Why Harry’s Garage Take on the UK Electric Car Market Is (Mostly) WRONG
Hello it’s Martin and as you can probably tell from the title of this video I want to comment on some of the things which were said in Harry Metal’s video a couple of weeks ago he goes by the name Harris Garage on YouTube and he is a hugely credible guy with a long
History in the motor journalism World here in the UK but without any offense obviously he’s quite new to EVs and as someone who has lived with the EVS for a while I thought I would chip in because some of the things which he said are rightfully correct and really need
Addressing because the world of EVS is by no means perfect but some of these things are also playing out wrong so let’s get started I’ve taken some notes and we will go through them now Harry starts his video by saying that he is going back to diesel after he had a pure
Electric ipas and then a plug-in hybrid Range Rover so obviously that doesn’t really bode well for the walls of electric cars so what’s the reality let’s start with the finance example he gives because he did go on the Range Rover website and looked at PCP deals with a 20,000 pound deposit 3 years
10,000 annual miles which is a very reasonable thing to do the plug-in hybrid Range Rover obviously came out quite expensive but the big difference was with the Range Rover Sports hold on one second I’m editing the video and even though I’m not completely naive of course I appreciate that the plug-in
Hybrid is going to be more expensive being almost double the price though per month that sounds a bit too much so I looked further at the jlr website and there are some things which have been left out from harr’s video yes it is possible to get the D300 at the £600 per
Month as he was describing based on his preferred terms but that’s what the entry level SE version whereas the plug-in hybrid automatically starts with the dynamic SE trim level which is one level up you may say oh but but if he doesn’t want the dynamic SC obviously
Then you save a little bit of money well if you’re under number plate of his particular example through any number plate database in the UK or any HPI system it does come up as the dynamic see so that argument goes out the window and that’s that also let’s actually look
At the configurator if we start with the diesel version you will see that actually included in the deposit you’ve got a finance allowance which in other words is a deposit contribution usually from the manufacturer whereas if I click over to the plug-in hybrid that’s not
The case so if you put in 20,000 in of your own money with the plug-in hybrid obviously that counts as a 202,000 deposit whereas with the diesel the manufacturer adds five grand on top of that so it’s essentially £25,000 which on one hand I can appreciate maybe a very enticing deal
But it really twists what the video is all about so if we level out the playing field and go with an actual 20 grand deposit across both of the examples the diesel works out to about 728 per month whereas the plug-in hybrid is 9 59 not denying that the plug-in hybrid
Is more expensive but it’s no longer double the diesel version and what about appreciation this actually surprised me the easiest and most accurate way of predicting depreciation into the future is looking at the final payment of the PCP deal because this is basically the guaranteed future value of the vehicle
So after 3 years the plug-in hybrid will go from the almost 93,000 list price to just over £58,000 the diesel will drop from £ 86.6 th000 to about 51.3 th000 so if my math adds up the diesel depreciates about 41% in 3 years whereas the plug-in hybrid less than 38% what
About that and you see these are the kinds of things in context which should have been mentioned in Harris’s video because it really is sneaky at best because it changes the narrative from oh plug-in hybrids and electric cars depreciate terribly and nobody wants them to if you want to get a fantastic
Deal you can but it will be a diesel vehicle where the manufacturer has to throw in a deposit contribution to get more people to buy it anyways let’s continue what I also want you to keep in mind is that this doesn’t mean that plug-in hybrids or electric vehicles will automatically get more expensive
Yes it is the common Trend now and unfortunately plug-in hybrids are the worst offenders really they were meant to be a transition technology to help people get into EVS by us using smaller batteries and the idea was that that would help reduce The Upfront cost but something interesting happened in the
World of EV manufacturing and that’s that battery prices have plummeted over the last decade so for example if we look at 2013 the price per kilowatt hour for a battery pack was about 732 us do that includes the sales themselves and any kind of extra bits on
Top to make it into a full battery pack however if we look at the current figures we are basically down to about $150 per kilow on the Pack level if you look at the graph which I put on the screen now you will notice that the
Trend has kind of reversed a little bit in the last year or two and prices have gone up a tiny bit you have to keep in mind in 2020 when Co happened it really disrupted a lot of the supply chains and Manufacturing was heavily delayed so suddenly there is this huge demand for
EVS which require big batteries but we don’t have enough Supply and that’s what caused the prices to go up I believe 2023 numbers are still slightly elevated compared to the lowest we ever got to in 2021 but the trajectory should continue dropping down either way you can see
