Has anyone any experience of electric cars? I'm thinking of buying one to plug into my offgrid system and I see there are quite a few secondhand ones coming on the market. All in London. I would live to get some feedback from anyone that has one or has driven one. It seems that the G-wiz is the most common so far but the Mega City looks interesting.

Thanks Keith

No experience of them but I am replacing my car at the moment and have been looking at a number of options. I doubt an all electric car is feasible, probably better off with a combination of electric and diesel.

http://www.green-car-guide.com/
http://www.whatgreencar.com/
http://www.parkers.co.uk/choose/TopTen.aspx?category=5&Template=

I love the car I have now but rarely go farther than 30 miles in a full journey. So I was thinking of mothballing the Suzuki Vitara for use on very rare longer journeys and using a bespoke electric car for my once a week journey to Cardigan (30 mile round trip).

Only problem is that the Suzuki will need to have tax, MOT and insurance kept up for perhaps just one or two journeys a year. Maybe the government ougt to introduce pay as you go tax etc for very occasional users.

It was over 25 years when it first came in which meant it was any vehicle registered before 1972.....and still is i believe. I know because I had a 1973 VW camper and had to pay full road tax which was annoying!

The aygo I mentioned has has tax of £20 a year form 2009 onwards (£35 this year) and is in group 1 for insurance. I'm swapping a 330Ci for mine - as it's our second car. Next to go will be the Cmax but haven't decided yet what to get instead. Like the idea of a used prius as they should get 50 mpg real world - not bad for a family sized car.

I recently did our carbon footprint and cars were our worst area at 5.7 tonnes :-(

I've been checking out a lot of the rumours on the prius - like stuff about the battteris causing deforestation and hummers are better dust to dust etc and it's all lies. Also despite using a fuel with 11% less energy than diesel it manages equiavalent MPG without the particulates. Latest research turning up is saying the large carbon particles in diesel (And wood smoke) are just as bad for global warming as CO2. There are aftermarket Li-Ion battery packs for the prius. I think someone in the UK is now selling them - but don't know your budget. They're about £10k. With a further £10-12k for the used prius? The drive train is warrented for 8 years, but you may invalidate that if you swap the batteries - haven't found out yet.

Or you could hand on to see what the renault/nissan deal with Better Place to Live turn up.

Had an ELMO, factory conversion of the Skoda pickup. 25Kw motor driving through the existing gears/transmission, powered by 14 batteries, 10 below the pickup tray and 4 over the motor. The fuel tank, exhaust system and IC engine were removed and the spare wheel located behind the passenger seat. An additional 12v battery, charged from the main battery pack powered the lights,windscreen gear and indicators. There was no heating. Tyres, Czech in origin, were pumped to 50 lbs to reduce drag. The tray was about 18" deep and took a maximum of 200kg. In running order but no ltray oad it was close to maximum weight but the low centre of gravity and hard tyres allowed fast cornering without any roll. An inbuilt battery charger plugged into the 230v system topped up the batteries overnight. The total costs, running and battery renewal was 1/3 of the Volvo 40 series. No MOT being in the same category as the milk floats. Insurance about £250.

Designed as park upkeep vehicle for which it was ideal. On the road however it could do 40 miles at 40mph which caused concern entering from the slip roads. The police recommended an orange flashing light as used for agricultural vehicles going less than 25 mph. It was the local wonder always beating IC powerd cars off the lights as there was maximum power at zero revs and power tailing off markedly as 40 mph approached. Quite the opposite effect from IC powered cars.

The vehicle was lost due to an accident but the battery pack maintained it's charge despite the considerable shock of the accident. It would have been an ideal town vehicle, I had used it between towns 10 miles apart.

What is the efficiency of a new coal gasification power station (to use worst case) compared to a state of the art internal combustion engine (not a hybrid)? I'm guessing the power station is more efficient. Centralised burning of fossil fuels gives you the opportunity to capture the CO2 which you can't do with a tail pipe, plus there is no local particulate pollution. There are fuel security advantages of moving away from oil for transportation (so long as we don't replace it with gas fired power stations). Using more off peak power is a more efficient use of our power generation infrastructure, particularly when the contributions of renewables (you can't choose when the wind blows) and nuclear (you want them on 24/7) are going to increase over the coming decades. Using electric cars is vastly more efficient than growing biofuels and doesn't take food out of poor peoples' mouths. Electric cars are far simpler with hardly any moving parts and the new batteries can do 150k miles and still be able to hold 75% of their charge so can then be used for stationary uses like grid buffering. The Tesla has demonstrated that performance (faster than Porsche) and range wise (150miles) it can be done, just need to get the price down.

