Electric Vehicles

[Mucker1884]

Can they not just bang a socket on every lampost?

… and an honesty box! 👀

[Archied]

47 minutes ago, GboroRam said:

You do you. 

I'll do me. 

I don't miss £80 a go at the petrol station. I plan ahead when I travel, I have a home charger and it gets me to Southall and back easy enough. Next week I'm going to give Bristol a try. I might need to spend half an hour charging up on the way home, which I'll spend having a KFC and a coffee. 

I love how diesel advocates are so hot on the environment all of a sudden. Neither is perfect. But how many people are giving their opinion online, using tech that also uses lithium batteries? 

Totally agree, choice is everything 

[RoyMac5]

6 minutes ago, Archied said:

Totally agree, choice is everything 

And responsibility nothing. 😄

 

[Archied]

6 minutes ago, RoyMac5 said:

And responsibility nothing. 😄

 

Yeah yeah , just tag me as a polar bear killer 😂😂😂, I’m immune to all this now 

[TigerTedd]

7 hours ago, Archied said:

You would if everyone has moved over to ev🤷‍♂️

How many times do you drive more than 500 miles in one go? If you have a charger at home and can drive 500 miles, you’ll almost never need a public charging station. 

[Ghost of Clough]

12 hours ago, Mucker1884 said:

Maybe you'd need more charging points (Than the current number of fuel pumps), as "everyone" would have one (A 500 mile range ev), but spend more time hogging the "Re-fuelling point".  🤷‍♂️

 

A lot of people would no longer have to go to the petrol station to fuel up, as they could do it overnight at home instead. I doubt you'd need many charging stations in towns/cities. The only issue would be people who don't have a drive. The people with cars in flats and terraced housing where charging a car at home would be problematic.

At a 500 mile range, you're talking about motorway as the main issue. Currently, I'd say finding a charger at a service station is only a problem 20% of the time. To get that down to 0% whislt also scaling up to everyone having at EV, you'd need over 100 chargers at every motorway service station. Maybe 1 in 2 current parking spaces turned into charging?

[Archied]

38 minutes ago, TigerTedd said:

How many times do you drive more than 500 miles in one go? If you have a charger at home and can drive 500 miles, you’ll almost never need a public charging station. 

Not too often ,, that’s the point , when they have that kind of range its range anxiety over 🤷🏻‍♂️, move it away from me and figure the kind of numbers of people in this country who don’t have charge at home suitable type properties 

[TigerTedd]

13 minutes ago, Archied said:

Not too often ,, that’s the point , when they have that kind of range its range anxiety over 🤷🏻‍♂️, move it away from me and figure the kind of numbers of people in this country who don’t have charge at home suitable type properties 

But I do have a charger at home. So if I had a 500 mile range car, I’d have 99 problems but charging my car isn’t one. 

[Archied]

22 minutes ago, TigerTedd said:

But I do have a charger at home. So if I had a 500 mile range car, I’d have 99 problems but charging my car isn’t one. 

That’s good , ev works for you and at this point it’s the car you choose , at this point they are not for me , couldn’t cope with Earnie s ghostly gold tops a rattling in they’re crate everywhere I go 😀

[ketteringram]

There are already over 50 chargers at Hopwood services on the M42. I still think that one day, they'll basically need a charger in every single parking space. There are two where I work, which has over 600 employees. I'd have no problem putting a charger in at home. I'd love to switch to electric. The cost side doesn't work for me yet. I can afford it, but I can't justify it.

[GboroRam]

Some people jump through hoops to find reasons to keep spending £80 a time filling up their cars. Knock yourselves out, I'm sure Exxon appreciate it. 

[ketteringram]

My current fuel spend is around £180 per month. I'm stopping work the end of this year. After that, it'll probably drop to around £40 per month. If I buy a decent ish EV now, I don't think I'd ever make up for the increased cost of buying it in fuel saving. 

[kash_a_ram_a_ding_dong]

45 minutes ago, ketteringram said:

My current fuel spend is around £180 per month. I'm stopping work the end of this year. After that, it'll probably drop to around £40 per month. If I buy a decent ish EV now, I don't think I'd ever make up for the increased cost of buying it in fuel saving. 

EVs when bought new,are reaching price parity with their ice equivalents and already have done so in terms of used vehicles.

For instance the mg4 which is a ford focus sized rival is already cheaper than the cheapest focus but boasts much higher standard equipment levels and a 7 year warranty compared to fords 3 years...plus it's great to drive.

Throw in a decent range,even on the smallest battery size,a great drive and the fact that it will save your a fortune in fuel and running costs and it becomes a compelling argument for many people.

[FlyBritishMidland]

21 hours ago, Mucker1884 said:

Can they not just bang a socket on every lampost?

… and an honesty box! 👀

Some towns do have chargers on lampposts.  I go to Coventry for work quite bit and they have quite a lot on lampposts.  They charge at 7kW so the same as a home charger.  An easy way to improve the EV infrastructure.

