Ireland Declares Climate Emergency

[kdevitt]

None of that really has anything to to with the price of butter. The dogs on the street could tell you that PHEV's were favoured as company cars due to their tax treatment and that real world MPG doesn't match stated figures.

For thousands of people living in cities, whose commute is less than 15km per day (my wifes commute is 1.5km each way) - they can run on EV power only for the day to day driving, which means less emissions in cities. Pushing these buyers back to diesels or pure petrol engines runs contrary to the governments aims, and is frankly braindead.

[Felix]

None of that really has anything to to with the price of butter. The dogs on the street could tell you that PHEV's were favoured as company cars due to their tax treatment and that real world MPG doesn't match stated figures.

For thousands of people living in cities, whose commute is less than 15km per day (my wifes commute is 1.5km each way) - they can run on EV power only for the day to day driving, which means less emissions in cities. Pushing these buyers back to diesels or pure petrol engines runs contrary to the governments aims, and is frankly braindead.

Agree 100%.
On my second BMW PHEV and love nothing more than seeing how far the trip clock can go before I have to put petrol in.
I do a mix of long and short journeys and full EV is not right for me yet.
As for the removal of the grant with such short notice, it's really hard on dealers and buyers that have orders in for 221 registration.

[kdevitt]

Agree 100%.
On my second BMW PHEV and love nothing more than seeing how far the trip clock can go before I have to put petrol in.
I do a mix of long and short journeys and full EV is not right for me yet.
As for the removal of the grant with such short notice, it's really hard on dealers and buyers that have orders in for 221 registration.

Was in Joe Duffys looking at a 330e a few years back and he did his best to talk us out of the sale. Apparently the range was 25km in winter on the battery, so was no use. Reality as I said above though was that this would easily have covered the daily driving - so was perfect for us. Chris Harris was making the same point recently. There's a pretty dogmatic approach stemming largely from the Greens and their ilk, which is driving current policy - full EV or nothing, and as you said its rightly fucked up people with 221 orders already placed.

I'm not averse to actually going full EV for the family car - the 640d would be used for long journeys anyway - but most of them at the moment look like pure shite. The design ethos seems to scream 'look at me, I'm saving the planet'. And any of them that do look ok are mental expensive - put a decent interior into your Audi E Tron GT and its touching off 120k.

[dergside]

When I got the 530e it was as a toe in the water to a future of electric motoring thats coming whether I like it or not. As experiments go, its worked out OK and I wouldn't be put off full EV in a few years time when ranges have improved and there's enough of them to have trickled down to the part of the market that I frequent.

Forget about official figures, but the reality is that I'm covering 30-40% of my running around in this car on battery and the computed MPG (overlook for a min how that's calculated) is about 50% better than I got with the e60 530i before it over similar usage and with fairly similar power. When I most recently filled the car I had covered 903km's, 357 of them on battery, from the previous fill, using about 40litres of petrol in the process. So, its had a reasonably beneficial impact on this aspect of my carbon footprint (again, ignore the arguments about whole of life emissions, etc.).

If the 530e hadn't been available, I would probably have settled for a 520d, and the costs were reasonably equivalent. One of those would also have improved my carbon footprint compared to its predecessor, but arguably less so as its "the big bad wolf" choice according to current policy thinking. Its may be the toss of a coin as to which produces the better environmental outcome over the long term in the real world, but I would suggest that if a PHEV is connected to a charger regularly its probably a better choice in the whole. If the 530e wasn't available, or priced differently through tax policy, then I would have been very unlikely to have spent more to go to an equivalent full electric and would likely have spent less to go to a 520d, or gone back a generation and bought a 530d. So, a policy to tar PHEV as an environmentally undesirable step would have had the effect of producing a potentially worse short/medium term outcome.

The Green influence in Government is probably needed to force a few issues, but they have a habit of taking a binary view of things. They did this back in the noughties when they effectively declared that petrol is bad (Mr Makay, Southpark - drugs are bad.....) and pushed everyone in the direction of diesel. We all know how that's worked out - frying pan and fire analogies come to mind. This discouragement of PHEV as a stepping stone to the nirvana of full EV probably limits the interim progress that could be achieved by more people taking incremental steps in the journey to 2030.

