Diesel & petrol alternatives? Your thoughts please
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Yes you can. My Volvo V60 D6 PHEV can to 1800Kg. My polestar 2 EV can tow 1500Kg. The new Volvo C40 recharge EV can to 1800Kg.
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That article is click bait. It's true that many of the EVs that have come to market previously were not homologated for towing, mainly because they were smaller cars with lower range. But in the last year that has changed. Almost all new EVs that are coming out now are homologated for towing, with variying towing capability from 1000Kg (Tesla model 3) to 1500 Polestar 2, Volvo XC40, 1600, Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Skoda Enyak, 1800 Etron, C40 etc.
The world is moving forward.
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Have any of the manufacturers that you mention in your post given figures as to what towing mileages are to be achieved, it is no matter what they can tow if at this time and it seems future , to get away for a weekend you spend as much time recharging the EV to get there as when towing with an ICE vehicle there was probably no need to refuel all weekend
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I just did a 400 mile round trip with our Bailey Unicorn S3 Vigo max weight upgrade (MTPLM 1550Kg) towing with the Polestar 2 Launch edition. (78kWh, 300Kw). Started in South Northants and headed to Whitby (Great CL - Monks farm - with a view of the abbey). We planned the trip so that we would charge at our natural break points. Left at 8am from home, 1st stop for coffee and comfort was after about 1 hr 45 at Duckmanton (M1J29A). Stopped for about 25 - 30 mins. Long enough to find a cup of coffee, drink it and each a cheeky 2nd breakfast bacon roll. Then headed out again and stopped at Skelton Lakes in Leads at around noon. There we again stopped long enough for each of us to use the loo, buy some lunch and eat in the van. About 40 mins. At both stops we unhitched to charge and re-hitched to leave - added maybe 5 mins total to the stop. At both stops, we gained more charge than we needed to get to our next planned stop. I.e. we were not waiting for the car to charge, but getting on with resting and refuelling the humans while the car did its own thing. We arrived on site with about 30% charge remaining (60 - 80 miles solo, 30-35 towing). its a 10A CL, but we were able to plug the car in via the van, and charge an additional 15% to 20% each night. At the end of the trip I calculated roughly how much electricity we had used charging the car, and paid the CL owner the extra cost along with the pitch fee. We retraced our steps on the way home stopping for about 30 mins and 35 mins respectively.
On the whole trip we waited to charge the car for exactly 0 minutes. The extra hitch and un hitch took no more than 20 mins in the entire holiday. We spent 0 mins looking for or filling up at a fuel station. 400 miles of towing + about 200 miles of touring around while there cost the princely sum of about £50. The 400 miles of towing in my PHEV or the XC90 that I had before that would have cost about £140 in diesel. The local touring an additional £40 to £50. I saved on three trips to the fuel station, each being around 20 mins (as I would have had to go out of my way to find one).
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Have a look at my next post. I spent 0 time waiting to charge on a 400 mile trip.
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How many stops!!!how long was your journey
we live in as you can see by my avatar, and have with a 1300kg caravan ,will have done with our eight year old sportage automatic Without trying to find at this time an EV charging point and have done according to our mileometer 538miles which includes trips out at each of the 4sites so far on this tour and have put in two lots of diesel not full tanks, and with minimal depreciation of both vehicles for the year, not leased as it seems many EVs are , I think I will stick with what we have for hopefully untill our touring days are over ,which I think will work out much cheaper than your outfit
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2 each way. I could have done it in 1 stop, but I was ready to stop long before the car was. Taking my time on the journey is part of the holiday. I would have taken two stops towing 200 miles in an ICE.
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I want to get on with my 'holiday' ... not spend hours getting there. Maybe as & when I can hang up my tool box & stop working I might consider taking my time getting there whatever is powering my car but doubt I'll be stopping every 100 miles .... it'd take forever to get anywhere.
And I spend zero minutes enroute hitching or unhitching as I can pull alongside a pump while hitched up if necessary 😉
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You could be right as vans are designed to carry bigger loads and can then have a battery large enough for possibly? a decent mileage although the max load margins will be greatly reduced by the weight of the battery
Vauxhall are expecting to introduce an EV camper on their vivaro van later this year.
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That’s fair enough- each to their own. Like I say, towing for 2 hours is enough for me. I was ready to stop long before the car was.
But even if stopping that frequently was a compromise (which for me personally it is not) it’s more than made up for for 330 days of the year that I am not towing, and get to enjoy the driving style, convenience and low costs associated with an EV.
And it’s an amazing car…
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That’s fair enough, and while people who tow are a minority amongst drivers, people who’s car tows 80% of the time are so far away from “the norm” as to not be a target for any manufacturer. That being said, the new 800v systems in the latest generation of EVs can charge incredibly quickly (faster than my car) doing 20% to 80% in 20 mins, and with a towing starting range of over 150 miles. That changes the game again for those who want to long distance tow with minimal stops.
The gap then would be a more complete ultra-rapid charge network (350kW+) to support those charging stops.0 -
Is there a change of heart regarding electric vehicles? The government have announced that they are going to plough a lot of money into hydrogen cell technology for vehicles. Coupled with this, Toyota have a TV advert running about their development of a hydrogen powered car. How many people seeing this advert will have second thoughts about buying an electric car and defer their decision for a year or two to see how things develop?
Although we don't yet have the infrastructure to be able to refuel hydrogen powered cars at 'petrol stations', I assume the technology is not vastly different to that used for LPG vehicles. Far easier to kit out a fuel station with a hydrogen tank than to dig up thousands of miles of roads to install all the cabling that would be required to charge electric vehicles.
