Graham Butcher

Precisely what I said is it not?

And that is just the same as new fossil fuel cars, they are getting cleaner all the time, each generation of cars are cleaner than the preceding ones.

He is not alone though, the same can be said for most members who have electric cars, the one person who sticks out a mile as someone who is both fair and balanced and can see both sides of the discussion is @Ootohere and long may that balanced view reign.

At my local Esso PFS they are installing a few chargers and rather worryingly they have also installed a sign next to them that reads "Maximum stay 15 minutes" WTF?

All fine if that actually suits your bodily needs but not everybody has the same rest / toiletry / eating requirements.

Yes, but don't run away with the idea that a registration means a sale, it doesn't!

Problem with all these schemes is that they are always in favour of working people, and then those are only for those fortunate to be working for a largish company, there is nothing for those working for small family businesses etc or those retired, carers etc.

Volkswagen in dire trouble, I don't always agree with the Electric Viking, but I do on this occasion. This culture of treating the workers and often the customers badly while paying the shareholders and senior massive dividends.

Er excuse me, but yes I did, I provided a document that spelled it out, issued by the government for their own private government only city centre car parks around Westminster, back at the time when we last had this discussion.

Yes, people in London just do not comprehend just how lucky they are compared to the rest of the country, things that they take for granted, we would almost kill for. My son works in a shop just 200 yds away from the central bus terminus where all the local shuttle buses terminate and return on their outward trips again, (we no longer have joined up bus services that take you from side of the city to the other, they all go from edge into the centre and return again, called "shuttles"). The other day he waited almost an hour for a bus to show up and this is supposed to be a 15-minute service?

Problem there is, once again, the number of ICE cars on our roads still do and will do for many years to come, vastly outweigh the electric cars and hence my comment about making things worse for others still holds true.

When I say further down the road, I don't mean a few car lengths away but hundreds of yards and in many cases the traffic lights are biased such that when they turn green, as soon as they don't sense another vehicle close enough to trigger the embedded road sensor, they start the sequence back to red again and to allow traffic from the other side junctions to flow out onto the main road. The council in my city are quite open about the fact that they have biased the lights to take advantage of such gaps, especially if it results in slowing the speed of traffic flow into the city. They really want people not to drive in the city, regardless of what the means of propulsion is.

He only has a 400A incoming supply coming to the main disconnect that he showed you, and then that in turn splits off to feed the three, three-phase distribution boards which he again showed you on the schematic.

I see plenty of those numpties and they take a distinct dislike to having their journey prolonged even more. I always try and slow things down if I can because I know only too well how slow and steady can save you fuel and therefore money, but it also lengthens the trip time and the traffic jams as a result of not keeping up with the traffic flow and thus getting caught up and also making those behind you also have to sit there and watch the traffic lights go through several sequences before you get your turn get past them, because numpties going at snail speed only manage to get two or maybe three cars over the lights when they are on green because they can see a jam further down the road so they crawl along.

I agree, but the system does shift chargers onto other phases to try and balance them, and it clearly relies on not everyone wanting to charge every day, so clearly gambling on most of the cars being used as city cars and doing a very limited mileage each day. That in reality is not always going to be the case and there will be some cases where the management system will fail to throttle people's chargers and severe overloading or disconnection of the supply could occur with all the potential hazards and problems that can bring.

Driving like that in a city environment during rush periods will just prolong the agony for all the other drivers waiting for you to crawl your way along the road, and could possibly set some road rage off in the process.

Well here in Chelmsford there are currently approaching 1,000 new flats nearing approval stage that will involve demolishing shopping areas including a mall and rebuilding a new mall with flats above and surrounding it, with other blocks of flats, all of which have zero, yes, that's right zero parking arrangements, so anyone with a car will be forced to look for alternative parking solutions. The streets around the area are all pedestrianised and then the streets around the that area are all the type which have terraced houses as you see in the photo, narrow streets, parking only on one side, the houses themselves are only fractionally wider then the length of a small SUV, so not everyone can park their car there, those that can, do so on a permit. Currently there are no EVs in that area for reasons I mentioned in an earlier post. Like it or not, you are in a very privileged position and as a result you really cannot comprehend how vast numbers of normal everyday folk have to live their lives., so how are these people supposed to cope?