In conclusion, if we have to have cars they should, and will, be electric.

The only reason I'm looking into electric cars is that I have spare renewable electricity that I do not want to put on the Grid. I would not recommend that anyone who is grid connected buying one as it would, in truth be a nuclear powered car at present!

We seem to be in a bit of an 'energy storage void' at the moment. Fossil fuels are running out, battery technology (even lithium polymer) leaves alot to be desired in terms of lifecycle, practicality, recyclability etc. bio fuels are causing social and political problems as well as having questionable benefits once all the processing is taken into account and hydrogen options still cause big problems with safe storage and the general efficiency and cost of fuel cells. Hopefully the technology will move on within the next couple of years but until then the best use of electric power is for assisted bicycles (which are getting better all the time and for the cost of an electric car you could get a whole fleet of bikes and trailers! A to B magazine do a fair bit on electric transport. (atob.org)) HN

Keith, buy a Tesla. Then when you are bored with it you can give it to me.

PS - is anyone keeping an eye on what power tool companies are doing with batteries? DeWalt have a new Li-Ion (nano) that is supposed to be guaranteed for 2000 cycles.

Mmm. To be fair, I think he had the right idea - that there was (and is) an unmet need for something that just transports people and minimal luggage, to be used as well as a larger vehicle and not instead. I do think that we're stuck with the idea of what a car looks like, and that if we approached the needs and available technologies again we might come up with something quite different.

Many families have two cars these days, but do BOTH cars need to be capable of 300 mile range?

In my view an electric car built today would be perfectly acceptable as the second car in a two car family. That way you still have one capable of driving you to the south of france on holiday.... so that deals with the range problem for many people...just take the other car on long trips.

Now which car would most people drive to work? How far is the average commute?

It's seams logical to use your existing infrastructure i.e. your gas mains and the car you own?

Convert your car to run on CNG and buy a compressor to fill your car up at home.

The evolution of the electric car keep moving forward just jump on when your existing infrastructure wears out.

I have not got mains gas so quite like the idea of a 1972 VW beetle converted over to an electric motor (been done for years), but then I just like Bugs!

Nice one. Interesting how interesting this thread has been - even eco-boyz still like their carz/toyz! Me included.

When you mentioned something without an onboard 3 piece suite it reminded me of this....

http://www.wrightspeed.com/x1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qDZOBQs60w

That video shows the electric car whooping 2 well knnown supercar manufacturers backsides.

A quick quote...

In recent track testing, on street tires, it achieved the following performance:
0-30 mph: 1.35 sec
0-60 mph: 3.07 sec in 117 ft
0-100 mph: 6.87 sec
0-100-0 mph 11.2 sec
Lateral g: 1.3
Braking g: 1.2

As an ex biker something like this would do me, but it would need 4 seats, well at least 3... (I still have the helmet, leathers and waterproofs!)

It shows you that supercar manufacturers need to up their game before the new boys come along on kick them off their thrones. Best bit - the Ariel Atom chassis on which it's based is made in the UK.

PS Tango that Dust to Dust report has throughly been trashed on the internet. It shows you can use statistics to prove anything. The main problem was they only gave a prius a life of 100,000 miles, despite for example 1 canadian taxi driver who put 250,000 km on his in 3 years so Toyota bought it off him for R&D. The assumptions it made biased the results in favour of exiting technology - because it didn't apportion the costs used in Prius R&D to future models which will use the same technology. Whilst no R&D cost of developing the internal combustion engine to it's current level, in say a hummer was appropratied for the last 50 years. The other thing that is most obvious - if it costs so much energy to produce a Prius - then Toyota would be selling each car at a loss. They did this with the Mk I prius, but not the latest one. Toyota argument (based on their own numbers) is that the lifecycle energy cost is about 15% in manufacturing and 85% in fuel use. Not the otherway round.

Chris is right saying that although we don't have much renewables around, it's still more efficient to get the power generated centrally. Despite coal powered electric generation being inefficient it would create less pollution & CO2 than using oil powered combustion engines as the over all efficieny is better. I did a check last week and end to end efficiency is about 19% for an ICE, but about 30% for battery powered car. You also have the option with coal generation to use sequestration. Eventually! Can't see a practical means of trapping your tail pipe emissions ready to be pumped back into the north sea.

Simon