Buying a 2nd hand car instead of an EV
- Thread starter northernchappy
- Start date
I had an eye screening check today, one of those times when it would be most unwise to drive, and so two buses to get there. bearing in mind, I live in a village, mostly occupied by commuters, I took the opportunity whilst waiting for the bus, to do a count of ICE, versus EV. This was on a very local village road, where EV's are most useful. The result was 44 ICE, versus 2 EV's. Imagine the chaos, had that been 46 EV's and all trying to recharge simultaineously, at a motorway filling station.
Neither did/will require me to ensure I have a full tank of fuel, prior to driving - is the point you seem blind to. I just jump in and drive, reassured that if I should decide I might have set off without adequate fuel, I can stop almost anywhere, top up, and resume my journey, within five minutes.
I'm not denying that at all.
I've always said it's horses for courses.
Your dragging a caravan probably rules you out of EV but realistically, that's the only thing.
Charge overnight for buttons, do a couple of hundred miles to my office or site. Stop for twenty minutes on the way home for a top-up and cuppa, and charge again overnight. Easily doable, and absolutely no bother.
Whereas you've consistently poo-pooed EVs based on (in) experience, and utterly contrived scenarios.
When people are coming here for advice, it's a shame that your often worthwhile opinion is absolutely not so, when it comes to EVs.
I've done decades in ICE, and tens of thousands of miles in EV, so know the merits of both.
"Stay in your lane" is an apt maxim here.
Same here Harry, out of approx 170 homes where I live there are just 2 EV's & one of those is a company car that rarely charges at home.
Why would every car be EV, there only be one charging station, AND every one of those EVs be trying to charge at the same time?
Like I said before, utterly contrived scenarios, to cover your ideological but afactual objections.
At start of 2026 in the UK, there were approx. :
- 1.85 million full EVs
- 1 million home chargers
- 1.85 million full EVs
- 1 million home chargers
Frequently. I'm doing it right now in fact, whilst sat in my living room, typing this...
You need an EV like mine - it just tells you what they are. It can even tell you what they are on your phone if you like...
Of course, when every car in the country was ICE, they didn't all want to fill up at the same time, for some strange reason...
So do I...
UK electric car chargers outnumber petrol pumps by almost two-to-one | Auto Express
DfT data shows there are more than 116,000 public EV chargers, on top of the thousands of home wallboxes nationwide
www.autoexpress.co.uk
500 years ago, you'd have been telling Columbus that he'd fall off the edge of the world once he got to the horizon...
UK electric car chargers outnumber petrol pumps by almost two-to-one | Auto Express
DfT data shows there are more than 116,000 public EV chargers, on top of the thousands of home wallboxes nationwide
www.autoexpress.co.uk
That maybe so but what’s the average time it takes to put enough fuel in a ICE car to enable 500 miles of travel compared to charging a battery in an EV to do the same mileage? Also, is the range on an ICE vehicle severely affected by use of lights, heater, a/c etc?
That isn't the point.
The majority of vehicles spend the majority of their time parked up. That is where charging should occur so how long it takes is irrelevant. The car will be parked there anyway - an extra few seconds to shove a cable into the car is the only additional effort.
Today that is mostly people who can park on their own property and charge overnight.
In the future that will be for any EV parked anywhere. What's missing today is the charging facilities at all of these other places - but these are being installed. It will take a long time, but then so will replacing existing ICE vehicles with electric.
That is why if you don't have easy access to charging where your vehicle is parked most of the time, buying an EV today is not a sensible thing to do.
There will always be a requirement for public charging but even there, most of that should be slow AC charging. If someone drives to a place for a reason and the car is parked for an hour or four, that is when charging should occur.
For longer journeys rapid charging is required and already exists, for those short stops at motorway services and similar which people should be making anyway.
The mindset of driving around until your car has no fuel left and then going to some special filling up place to cram a weeks worth of fuel in is going away. EVs are not like that, and anyone who tries to use them like that will have problems.
Everything has an effect, but it's insignificant.
Worst case would be a resistive heater, but even at a hefty 3000W on continuously (which would cook those in the car after a while), and it was on for a full two hours at that high output, that's 6kWh or about 20 miles of range for a typical car.
While 20 miles of range is noticeable, over a 2 hour driving journey it's mostly irrelevant. Perhaps 10% of the range of a vehicle that can do 200 miles.
In reality even lower spec cars with resistive heaters do not use 3000W all the time, and better vehicles use the AC compressor for heating which will cut power consumption for heating by at least half and usually more.
Other items such as lights, radio and all the other electrical crap in vehicles is so low in power use that any range loss isn't even noticeable.
EV batteries are massive, usually 50kWh to 80kWh. An average UK home uses about 10kWh of electricity per day, a single charge of a typical EV could power that house for a week.
Most of the range lost in cold weather is due to the battery itself not working well at low temperatures, which is why most modern EVs have battery heating to avoid this problem.
UK electric car chargers outnumber petrol pumps by almost two-to-one | Auto Express
DfT data shows there are more than 116,000 public EV chargers, on top of the thousands of home wallboxes nationwide
That maybe so but what’s the average time it takes to put enough fuel in a ICE car to enable 500 miles of travel compared to charging a battery in an EV to do the same mileage? Also, is the range on an ICE vehicle severely affected by use of lights, heater, a/c etc?
It takes you about five minutes to fuel for that range.
Me? A few seconds to plug in, and a few seconds to unplug later. Separated by me having a kip.
Radio, lights, heated seats, heated steering wheel : makes so little difference to range, it doesn't show up on the display.
Cabin heating does reduce range though.
That said, 2/3 of the fuel in an ICE car goes to (waste) anyway, in terms of heat and noise.
It's just that this is taken as acceptable through familiarity.
If an ICE car was as efficient as an EV, you'd be getting something like 1500 miles from a full tank.
I wondered what these were for
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