Tomorrow night I'll drive to the top of Donegal - pretty much bang on 400km's and 4 1/2 hours door to door. Given a late start, after work, etc. then the prospect of needing to make a charging stop and add, maybe an hour or more to the journey means a reality of arriving in the week small hours of Friday rather than Thursday night. That's pretty much unavoidable at present as 400km's is pushing the real world boundaries of range for even the largest range EV's at present, especially given the average speed to make the journey in that time. So, if there are disincentives to a PHEV, then my next car will be a full petrol or diesel rather than full EV. The remnants of the last policy championed by the Greens effectively means a diesel given that choice of petrols in the second owner market for my type of car is all but non-existant. That's hardly progress I would have thought.

[Big H]

the reality is that I'm covering 30-40% of my running around in this car on battery

Assuming daily use - how often are you plugging it in ?

For longer range EV's (400km+ per charge), it's obviously not a major issue, but fumbling about taking charger's out of the boot, plugging in and then having to repeat the (reverse) process again later in the evening (invariably in the pissing rain) would grow tiring after a while for many no doubt....

[dergside]

Assuming daily use - how often are you plugging it in ?

For longer range EV's (400km+ per charge), it's obviously not a major issue, but fumbling about taking charger's out of the boot, plugging in and then having to repeat the (reverse) process again later in the evening (invariably in the pissing rain) would grow tiring after a while for many no doubt....

Its charged daily Mon-Fri in the office car park and occassionally at home at the weekends. Over recent months I've had another car taxed and that's what I've been mostly using at the weekends - e36 over the summer months, e63 now for the winter, so it does mean that the 530e isn't doing a great deal of weekend work when charging from the mains at home is painfully slow. Dithering means I still haven't put in a wall box there.

Re. cables, what you say is true. Even with this one, the Type 2 cable is always loose in the boot. The boot size is already compromised by the battery pack compared to a regular G30 so space lost with the cable, or things on the back seat rather than the boot, etc. is a little bit of a faff, but because we haven't had cause to fill the car to the gunwales for a holiday in Europe (or even more importantly been compromised in how much wine we can return with ) that hasn't been a significant real world problem thus far. As far as the wet and windy nights are concerned, practice means that the time spent getting wet hooking it up or unhooking it is a matter of seconds really.

[Felix]

Assuming daily use - how often are you plugging it in ?

For longer range EV's (400km+ per charge), it's obviously not a major issue, but fumbling about taking charger's out of the boot, plugging in and then having to repeat the (reverse) process again later in the evening (invariably in the pissing rain) would grow tiring after a while for many no doubt....

That's exactly why I got a tethered charger installed at home. Very quick to plug in.

PHEVs need to be charged to make sense environmentally. I think most people investing in PHEV are doing so for flexibility. Petrol range when needed (like Dergside's situation), battery for economy and lowered environmental impact. My X5 45e has a range of 80km real world on battery, which is a lot more usable than the 30km I was getting from the 530e. But a lot of people have low mileage and a 530e could easily be run on mostly battery.
Over their lifetime EVs have a lower environmental impact than any combustion engine car.

[Big H]

Some interesting stats from the EPA today - despite the total lockdown for much of 2020, there was only a 15.7% decline in transport emmissions.

This was offset with an increase in household emmissions by 9% due to primarily working from home !

So motorists are being totally nailed for a 6.7% reduction in transport emmissions - does this not indicate that regular car drivers doing their usual commute are not the major issue here ? Yes, further electrification will bring the figures down substantially more, but should we be also looking elsewhere for major transport emmissions reductions ? Planes, trains, trucks, buses, tractors etc ?

[CitizenKane]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...-bill-support/

Possibly some welcome news for petrol heads?

[CitizenKane]

https://m.independent.ie/opinion/com...938995792.html

Interesting article that echoes concerns some on here have discussed, not just about EVs but also hybrids when batteries start to approach the end of their useful life.

I don’t know about you all but I don’t think I’ll be moving away from petrol or diesel any time soon.