Not sure about the honesty box though!!

Edited July 14 by FlyBritishMidland

[Carl Sagan]

On 12/07/2024 at 07:43, GboroRam said:

No, I seriously was considering one. The prices are relatively affordable, but there's enough sneaky dealer tricks that you end up paying extras and it just didn't work out as good a deal as first suggested. 

The trouble with living ethically with everything you buy is, eventually you run out of ethical companies and you starve to death. 

The main reason I went in an alternative direction ultimately was my wife thought doing everything through a central console was too confusing. Unfortunately one of the major disadvantages of tesla is they insist on fixing things that aren't broken. Nobody has a problem with indicator stalks, we're all comfortable with using a stick next to the wheel to tell people which way we're going. So to move it to somewhere unintuitive is a bad engineering decision. I've seen one person add sticky buttons so he can feel them without taking his eyes off the road. When users have to fix your improvements by DIY, you know you've made a mistake. 

I would say probably the most stupid thing about Teslas is having to use the touchscreen to open the glove box! Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Even if, on the whole, I really like the absence of clutter. Indicator stalks? I've not yet decided, but I suspect future drivers might laugh that there were once such things.

It's interesting that SpaceX uses touchscreens instead of switches in their spacecraft. One good thing about that is it should force the technology to be really reliable. But I take the point that, just because you could, doesn't necessarily mean that you should. And design should always be human-centred if humans have to use it.

[Ghost of Clough]

45 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

I would say probably the most stupid thing about Teslas is having to use the touchscreen to open the glove box! Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Even if, on the whole, I really like the absence of clutter. Indicator stalks? I've not yet decided, but I suspect future drivers might laugh that there were once such things.

It's interesting that SpaceX uses touchscreens instead of switches in their spacecraft. One good thing about that is it should force the technology to be really reliable. But I take the point that, just because you could, doesn't necessarily mean that you should. And design should always be human-centred if humans have to use it.

My company were using touchscreens for years. We eventually spoke to the users who said they preferred the old ways - didn't like going through menus to find what they needed, and their visibility was often reduced making it hard to see the screen.

The responses would probably be different in 20 years time when you have a generation who have grown up using technology using this equipment.

[Animal is a Ram]

I often wonder if UI designers actually sit and 'drive' the cars and attempt to use the controls.

I've got a company Ford Ranger at the moment (not my choice) and 80% of the controls are now through the giant touchscreen, save for most of the heating controls. It's impossible to use while on the move, since you have to take your eyes off the road.

I was briefly driving my sis-in-law's VW ID3 and those slidy heat controls are ridiculous.

One of my bosses has a Tesla. It would really sit in the back of my mind 'what if the screen bricked itself'? I love tech, but to have critical controls of a ton of metal and batteries disappear because the screen failed? No ta. 

[Wolfie]

8 hours ago, Animal is a Ram said:

I often wonder if UI designers actually sit and 'drive' the cars and attempt to use the controls.

I've got a company Ford Ranger at the moment (not my choice) and 80% of the controls are now through the giant touchscreen, save for most of the heating controls. It's impossible to use while on the move, since you have to take your eyes off the road.

I was briefly driving my sis-in-law's VW ID3 and those slidy heat controls are ridiculous.

One of my bosses has a Tesla. It would really sit in the back of my mind 'what if the screen bricked itself'? I love tech, but to have critical controls of a ton of metal and batteries disappear because the screen failed? No ta. 

It’s bizarre isn’t it. Manufacturers have tried to fix a problem that never existed and made it worse - and unsafe IMO. 

BMW’s idrive system via the wheel controller was widely regarded as the best in the industry and they then decided to do away with it on some models and move everything to the screen, which has been widely panned in the motoring press. It’s the main thing that’s stopping me upgrading my X1 to the newer model. 

[Stive Pesley]

50 minutes ago, Wolfie said:

It’s bizarre isn’t it. Manufacturers have tried to fix a problem that never existed and made it worse - and unsafe IMO. 

Let's be honest, if having all the controls in one large complex rectangle in the middle of the dash was the best solution, then cars throughout time would have had all the buttons and knobs in a rectangle in the middle of the dash. 

But no - the stuff you need to do regularly without taking your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road have always been attached to the steering wheel for very good reasons!

[Animal is a Ram]

2 hours ago, Wolfie said:

It’s bizarre isn’t it. Manufacturers have tried to fix a problem that never existed and made it worse - and unsafe IMO. 

BMW’s idrive system via the wheel controller was widely regarded as the best in the industry and they then decided to do away with it on some models and move everything to the screen, which has been widely panned in the motoring press. It’s the main thing that’s stopping me upgrading my X1 to the newer model. 

Audi had a similar system, it was fantastic in an A4 I drove as a hire car once.