I've just become the proud owner of an all-electric car, a Renault Zoe. Don't mistake me for the kind of person who can afford to buy new cars - ha! - we're leasing this one, £130 a month for the car and another £70 a month for the battery, which is normally leased even if you buy the car (as it needs periodic replacement), but it's a definite step up from our previous history of failing second-hand cars.
It's nice. 60-80 mile range between recharges, depending on the ambient temperature (mainly because the heat pump that controls the air temperature inside it draws a kW or two). I have the dashboard set to display the power level in kilowatts, which is instructive: Cruising at 30mph on a flat road = 8kW or so. Accelerating smoothly = 20kW. Accelerating hard from 60mph to 70mph: 60kW. So far, I've not paid for electricity to charge it with; here in the UK, public chargers tend to be free to use, although many of them are in car parks you need to pay to leave your car in. A hotel near us has free parking AND a 22kW charger that can fill it in 1-2 hours, but we need to lurk in the hotel bar while it's charging because there's nothing else to do. On the other hand, two paid-for car parks near places I actually need to go and visit (eg, my office) have 7kW chargers that take four hours to charge the thing fully. Plugging the car in to charge, even now I've done it several times, still carries a pleasingly future-shock strangeness. Ideally, you have a charger at home, but I have no off-street parking to fit one in, so I can't. The local council should install a public one in the road, central government offers them grants for doing so, but they've yet to respond to my request, so I'm not holding my breath. Electric cars are widely touted as the environmentally friendly option. Obviously, they're nowhere near as good as walking or riding a bike, but I wonder how much they improve over fuel-burning cars. They still need to be made, and that's a large fraction of the resources used in a car's lifetime. And they have that battery full of exotic substances which needs replacing periodically. And rather than buying a second-hand one, I've entered into a three-year leasing contract, whereby they'll replace it every few years if I keep paying them. Making me now the wasteful person driving new cars around, that creates the piles of cheap second-hand cars others will buy. Sadly, the fact it's leased means I'm not supposed to take it to bits and see how it all works inside :-( -- Alaric Snell-Pym http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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