Graham Butcher

What would be the minimum amount you can put in the battery at public chargers?

It wouldn't surprise me. They used the recorded data that the Jag had stored to get a conviction.

But by the same token, it is true with ICE cars, but there is always the chance the actual estimation is correct. There will always be tolerances and margins in all of these things. Surely the sensible thing to do is to accept what the car is telling you in order to do your very best not to get stranded. The sane thing to do is to react correctly in the same way was you would do if a engine warning light came on?

Interesting video by Dave Takes It On, where he tests ignoring the system on a Tesla which is telling him that he needs a charging stop to complete the planned trip. Then the car suddenly tells him (which he knew it would) that if he were to keep below 50mph, he should be able to make the trip and arrive with about -3% of range left. So, is it another way to slow down travel in the interests of road safety? The same argument that Wales used when dropping 30mph roads down to 20mph? Similar to what our government are planning to do on rural roads?

Quick question: have you actually seen any evidence of this spacing and animals / crops using the space created? I personally have not; there are loads of solar farms near me, and they all seem to cram in as many panels into a field as they can, along with all the controllers and grid connections. I'm puzzled just as to how having solar farms is protecting the waterways. The farmers are saying that they are being encouraged to take land out of production, and this is leading to ever more importation of food crops that they could be growing. Isn't that just shifting the CO₂ problem onto other countries when they produce extra food for the UK and also the same with the road transportation of those foods to the docks, shipping them across the seas, and then further transportation here in the UK?

Maybe but I doubt it, it will either be full on battery powered trucks, or stay with the status quo for a bit longer. We can't really cut down the payloads as we need to move much more food in from the ports seeing as we are giving up huge amounts farmland to solar farms.

Why is only Octopus doing this? I haven't heard of anyone else doing it. Jacob Rees-Mogg has even released a video speaking about the fact that only Octopus are doing it, and then he goes into one about the folly of it.

Sounds great, but I seriously doubt it will take off or even be approved for use in Europe and the UK owing to weight and also possibly length limits on trucks on our roads.

What, are octopuses seriously suggesting that 2 hours of darkness because of the eclipse will mean that their solar farms won't be able to contribute to the grid, so the grid itself is at risk of collapse unless people switch off their power-hungry devices? As a reward for complying, they will give you a free hour on Sunday? Really? In a few more weeks it will automatically be dark at the same time as the eclipse is taking place, and it will be colder, as it will be winter, and those with electric heating will not be using the same power-hungry devices to do washing, cook dinners, etc., and yet we don't normally have power restrictions or get asked not to use power during the hours of darkness. That has set my BS sensors tingling, so what is your position on this then? I think this is a test to see how compliant people are. I'm with OVO, and I have a smart meter, and I have solar, but no batteries, and OVO has not sent me anything asking us to reduce our consumption tomorrow evening during the eclipse???

some good deals in that auction.

This really is misinformation; it is not typical for many drivers/owners. These scenarios are, and we get what you are saying, but they are very personal to your situation. If you seriously want ICE vehicles to be replaced, you need to clearly demonstrate to others that if you were not able to home charge on your own drive, running an electric car is still both doable and affordable in order to get more drivers to make the switch. Cars charging on your own drive or at a proper charging hub are within an equipotential zone where every metal structure should be safely bonded to each other in that location. Extending your supply outside of that area via footpath, gully, etc. may well be introducing possible risk of fatal electrical shocks to others. This is a clear example of where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is not scaremongering; it is a real fact and is why some local authorities are reluctant. to approve the installation of these gullys. I provide this information in the pure interests of public safety and people's awareness of the newness of electric transportation and to show why I have been saying that there are many aspects of such that require resolving before making it compulsory. The following document gives more information and is 15 pages in length. HEA-EV-Touch-Potential-Guidance-Note-Iss1.1-2026Feb18.pdf

The key is of course, home charging.

I read on another news site that he claimed he wanted to reject the car and get out of his lease, and Jaguar refused, and that was why he concocted this event in order to get out of his contract.

Fine, if that is the closed-mind approach, then I'm out of this thread, and you can all get back to making yourselves feel good about things. I have already made the changes to the system, so I now no longer follow this thread.

This was an a very interesting problem and a novel approach to resolving it.

