New Vectrix in 2014

[Bluebottle]

I see what Abitmad and RTFM are saying but I don't think it makes them totally useless. It depends on your circumstances.
As a cheap second vehicle they work perfectly.

As for overpricing:
My bike cost £1100
Set of new batteries £147 ( never needed them)
Fuel savings completely paid for the cost of the bike in about 13 months, maintenance and service savings were an extra bonus on top.


So for me cost hasn't been high at all - I agree that it is if you stick to the traditional big name manufacturers and companies doing major R&D though.
Plus the big brands use lithium batteries which are expensive but powerful and light; I've always used solid state silicon which is heavier/less powerful but cheaper, has much less environmental impact and is more robust regarding bad battery management.

I wish I had gone for the higher powered £3000 bike (£210 battery) but that is another story.

[mottza]

I would of considered something like that for when I bought the Ludix to get down the train station.

[MrGrumpy]

I've always thought that electric scoots can make sense for commuting, as the running costs are so low, and your mileage is normally well known and you can plan your recharges accordingly. However, the lack of flexibility means that you need other scoots / vehicles as well to give you that flexibility when you need it - but I have a commuting scoot and a leisure scoot anyway.

Whats put me off is the high first cost - most of my commutes have bits of dual carriageway, so I need something with a decent top speed, and powerful elec scoots are expensive. The other concern is the life of the very expensive batteries. I've read various claims and counter-claims about just how many recharge cycles you can get out of a battery pack. To make financial sense, they have to be able to last the expected life of the scoot as replacing them will kill any talk of saving money stone dead! There again, on a commuter scoot, you know you probably be using it 5 days a week 50 weeks a year = 250 days a year, so you can work out exactly recharges you are likely to need!

[TmaX9]

It doesn't matter how cheap to run these electric vehicles are in priciple, once they become mainstream the cost will soar, and to allow this to happen, every hotel, B&B, workplace, shopping centre and public car park will have to provide a power point in every parking space. You have to be able to refill not only at roadside top up points but at your destination.
Then you will be charged £5 for every 50p worth of electricity you use. It will be absolutely no cheaper than with petrol, less convenient and HMG will still take the same, if not greater, percentage of supply cost in tax.
The roads will be blocked with dead electric vehicles every time the roads flood with more than 2 inches of water too if drivers try to plough through like they do now.

Also certain roads will become no-go areas due to inclines.
Have you ever followed a Prius over the Hardknott Pass?? I have and the smell of burning traction motors can be had for half a mile or more.
You could argue that development of better designs would cancel this out, but the rate of development will be much slower than with the internal combustion engine as there is less mechanical engineering that you can 'tweak'.

[Bluebottle]

I have to disagree with a lot of that TMax9

I've run brushless DC motors completely submerged under water and it didn't bother them in the slightest.
Petrol engines are the ones that suffer in the wet because of trying to force a high resistance electric spark - and drawing water into the engine, neither of which happen in an EV.
My PCB control board might react badly to water but it is completely sealed and 2ft (60cm) off the ground.
Have you heard something about a particular EV that I've missed?

Less engineering to tweak?
I'm not so sure there either. Yes there are fewer parts to fiddle with (that is a good thing) but there are many superior motor and battery technologies in development. Often the biggest bidders for these technologies are the oil companies who buy them up and moth-ball them (I wonder why?) but some of them will find their way to market - graphine supercapicitors is one I've mentioned before and there are superconductor motors and we haven't even started on metal polymers yet.
Having said that, the electric motor is already superior to petrol motors. More efficient, produces 100% torque at 0 rpm, lower maintenance, more reliable, doesn't require ancilliary cooling/lubrication etc. it is the fuel storage that needs development, that is the only advantage of fossil fuels ( apart from public habituation).

Never had an overheating problem on hills (Pennines). I don't know anything about the Prious hybrid but doesn't it switch to petrol in high torque situations?

Govt taxing and interference - yes, I' m sure they will be sticking there oar in somewhere along the line.

[TmaX9]

What I meant by less engineering to tweak is that the internal combustion unit is very inefficient, and over the years has been tweaked, boosted, injected and generally refined hugely, but is still poor at getting all the potential power out of it's fuel. There is still a way to go.
As you say an electric motor is almost 100% efficient, which means no development route for manufacturers to chase to make their product more attractive then their rivals. They will probably buy in the units anyway, so what do they do to make their vehicles stand out? I can see lots of useless gadgets, irrelevant distractions and like most electronic devices, an almost instant obsolescence in that you will never be able to upgrade to better batteries for example because they don't fit. It'll be like the CPU/memory socket differences in computers that only provide about a year or so of upgrades before another design with more pins or a completely different design come along.
Once the losses in servicing revenues are worked out, I'm sure they will engineer a few vulnerabilities to surface that current pioneering designs do not have so as to not damage the push to move to these technologies.
I'm not sure how the Prius works but I followed the smell of burning to the top of Hardknott last year, passed a very smelly Prius and a while later as I was parked up along it came and stopped next to me. It was a hire car driven by an elderly New Zealand couple on their holidays and were just following the GPS back to Ambleside without knowing what the road was like. They had to finally stop as all the warning lights were flashing and it was making very funny noises so they were going to let it rest for a while to cool down. They were curious about my Nexus and despite being of the 'green' persuasion, not very enamoured with the Prius' abilities.
Whatever happens and technologies adapted we will get ripped of again you can be sure.

[Bluebottle]

Obsolete motherboards/connectors/interrfaces etc etc do drive me up the wall too.

A lot of the green EV crowd/scene or whatever you want to call it go "off grid" so that they generate their own electricity and use standardised batteries, not only because you then get a properly green vehicle but also because of the kind of concerns that you mentioned. Obviously you have to be lucky enough to have space/resources/know how etc to hand but I like the idea of these guerila vehicles trundling around almost for free powered by wind and rain.

[StephenC]

I'm not sure how the Prius works but I followed the smell of burning to the top of Hardknott last year, passed a very smelly Prius and a while later as I was parked up along it came and stopped next to me. It was a hire car driven by an elderly New Zealand couple on their holidays and were just following the GPS back to Ambleside without knowing what the road was like. They had to finally stop as all the warning lights were flashing and it was making very funny noises so they were going to let it rest for a while to cool down. They were curious about my Nexus and despite being of the 'green' persuasion, not very enamoured with the Prius' abilities.

I had a rented Corsa on Kefalonia that performed much the same. I reckon it was more than likely the treatment it got as a hire car rather than anything inherent with the electrics. Quite possibly they were knackering the clutch with all the hilly stuff.

That's not to say that electric transport will be trouble free once it goes mainstream. There are bound to be issues coming out that only millions of miles on public roads will flush out.