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Investments into Hydrogen fuel cells is important to support applications where battery power is not available or practical. Right now that does not include cars. Contrary to being easy to retrofit, H2 storage is surprisingly difficult. It requires extreme pressure to keep liquid, around 10,000psi as opposed to 100psi for LPG. And H2 is an aggressive reagent, attacking the compounds it is stored in. It’s also expensive, requiring 3x the electric per mile at the wheels of battery electric vehicles.
One of the great things about electricity, it’s already as widest spread infrastructure we have ever built. There is no need to dig up thousands of miles of road because the main grid connections are already in place. Yes there are local installations to be carried out to install each specific charger, but that is really no different to the dig to retrofit a fuel station, and is far simpler as the technology of electricity transport is well understood and ubiquitous.
I am sure H2 will have it’s place in transport (aero, shipping, non-electrified trains, plant machines) and probably in grid or energy storage. But cars? It’s just too expensive.
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I think most caravanners would agree that tow-car technology has some way to go before we make the leap from diesel to electric. The problem that I see more immediately is that the affordability of diesel too will become prohibitive as price is ramped up to force the migration to electric.
Cars such as the newly released Kia EV6 are showing a potential for towing a 1500kg caravan, but only for about 150 miles. I fear that in addition to the cost of migrating to electric, we may also have to change the way we tour, introducing more overnight stops, unless the technology and its affordability change radically in the next 9 years or so.
It could be that we return to the ethos of caravanning in the 60's and 70's that part of the holiday is the getting there, with more stops en-route!
Beyond car technology, I am concerned by the absence of movement in caravan design, with radical change needed pretty quickly. Weight is going to have to reduce, so compromise on some of the goodies we haul around with us is likely. I don't think many caravans will have microwaves, going forward! I think some pretty big compromises are likely in the way we tour, what we tow with and what we tow, but whether this can be achieved by 2030, I am unsure.
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I think that you will find the electric infrastructure we have will not cope if we all have electric cars, the existing cable will just melt when we all want to charge cars at the same time like overnight. Therefore the roads will have to be dug up to lay new bigger cables to cope.Best of luck doing that in 8 years and 3 months.
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DT, that’s not the opinion of the national grid who seem to have studied the topic, and made it the number one myth busted on their own FAQ on EVs.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-myths-about-electric-vehicles-busted
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I think these-‘Frank down the pub’ types are not thinking it thru at all. We have times now when everyone wants Lekky at the same time. . .Winter mornings, tea times, dinner times, popular TV programmes & events, Christmas. These are all high demand times, I’m convinced the companies that run the national grid are a lot smarter than Frank down the pub & naysayers👍🏻
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You will have to forgive me for accepting the public statement of fact published by the organisation whose function it is (and has been for years) to manage the long term capacity of a critical national infrastructure, over the musings of a person of unsubstantiated credibility who may not know the 1st thing about the topic. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
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A rather condescending reply from you .... this is the musings of said person. Would you like copy of his indentures?
National grid have no problem delivering their end of the bargain as they have capacity to spare. Mainly due to diminished commercial demand and, in some areas, more energy efficient domestic usage. We on the other hand have capacity where we don't need it (at the moment). Large industrial sites and estates have huge capacity but no one to use it. Housing estates, like ours, have benefited from energy efficiencies but out weighed by the greater number of power using devices. On the circuit my house is fed via has a current rating of at the largest section of 360A. As the circuit moves further away from the substation the cross section of the cable reduces and so the rating. The average domestic ev charger will charge at 7kW which approximates to 30A. The number of properties connected is roughly 90. If only 50% of those connect an ev for charging its easy to see the problem. We run out of capacity on nearly every single low voltage circuit with domestic properties connected. Coordinated charging/discharge is a possible solution, but how that is achieved is an unsolved problem at the moment. There are various proposals on the table involving comms with the cars directly or via smart meters.
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See - now that is more helpful, actual constructive thought process, and is useful in so far as identifies the potential problems at the local DNO level. But is also acknowledging the validity of the information from national grid. So it actually IS what your mate said, but with local caveats.
The problem I have with "thats not quite what a mate of mine said" is it's a blanket statement refuting the credibility of the national grid statement, which he didn't do. He agreed with the national grid. But he has a valid point from a different perspective which needs attention.
If you had chosen to post the musings verbatim to start with, we could have had an open dialogue, but refutation without evidence is pointless.
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Continuing from previous post ... what happens when your other half has an EV & it needs charging & then children each need their car charging? Will the 60A or 100A supply fuse support 4 cars? And then when your neighbours all want 2/3/4/ or cars charging will the supplies to your street support them all? You can't move for cars on our estate at the weekend when most people are at home.
I love the idea of leccy cars but I don't believe they are the only answer to our problems. I can't see us getting very far with leccy HGVs or planes
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Most people will know?by the marketing department speak, that there may be enough power to cater for future needs ,but on the "coal face" of real life many engineers admit that a large amount of the underground power cables are ,as this area over 60 yrs old and are with the power hungry nation we are ,under severe stress and we will be getting more and more outages as they,degrade
.When at FM earlier this year a cable went down and it took best part of a week with 2 big ICE generators on site to maintain a partial supply to the site and the park complex,as the men/and women who were splicing in a replacement piece of cable said ,they "patching up" these cables more often,
As posted before a retired CEGB second engineer, who is among our dog walking fraternity has said if the idea of using the street light supply for EV charging points on lamp posts? was really tested in reality it would not work in most areas as the cables are far to old
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The trucks & vans are here-
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