@wyx087may I suggest that you read what I wrote again, but it still remains true that there are millions who cannot charge some living in blocks of flats will not be able to charge, even in underground car parks as there is high concerns about repeats og the Korean and other places happening. UK Government have already banned EVs from their car parks in London.

While it is very true that EV charging hubs use up far more real estate than a PFS does, I dare say that some of you are thinking so what, as EV sales increase (if they do, remember pre-registration is not the same as a sale), then you could be thinking that more PFS could be adapted into becoming smaller hubs, which technically is true, but that still would not be sufficient to handle all the requirements as a small PFS could handle far more cars an hour than a typical charging hub can. The only key to the problem is being able to public recharge to max capacity in the same time as it takes to fill up a liquid fuel tank so that an EV charging centre can compete on a time basis with a PFS and then the second problem comes in being to supply enough power to do that time and time again without the grip being affected so that other users are not impacted by power shortages even on a dull and windless as well as a freezing day. Charging at home is never ever going to become available to everyone, it's just not possible, so the model has to be perfectly viable in terms of time and cost as it is with fossil fuels, even if it is not possible to get an EV to provide the same range as the current crop of ICE cars, as long as there is not a significant cost and time penalty in having to keep stopping to charge (some ICE cars can only do 2 or 3 hundred miles before needing more fuel) than more people would consider making the switch to electric.

I found this rather interesting today.

Just keep telling yourself that when (and I do expect that this will happen in the fullness of time) that the confession is announced that actually electric cars are not quite as green and good for the planet as it was originally claimed when they discover the real impact of trading pollution at our end of usage for the massive problems being created in other parts of the world with the water table slowly becoming heavily polluted. We had similar position with the advent of diesel only to be told once huge numbers of people switched that it was supposed to be far worse than petrol. Petrol used to be terrible with its carbon monoxide with is high choice of means of suicide. They cured that with the fitting of catalytic convertors. Fact is air quality is many magnitudes better today than it was in 70's and 80's even, we are extracting greater economy and less pollution from every litre of oil today than it was ever dreamed possible 40 years ago. We get way more mpg from even 3 litre cars now then we got from 1.4 litre cars then, we also get far more mph now for the same amount of fuel. My 1957 Hillman Minx was 1.4l, 54 BHP, 31mpg, 0-60mph in 26 seconds, top speed of 71mph and spewed out loads of pollution, current car is 2l, does upto 65mpg, has 150B HP, top speed of 139 mph, 0-60 8.5 seconds and weighs almost twice the weight of the Hillman and produces a fraction of the pollution. Even today we are exporting thousands of tons of scrap tyres to other parts of the world rather than deal with the recycling of them ourselves here. They have a magnitude of other uses that they could be used for, but because of the low profit margins involved or simply can't be bothered we ship them off to for others to deal with. This video shows a tyre dump on fire, how much carcinogenic fumes are involved here? Kuwaiti citizens deal with effects of fires in world’s largest tyre graveyard

Yes, but you are distorting the results again from the conditions that Matt set for the test, and you're thinking like a person who is besotted with EVs. Whereas Matt was thinking about people who were thinking about transitioning from an ICE to an EV where heat is a by product of combustion and using a heated seat would be increasing the load on the engine and thus decreasing the range. Surely it is better anyway to be at a comfortable temperature all over your body and not have a hot/warm back and be cold everywhere else? As you get older, you feel the cold more, especially in the feet and hands and cold fingers are not good for driving and wearing gloves is equally not good.

But that is not what Matt Watson wanted, he set the parameters for the test to be as most "normal" drivers would with no aids to economy other than having the heated seats off, air con set at 20C and keeping strictly to the speed limits and achieving them whenever possible, so no eco-modes at all.

Apparently EV sales are up, or are they? The truth is out there, somewhere.