Sorry, but I'm not kicking off, just making a statement. Factual information could be construed as misinformation by anybody who either does not want to accept that the information is factual even though it is supported by evidence. The name of this thread is "the truth about electric cars", so is it not a fact that some truths will be pleasant and accepted, while other truths won't be accepted but will still be true just the same?

The problem with misinformation is that it may not be actual misinformation but factual information based in information that is not yet general knowledge.

What so many of you all are wilfully ignoring is the many Luddites, as you call us (which is disrespectful; we don't call you evangelists, do we?), are that we can see that BEVs or something similar will eventually take over as the fuel of the future. There is plenty of evidence of that being the case, other than the one that you all keep eluding to, that of global warming and its causes. You all love to claim that it is the result of us burning fossil fuels and putting toxic emissions in the air, when there is evidence to suggest that actually is not true at all. Let's look at the one that so many of you keep referring to, that of air quality leading to loads of premature deaths as a direct result of tailpipe emissions. So how do you square that with the fact that life expectancy has risen dramatically over the years? It is a fact the UK has far better air quality with lower PM. 2.5 in the air than Hong Kong, which also has a far higher average temperature than the UK. UK life expectancy is 80.208 as opposed to Hong Kong's figure of 85.68 years. I was born in 1949, and following the graph across, I have already exceeded the expected life of 1950 by something like 2.5 times that figure, hmm. The UK has an average of 8-11 microg/m³ of PM2.5 compared to Hong Kong's average of 15-17 microg/m³ of PM2.5. The UK has 2.1M BEVs, while Hong Kong only has 80,000. The average annual temperature for the UK is 10°C, while for Hong Kong it is 23°C. Density of population per sq. kilometre: UK = 258; Hong Kong = 6,755 So the UK has an annual lower temperature, better air quality, lower population density and far more BEVs but a way shorter life expectancy. Hmm, something is not quite adding up to support the claims that more BEVs, fewer emissions, etc. Clearly, there are other factors at play here.

Please read my post again; I said that you're NOT a green warrior, but you still misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm like you; I doubt I'll be around by the time ICE is banned, but then again, I could be. My mum never passed until reaching 92, so I could be. As to whether I'd still be driving, who knows that answer? I don't, and neither do you. But, like that professor told me, as an engineer, I have an inquisitive mind, and I'll never give up trying to preserve our rights to have a choice. As I have said before, when those at the top of the tree start proving their green credentials and actively do what they want us all to do, then maybe they might get somewhere. Like the lockdown when BJ was having parties and others were having police raids, they just keep on demonstrating how it's one rule for us and another for them and their wealthy backers.

You're doing a pretty fine job of misrepresenting what I'm saying. I never said that we are doomed or anything like it; this is you misunderstanding things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you do have an EV and also a BEV, so what is it with you? Having a foot in both camps rules you out from being a green warrior who never misses a chance to point out to anyone who will listen that BEV is the only way of cleaning up the environment and saving the planet. I have said that as an electrical engineer, I have a greater understanding of electricity than a lot of people, and by the same token, being an engineer, I don't suffer from a closed mindset. I remember one of the professors at college telling us all that it is only when you begin to learn something and you gain knowledge that you actually realise just how little we actually know. He went to explain just what he said actually meant, which was that the true engineer does not just accept what he has been told but wants to learn more about why something behaves in a particular fashion. What if we change the circumstances? How does that behave then and so on? This is how discoveries are made and modern inventions have evolved from true engineers. If no one questions the status quo, nothing changes, and that is why we are not all still walking, cycling or horse riding; someone thought differently and tried something. Anyway, back to the hydrogen topic, all I actually said was, "Well, that's a possibility, but that too has serious complications in its use, storage and can be extremely dangerous when things go wrong, plus it also consumes massive amounts of energy currently to produce it." All of which I said is 100% true; it does indeed offer great potential. For a start, it is extremely plentiful; it is the most plentiful element in the universe. It is currently the most difficult one to handle and control; being lighter than air, it has to be bonded to something else to keep it from floating away. Hence, water is the richest source of it. Its atoms are so small that they can escape through most materials, so it has to be stored either at extremely high pressures or at extremely low temperatures, both of which make it difficult to store and also consume more power to store it. It also demands tremendous amounts of power to separate from water, making it overall less efficient than other means of energy. However, once those problems have been resolved, it is a very clean energy source, as its byproduct is water. So to recap then, I never implied anything about its fire capability or that we are all doomed, merely pointing out that it is one possible solution, but it is not currently at a stage for mass adoption and is not without its own significant problems.

