Question of the Month: Will the next car you purchase be an EV or a Hybrid Electric Vehicle?

baldengineer said:

Even in a heavy year, I barely drive 5,000 miles.

Similar here, hence why a light electric vehicle would appeal to me, more so than a full bloated electric priced at around two to three times that of a ICE. Don't need the range, just an urban run-around for 99.999% of the time.

I'm also hoping that kit cars will make something of a comeback but in an electric format.

I assumed that was the case.  At the moment, it would require a lot of power generated by solar panels to recharge a car (e.g. for mine, it would take around 24KW to recharge from 50% to 80%) but frequent but low amounts of charge might work.  Hopefully battery technology and PV technology will improve and become cheaper to become viable because I agree: it would be really cool to recharge purely on sunlight.

Andrew J said:

Really, most people do a LOT of very short journeys.

Indeed but most people probably also have to make that long journey a couple of times a year. AC Propulsion originally solved that with a generator trailer that could be towed for longer trips. 

The jury is not out on that one yet. There were also second hand combustion cars on board. 

I haven't done the math. I'm just going on the assumption that since my car sits in the garage for up to 7 days not doing anything that there will be enough energy collected to drive it the couple of miles when I do need it.

Maybe for now, I'll just settle for a system that recharges the batteries of my yard tools.

Andrew J said:

I do think ICE vehicles day's are numbered though.

They are in the UK where sales of new ICE vehicles are to be banned from 2030 (and hybrids from 2035) unless there is some rapid back-tracking...

Yeah, exactly. I don't need to spend $50,000 on a car with a bunch of stuff I don't need to sit in my garage and depreciate.

I agree, which is why is why I said that in the context of Hybrid vehicles.  If your hybrid can do 30miles on pure electric that would probably cover a majority of journeys for a lot of people; the ICE would cover those longer trips.

My wife and I do mostly short journeys but we do longer ones on occasion.  Before buying an EV, we spent quite a long time looking at the longer journeys we did and how it might work.  It seemed eminently do-able but I can't say we're going to be 100% comfortable the first time we do them.  Not range anxiety, but charger anxiety!!

My family is around 170 miles away but I'm lucky in that my father has a 7KW charger.  We're about to find out how it's going to go with a longer trip (200 miles or so) to North Yorkshire next month.  We also go to the Lake District a fair bit and they're a bit scarcer there.  We specifically avoided going to the coast in North Yorkshire because it seemed to be a bit of an EV charger desert.  It's certainly not perfect by any means.

Yeh, I predict back-tracking by the government when we get closer, despite them saying they're fully committed to that strategy!

Indeed: there's a lot of nonsense spread about EVs bursting into flames.  Obviously, nothing can be ruled out because stuff happens, but the stats are definitely on the side of EVs on that particular point.  In other words, if an EV did cause the problem, it was a problem with that particular car, not the technology.