The Truth About Living With An Electric Car
Have you ever wondered how truthful electric vehicle (EV) ads are when it comes to range and efficiency in the real world? Or how different add-ons and accessories can reduce the range of your electric car? Well, the UK company carwow did, and they pulled together this video.
After getting their hands on the EV Skoda Enyaq (pictured), they started putting it through a series of tests to see how its claimed range holds up in different driving scenarios.
They began fairly lightly, with carwow employee Mat Watson driving the car as anyone normally would. He then ups the stakes, driving with everything turned up to the max, including the heaters, wipers, and headlights!
But wait, there’s more! Once he’s undertaken that test, he adds some other equipment to the car, including a ski rack and a roof box, all the way through to towing a caravan!
This is a real-world road test of an EV showing that manufacturers are lying about range and efficiency. Watch the video to learn more:
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Howdy
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Very good video, but one or two notes.
Continuously turning will create greater load on the drive system, and thus the battery, than straight line driving. While I expect this might be negated on average by the fact normal high speed driving includes various curves, including tighter ones, I thought it worth mentioning.
It’s a pity a roof rack alone, without the bike or box wasn’t tested. Roof racks are a known consumer of power just on their own.
As was stated, the video is also applicable to none EV, as it still represents the same loses in either case.
I have to wonder how such an EV would meet the challenge of climbing hills with a caravan attached? Active cooling would cause even less energy reserve, and restraint from the driver alone may not be enough.
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VOWG
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A foolish waste of resources to solve a non-problem.
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Tom
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Absolutely!
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Tom
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With lithium going to the moon just wait until you have to pay more than you paid for your junky EV to replace the battery pack.
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Eric the Red
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This britich twit speaks too fast and too flippantly. I can’t understand most of what he’s saying. Also, I’m not Generation Twerp, so I resent trying to pick up key information from listening and watching a damn video. A real article would have a hierarchy of assumptions and associated conclusions stated plainly in an article that I can read, you know, like real intelligent people, not like some damn TikTok generation where news consists of nothing but endless concatenations of Twatter feeds.
Conclusion: stop being an adolescent, learn about real journalism, especially those concerning technical data, and rewrite this damn excuse for an article. Maybe then real people will actually start to have the opportunity to learn real information.
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Richard Noakes
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Electric cars were invented and used in the early 1900’s, as an alternative to petrol (gas) driven cars, the first petrol (gas) driven car was the Benz 3 wheeler driven by the inventor’s wife to a friends or family home some distance away – a woman driving a 3 wheeler petrol (gas) driven car – with her 2 children on board – not done – and the invention caught on and why we have petrol and diesel cars now – Mercedes being the Benz brand name, in actual fact.
The problem back then, was the battery life and the same problem will be the defeat of electric cars now, especially as the costs of Lithium (not readily available), have shot up and continue to increase, which in turn increases the costs and replacement costs of batteries, which need this vital element in them.
Modern electric cars, also occasionally short out, causing fires which cannot be put out and you really don’t want to house an electric car near your home in case that burns down too and the cars themselves are not cheap to buy either, against petrol (gas) engine cars.
When the pluses and minuses are factored in, the prestige of driving an electric car is ultimately a waste of money in any trip, other than driving locally around your suburb and like all batteries, the replacement cost of worn out batteries, is often a substantial part of the replacement cost of a new electric car, where your battery dead, electric car, has no trade in value either.
Anyone caught up in this electric car madness, has to be wealthy, where money is not an issue, where, in most families, cost of living increases impact on family expenditure, when electric cars make no sense against gas powered cars, for reliability, distance driving, or maintenance, parts and they rarely catch fire, either.
There is a rumor going around that Blue Gas, which is made with Ammonia will replace petrol (gas) and any petrol (gas) car will run on it, without any engine modifications and in fact one of the early x- jet planes ran on Blue Gas, but the conversion costs, currently, make Blue Gas too expensive.
