99 Corolla) Spending 40-50k€ on an electric car (or even a new combustion car) seems like a total waste of money to me.

I'd prefer to keep my horse than ride a soulless machine Not everywhere; in rural areas, private transportation is the way to go. However, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually saw cars banned from high density areas. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/238785/5fc44771-a0a0-4a24-abfc-1c0361ca13e9/image.png In each photo, the same sized group is standing next to their transport.

EVs are key for those countries to reduce emissions, and in the USA transportation is now the biggest CO2 emitter and the biggest slice of that is passenger cars.

congrats, youve compared apples to oranges why did you think that would make for a good post?

that's a real selfish, immature, fucklord opinion you've got there

I agree with a few points in that survey. I'd love an EV, but the selection in the UK is piss poor, they're out of reach in price for a huge majority of people, they can take an absolute age to charge (dependent on charging point and battery capacity of course), and the infrastructure for charging points just isn't there yet. Sure, they might not go as long on one charge as an ICE car will, but if they can be charged fast enough, then that's a negligible issue. Honestly the main point for me is price. To have a reasonable charging rate, I'd have to get a proper, high speed charging point installed at home as there are very few charging points where I live, and none at my work (the closest is about a mile away). I'd also have to get the car itself, with the cheapest being a Peugeot iOn and quite frankly walking the 22 miles to work would be more practical as I can carry more than it can. The Renault Zoe is probably the next most affordable, and again, it's not really practical enough. But then we're talking almost £20,000. I can only just about afford a 2 year old Vauxhall Astra worth half of that on 3 year finance, so how the shit am I ever going to be able to afford an EV? Lower costs for buying and a proper, national mandate for high speed charging stations would set things into motion for real for the EV market in the UK, and neither is going to happen for a fair while yet.

Ok, which part specifically? If it's the horse part then fair enough, that was dumb. I just thought the phrasing was funny given that our transport used to actually have souls. If it was the picture which did a space comparison, then yes sure, pollution is much more a driver for people adopting EVs -- but space concerns are a reason for those EVs to be public transport rather than cars. I don't think it's irrelevant.

For the majority of the country, if you can charge at home then the public charging infrastructure is good enough. Most people just aren't aware of it yet. Astra's aren't much cheaper than a Zoe or Leaf. If you do a decent amount of mileage then it might in fact work out cheaper. The more mileage you do the more an EV makes sense. For me for example at 1700 miles a month comparing PCP deals of the Leaf, and base spec Astra then when you factor in fuel cost the Astra costs £130 a month more than a new Leaf at sticker price. Not even factoring in car tax, servicing, or my £60 a month saving on parking at that. Choice is an issue, but we are about to see an explosion in new EVs over the next couple of years. There's an automated and electric vehicle bill going through parliament right now that does exactly what you say. However in England on the motorway network all service stations bar 1 have chargers now.

I used to think this way too, but it is just SO much better having your own car, not having to wait for the bus/train, being able to go to any grocery store you want, being able to go to the beach, visit parents, etc. at a moment's notice. Public transportation is definitely something we should invest in, but personally if I had to choose between public transportation and the costs of owning a car, I'd definitely go with a car.

I'm talking about people who hold opinions like these: "as long as you keep your EV/Musk boner away from me, I think letting people drive what they want to drive is just fine" "i'd prefer to keep my 5 cylinder than drive a soulless Tesla" If we don't start enacting policies restricting the number of ICE cars on the road, whether through a limit on production or ownership, then we'll just continue polluting the environment and there won't be enough demand for economies of scale to drive down the prices of EVs.

There's less to go wrong, but the things that do go wrong will break your wallet. A Prius battery pack is $2,000, and Tesla battery replacements (AFAIK) are over ten grand. That's way more expensive than ICE repairs, even factoring in labor.