Well that's a possibility but that too has serious complications in its use, storage and can be extremely dangerous when things go wrong, plus it also consumes massive amounts of energy currently to produce it.

The point I think the video is making is, are we just replacing one problem with another before we have thoughlly tested things out. Are we just adding another form of pollution while still continuing the former? We will still require oil and plastics, so drilling will still be done. Should we have invested more in looking at ways to scrub the harmful emissions from burning fossil fuels while simulatously looking at other technologies at exploring their potentials? So we don't just lurch from discovering that petrol has major issues, then the same again with diesel, and we already are aware that Lithium has some major undesirable effects etc. The post is not a downer on EVs and praising fossil fuels, it's taking an alternative look at devlopments and questioning everything. Just maybe we should all be thinking this way, because that is how progress is made, it is not made by just following like sheep what a few people are telling us. We need to think outside of the box.

My advice would be to purchase an external SAT Nav like a TomTom unit, for example, or if you have a system with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto built-in, to use that and use Google Maps on your phone. Both of these approaches will also give live traffic data, which I think is provided courtesy of mobile phone tracking and system can see where the mobile phones that were moving before have just suddenly all slowed right or become stationary. The only real problem with these options is that if you have that little dot matrix screen on your instrument cluster giving you turn-by-turn information on the distance to the junction, etc., that functionality is not present.

Here is a rather interesting theory on the rise of the EV throughout history, and it asks the question: are we making the correct decision now even, or will history prove that we are making things worse or better?

No one is denying that there will be many private buyers of EVs, just as no one was actually talking about the numbers of them being company cars until @lol-lol mentioned it. It is perfectly logical that there would be significant numbers of them in private ownership in the same way as there are loads of diesel cars in private ownership. There are many parallels between them I suspect, and that from the very start there was some private owners who actually chose to have them – yes, that's right, chose. For many people, the entire debacle of EVs is all about the right to choose, and for many, I suspect that decision was made upon the realisation that there could be much cheapness to be had from home charging and the other aspect that for lots of early adopters, their actual transportation requirements were more about local drives to and from work, shopping, taking kids to school and other such relatively short journeys with the promise of being able to top the battery up to full again overnight. I seriously doubt that global warming or air quality was uppermost in their minds at the time. When the narrative switched to climate change, I accept that some will have become converts at that point. When the WEF and WHO got behind them, the emphasis suddenly switched, and governments started to encourage businesses to make the switch by way of inducements, just as they did with diesel. In my own case with diesel, although I had a car shortly after being able to drive legally, I have always had petrol, although there were a few diesel cars around in the 70s, but mainly they were converted to use engines made by Perkins, and they tended in the main to be taxis; there were a few large luxury cars such as Jaguars converted, not for the performance, I add. My introduction to diesel cars was while I was working for Crabtree Electrical, who switched their fleet over to diesel because the UK government introduced incentives to companies to switch to what was then claimed to be the fuel of the future. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? At that time I was spending 5 days a week driving lots of miles, crisscrossing London to visit electrical consulting companies working on some very interesting projects, and I was impressed by the way that they transformed driving in London's heavy traffic with their low-down grunt, pulling the car along in slow traffic with ease, just by using the clutch only. That first car was a Vauxhall Cavalier, and I became hooked on diesel from then on. Now I fully expect that the lion's share of people on this forum who have EVs as their own private transportation share the same route, starting with their companies either adopting electric for their fleets if it suits their needs or via salary sacrifice schemes and lower BIK rates. Many of you have made no secret of the fact that you love the instant torque that the electric motor gives you and lightning-fast acceleration, allowing all of you to get to the next set of traffic lights or up to 60 mph before any ICE cars. Now I also suspect that many find that aspect so addictive, combined with the promise of low running costs, that when you were going to buy a private car for your wife, or when you retired, it became a no-brainer to continue with another EV so you could enjoy that performance and much cheapness. This is borne out by the discussions about solar panels, storage batteries, periods of electricity being almost free and the elaborate plans some of you come up with to grab as much of that as you can and stuff it into storage batteries, even down to choosing cars with V2G technology to garner more cheapness and now even looking at balcony solar and heat pumps.