Electric cars - What do they mean for the rest of us?

Did a engine on a Peugeot hybrid the other week so I got to drive it. Properly hilarious in a straight line (was some mid size MPV thing). The hybrid system was all contained in a neat subframe but needs a huge alternator and plumbing into the engine cooling system. Would be ace in the back of something light and FWD just for the initial launch power/grip.

On the first point Nickel Cadmium is an outdated battery tech - the current ones are Lithium Ion. Much like all modern electronics, there are some parts (not just batteries, motors, control electronics etc) that need expensive, difficult to extract metals, some of which come from really dodgy places. There is a lot of research into how to reduce/remove use of these materials because they are expensive and hard to get hold of (especially ethically in some cases). Building a brand new car has an energy and material cost that you have to include in the total emissions of a vehicle (along with the disposal of the leftovers) when you are trying to measure the footprint. Currently building an EV has a bigger footprint than building and ICE vehicle, however, there is a crossover point at which the lifetime emissions of an ICE vehicle overtake the total emissions of an EV (when you compare like with like based on new cars). The numbers vary massively, based on where the car is built and where it is used (eg France has lots of nuclear power, Poland burns lots of brown coal). The UK grid is pretty clean, and you can see the current picture here: gridwatch.co.uk/

On the second point, no-one is scrapping batteries - they have a second life in home/grid storage. Batteries are valuable as a means of storing electricity, and when the car is done as a vehicle, the battery has an intrinsic value for other uses. If you take a 10yo Leaf that started off with 24kWh worth of battery and apply a reasonable degradation of 20%, it has 19kWh of capacity available to use. That's 50% more than a Tesla powerwall (13.7kWh) which costs 7 grand installed. Nissan and Renault and BMW are taking batteries from their old EVs, splitting the packs up into balanced modules and selling them again as static storage. Their only problem is that they can't get enough batteries for this purpose! This has a knock-on effect on the residuals of EVs - you can't buy a secondhand EV with a battery for under 5 grand because the battery on it's own is probably worth 3-4k.

Nicely put, and that clears up a whole heap of issues for me, much obliged duncanmartin, thumbs up.

That is their party trick.

As I understand it when doing from like 50 to 70 or whatever to pull around and overtake something, it is a bit of a different story. Still impressive to silently pull away from the lights at faster than GroupC car speeds.

I've been driving a 4wd machE, it's definitely quick, (apparently 5.1 secs to 60) especially for a 2 ton barge. Rides a bit iffy but otherwise it drives really well. Only real issue is charging when on a long journey (finding a fast charger which is available and works etc). That will almost be the biggest issue for the converted cars as far as I can see none of them support DC fast charging so a half hour top up becomes 4 hours and makes long journies almost impossible.