Speaking in terms of new cars, yeah, an Astra probably isn't much cheaper than an EV, or at all depending on spec - but mine isn't new. It's 2 years old, and if I were to buy a 2 year old EV then I wouldn't receive the government grant for purchasing an EV, which would mean the price is significantly higher. As for where I live, I'm in the Northern Isles. All charging points are owned and operated by the local authority, at selected points of their choosing (mostly around their buildings and select locations along the main road). We have a very, very small selection of car dealers here, none of which are the ones that sell the popular EVs (Renault, Nissan). As far as I know the only ones that would have sold an EV any time recently is Mitsubishi (the same thing as the Peugeot) and Ford (Focus Electric), but neither feature on their respective websites any more which means that neither of them are on sale. All of that means that if I want an EV, I have to take an overnight ferry trip costing hundreds of pounds each way, to go to a dealer which does sell EVs, to then bring it back to a place where it can't be serviced or maintained because no garage here has the tools to deal with EVs. So if anything goes wrong with it, that means more money on more trips to the UK mainland to have my car worked on. Like I said, the infrastructure isn't there (at least for me it isn't), nor is the selection and the price is too high for the average earner to afford.

Sure, but on most EVs that have active battery cooling then they will probably last longer than the car. A lot of EVs have 8 year warranties on the battery.

Used EVs will eventually reach that point in about 10-20 years time. In fact, my research shows that buying a new Honda Civic Touring compared to the long range Tesla Model 3, the cost to own the Honda Civic Touring will exceed the Model 3 LR after 6 years due to maintenance and gas. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/264110/20636459-e17b-46dd-9eaf-57cc16e75b0e/cardata.JPG Source: Car Comparison.xlsx The data above is reflecting selling existing ICE car for $2500, the cost of gas @ $3 per gallon, getting the $7500 EV Tax incentive, putting $5000 down and getting a loan interest rate of 2.91%.

I know Orkney's pretty big on EVs but can't really say about anywhere else around there. There's a guy up in Orkney that sells EVs up there, operating under "eco cars". He does a bunch of vlogs on YouTube. The way the £4500 grant works for EVs, is that it pretty much immediately takes that value off the car so any used EVs are going to already include that reduction. If you got the new Leaf, or a Zoe though you could pretty much do a tour of those islands without stopping to charge though, so not sure it's that big of a deal if you can get home charging? If you got a Tesla you could probably do a few laps around them all.

Orkney is a totally different place in most respects to Shetland though, and doing a tour around the islands is totally different to commuting here. I'm doing 40+ miles a day just to go to and from work, easily 200 miles a week anyway, and that's without any extra driving I might end up doing for one reason or another. Given the fact that it's incredibly hilly here, you can take the base range figure for any EV and run with that, but even then that's going to be incredibly optimistic. And then coming into winter with the pretty much constant storms off of the Atlantic and North Sea and regular hurricane force winds, even more of the range is going to be taken off. Given a tank of diesel for my Astra is about £70, it's not the cheapest but it can more than double, or maybe even triple the range I could get out of an EV. In general driving I get around 60mpg out of my car, and a tank generally runs for about 600 miles or so (according to the trip computer, I've never run the tank to empty yet since I've only had the car a couple of weeks and kept it topped up), there's far less to worry about in terms of range and fuelling with my diesel Astra then there would be in trying to run a Zoe or a Leaf. That's not to say there aren't EVs up here, there are but I can count the number I've seen in the past couple of years on one hand - one belongs to the Mitsubishi garage, they had it as a demo and couldn't sell it when they stopped using it, so now it's just their garage car. No one wanted it, it was too expensive and wasn't practical to own. There's a bloke here who does own a Tesla though, it's a pretty swish looking vehicle I have to say. But then cost comes in again, that bloke owns 2 businesses, I work in a supermarket. I'm all for EVs, as long as they and the power that's used to charge them can be produced in a sustainable manner, it's the inevitable future of most motoring in day to day life, but like I said in my other posts, until the infrastructure is properly laid out throughout the country and the costs fall and are affordable by more people, EVs are not going to be a huge success.

Do you really think I'm advocating for everyone who can't afford an EV to be left without transport, or do you think it's more likely that I'm talking about the principal that we should be making a shift towards EVs in general? Jesus christ, I suppose I'll have to explicitly state every nuance in the future.