New Silence S01+

[Tartan Cobbler]

If you have to replace batteries at at least £1k every 4/5 years that's a lot of services an ICE scooter will take

[Data]

If you have to replace batteries at at least £1k every 4/5 years that's a lot of services an ICE scooter will take

Lithium ion batteries car or bike, last a very long time, especially if you look after them. Don't confuse them with the likes of Lithium Ion phone batteries or push bike EV batteries. Those show very visible signs of degradation after 2 or 3 years. Car & some mc batteries are different in this respect for a shed load of reasons. The most important one is the vehicles themselves manage the battery charging & to some extent the discharging to prevent the damage that can occur during the life of the battery. The battery packs are cooled or heated as required which lengthens their life span many times over. The vehicles also regulate the charge rate with pulse charging when needed to charge more quickly without overheating the battery. There's lots of other things that the vehicles do but won't go there just now.

I don't know the cost of replacement batteries on the Silence but it won't be much. As each year passes the cost of the batteries keeps falling. Look at the Nissan leaf batteries on their first EV's for example. After 14 years of use they are still going strong with hardly any of them having been replaced (source: Nissan). The cost to replace the Leaf battery when it first came out was £19,780! Now they cost £4,000. Nissan has said the price is set to fall by another 50% over the next couple of years. So £2,000 for a car battery. That's less than a new factory ice engine in just about all cars. A Silence battery will cost peanuts in 5 years but it's unlikely it will need replacing in 5 years. It'll go much longer than that.

Note: Lithium Ion batteries will without doubt soon start to be replaced with Sodium or Graphene batteries, both of which will boost range and be lighter and quite soon much cheaper. That means you will have more choice as to what you use in your car and the range you get. Both Sodium and Graphene batteries can charge more quickly too.

[Data]

You are right of course. Servicing & fuelling the bike is cheaper but the real advantages come with longer term ownership. The motors simply don't wear out in the same way that ice engined bikes do. Performance should remain quite constant, not dropping off as the bike approaches service time after doing some big miles. It's a nice looking bike in my opinion.

That's arguable! Modern petrol engines will run and run and run, as long as you change oil/filters/spark plugs regularly, and as long as something in the electronics doesn't go bang! On the other hand, batteries on Elec vehicles do decline and do become useless in a far shorter timescale than IC engines do. As yet, we don't have any experience of how electric motors will fare over time, given that everything on a bike is subjected to the ordeal by salt, water, muck and vibration that constitutes UK roads.

Not sure why you are using this argument Grumpy. There is NO arguement about it. The evidence is incredibly clear & well documented & none of it supports your view. Just about everything you say here is actually untrue. Of course ice engines CAN run a long time over many miles & will cost many many times more money to do that compared to EV's, and they cannot match EV''s for longevity, driving experience, reliability & outright cost of ownership. Then there's the huge reduction in CO2 of EV's & the considerably cheaper service costs. There are already very high mileage EV's on the road (very many of them company cars and vans with in excess of 100,000 miles). I've seen EV's at ouor local auction with up to 80,000 miles on the clock with good battery state going for very high sums of money because they don't have any issues. So we do have plenty of experience of the robustness of the power trains in EV's. Indeed in the States many folks have covered 500,000+ miles in their EV's without problems. After all, there is only one main moving parts in an EV engine & it's pretty hard to wear it out, unlike an ice engine which has too many moving parts to name here & they all wear out incredibly quickly by comparison. Do you know the eco boost engines in most Fords have a design life of 120,000 miles only! EV's are designed to run much much further than that. Most won't see that from their ice engine as short journeys reduce that engine life considerably. EV's don't suffer problems caused by short trips & are unaffected. No oil to warm up etc etc...& I'm just scratching the surface here regarding EV advantages.

[Tartan Cobbler]

I know little about batteries/ ev's and the technology involved and agree with the zero emissions once the vehicle has been made but surely the manufacturing of said vehicles is worse for the environment?..... I'm finding this discussion fascinating and learning lots from those with more knowledge and experience, thankyou

[Data]

I know little about batteries/ ev's and the technology involved and agree with the zero emissions once the vehicle has been made but surely the manufacturing of said vehicles is worse for the environment?..... I'm finding this discussion fascinating and learning lots from those with more knowledge and experience, thankyou

It depends to some extent on the brand of EV car that you buy because some manufacturers use different materials to make their cars which require less energy to craft them. In those cases there is virtually no difference in the CO2 produced between petrol/diesel & EV's in production. Some other EV's may produce slightly more CO2 during manufacturer. Although, generally there isn't much difference and the huge reduction in CO2 from running an EV more than makes up any deficit. The longer you run your EV the better for the environment too! Don't forget that ice engined cars carry on producing CO2 at an ever increasing rate for the entirety of it's life and as the car ages tailpipe emissions getting dirtier and dirtier. One of the often raised issues is that producing the Lithium for the batteries has a negative affect on CO2. Of course it does! However, studies have shown that it's little different to producing petrol or diesel which is also very energy intensive. Mostly around the world it's fossil fuels that pump the oil out of the ground which adds to the problem, then it's transported producing more CO2 and it's got to be refined which is incredibly intensive with it's use of energy. Of course Lithium requires transporting and processing too. The good thing is that processing all these products will and is becoming much greener as we use more and more renewable energy.

This link is quite useful but isn't entirely accurate in it's conclusions I notice. But it's good enough to show you a trend.
https://www.transportenvironment.org/di ... tric-cars/

NOTE: Very very important to understand the UK is in a far better place with it's green energy than nearly anywhere else in europe (with one or two exceptions) and so that reduces further the CO2 from EV's and will further improve our CO2 figures.