Apparently someone has invented a method of converting Ammonia to Blue Gas cheaply, so Blue Gas prices will undermine and replace petrol (gas) prices hopefully, eventually – I can’t wait to run my petrol (gas) driven cars on this new Blue Gas fuel – which would be the death knell of battery driven cars, immediately – a case of history repeating itself once again.
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Howdy
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Hi Richard,
Not heard of blue gas, but it appears to be ammonia as a medium to transport Hydrogen, yet, there are problems.
“While concluding that full decarbonization of ammonia by 2050 is technically and economically feasible , the report also anticipates a relatively small role for blue ammonia in the eventual mix of technologies”
https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/articles/technology-advances-for-blue-hydrogen-and-blue-ammonia/
Or this one:
New technique seamlessly converts ammonia to green hydrogen
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201118141718.htm
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Herb Rose
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Hi Howdy,
Breaking any stable molecule into its components requires energy. Any heat produced to accomplish this separation represents lost energy (as opposed to work) and it will not be recovered when the atoms recombine into another stable molecule. Bottom line, it will take more energy to create the fuel than the fuel will produce.
Herb
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Howdy
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Hi Herb,
Yes, It’s the same story as allways with this replacement fuel nonsense. Hydrogen is rubbish, and EVs are not the future.
Using it as a shipping fuel needs more room, so less cargo.
“Ammonia also produces nitrogen oxides (NOx)”
https://www.sustainable-carbon.org/ammonia-a-fuel-of-the-future/
Tut tut…
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Herb Rose
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Hi Howdy,
A real solution would be if they found a catalyst for a fuel cell that wouldn’t be fouled by carbon. Then you could use methane and propane to produce electricity without the heat loss. The products released would be CO2 and H2O neither of which are pollutants.
Herb
Dave Walton
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I have owned a Nissan Leaf for 4 years and it does exactly what it says on the tin. The triumph of experience over uninformed opinion?
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MattH
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Hi Dave. Two opposing truths. Dang! Either you have a freak of automotive production or one proposition is not truth.
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality. In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences.. Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood.
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Howdy
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Hi Dave,
I note you have a small EV, not a ludicrous show-off device. I guess the car fits your requirements perfectly. I can’t argue with that, but the push for everybody to adopt them is not feasible, nor a good idea since they won’t replace ICE in most situations where distance, cost, and convenience is the requirement.
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Russ D
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EVs, however, are not green. A half million pounds of earth has to be dug up for just one battery pack which must be moved for processing in huge (diesel-powered) trucks, crushed and then wildly-toxic chemicals used to extract the ores — specifically lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and others. None of this occurs with a traditional vehicle. The packs are not economically recyclable and requiring them to be will wildly escalate their costs further. Charging said vehicle is approximately equal to running your electric clothes dryer all night long, and the cost of power when you’re not at home is roughly double to triple when you use a “supercharger” or similar; this makes the cost on a per-mile basis higher than that of a gas car in many cases.
We do not have the electrical capacity nor is there any way to generate it using so-called “green” methods to charge these vehicles if a material percentage of the fleet converts. Without power you own a $50,000 brick and being “out” means not going anywhere. What’s worse is that the existing fueling stations are used by a vehicle for about 5 minutes; conservatively it requires 30 minutes to get usable range from an EV, so contemplate where you’re going to get six times the land you have for each fuel station now, plus you will need to place them twice as close together as the average EV range is half or less that of a gasoline vehicle.
The truth is that modern automobile gasoline engines are about as efficient as can be achieved. CO2, which is the only primary emission of modern closed-loop gasoline engines, is not a pollutant — it is plant food and emitted by every animal as well. Simply put your gasoline car is far greener, all-in, than is your EV. Sorry, facts are facts folks and we don’t use liquid hydrocarbons because we’re pigs. We use them because nobody has come up with an actual workable and cost-effective alternative.
Mandating the impossible is a recipe for societal collapse. Secretary Pete has never put forward any facts, figures and computations to show how such a “transition” can take place. That’s because he knows he’s 100% full of **** and what he is cheering on and part of is impossible.
I don’t care if you feel this is a good thing or not. That which you feel must yield to physics.
Always.
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