That it has really flatlined and if we look at the numbers we are now very close to the magic number which is $100 per kilowatt hour because at that point many analysts are saying that’s where we reach true price parity between brand new EVs and internal combustion engine
Vehicles why am I saying all of this as important context well with plug-in hybrids these days it’s a very difficult proposition for manufacturers because customers the number one request from them is they want more electric range and to facilitate more electric range you need a biger battery pack so you’re
Almost building a car with two completely independent drivetrains at the same time because you want a big battery for Big Range that means you need a powerful onboard charger to recharge it in reasonable time you need a powerful inverter to be able to drive a big strong motor in electricon mode
Without the petrol or diesel engine kicking in likewise especially on this premium plug-in hybrids a 2 L 4- cylinder engine doesn’t really do because if you run out of battery power it’s a little bit unrefined and people expect a little bit better at least at these very high price points so you need
A big 3 L engine which again adds to the cost adds to the weight you still need a full-on transmission and exhaust system a fuel supply system and the price really skyrockets so unless you absolutely need the added flexibility of having both drivetrains electric and petrol which I appreciate Harry does
Make a good point by he needs one because the range isn’t quite there yet for all Towing applications you really are better off with an EV as in a full battery electric vehicle without an engine because the cost of manufacturing of these batteries has come down so fast
That it makes more sense to drop the entire engine entirely and it comes out cheaper to manufacture a battery electric car rather than a plug-in hybrids that’s the theory but how does it translate into sales we’ve got the latest sales numbers for the UK for January 2024 which are the exact ones
Which Harry references in his video as well and you can see that bevs and plug-in hybrids are on a rise slight boost in petrol as well year-over-year but Diesel and hybrids are generally speaking down and in fact if you look at the absolute numbers battery electric vehicles are now the second bestselling
Category out of all the drivetrain options the big reason is Fleet buyers and I agree with Harry on this many people buy electric car as company cars because of various tax benefits so youve got a market where a lot of people buy brand new electric cars but then at the
End of the company lease they need to be disposed somehow onto the used market so the used Market is starting to get flooded with these cars which are now aimed at private buyers who obviously don’t really care about the company tax benefits look with any of these things
The best thing to do is to look at the raw numbers rather than anecdotal evidence but having said that that let me provide some anecdotal evidence because I do work for a used independent electric car dealer in London so I see the situation firsthand and January has been actually
A very strong month for us I don’t want to go into the concrete numbers but we did really well so there is still demand in the private sector especially now that the prices have really dropped you know it’s no longer a question of can you justify paying the extra for an
Electric car because we have practically reached price parity if you look at a certain age and mileage the electric car usually is the same price or even lower than an equivalent petrol so unless you really have the need for maximum range at any cost whatsoever the electric car
Tends to make more financial sense is this a sustainable situation in the market long term Will the Market change I don’t know I don’t have a crystal ball and it’s not something I would want to pretend I know enough to put on video this brings us onto the topic of
Customers versus manufacturers because Harry makes the point that many manufacturers jumped into this game way too early and the customer still isn’t ready I can understand this point and to be fair to a certain extent in some markets it may be true and the UK May well be one of the markets where
Customers are not quite ready to embrace EVS yet it still feels like this kind of exotic thing out there and you know petrol is the safe choices maybe if you are daring enough you may go for a hybrid but it still runs like a petrol
Car you just fill it up with petrol or in the case of a diesel car with diesel and you’re back on the road however while all of this may be true there’s one other aspect from the other side of the story to keep in mind because manufacturers of cars they have very
Long development times and even though many of them are trying to shorten them in an effort to compete with all the kind of tech companies and electric car startups coming on the market now even the best ones take 3 to four years to design and put a car into
Production not to mention that once you put a car into production especially if it’s a first generation product it very rarely is perfect so you need another couple of years to gather real world user feedback feed it back to your engineering teams those engineering teams need to work their magic again for
The next 3 or four years to improve the issues which customers complain about need to put it into manufacturing and then you have got a car which is actually good and here comes the problem and we have seen this in the past there are many people saying Tesla is early to
The game they will capture the early adopter Market but once those people run out and electric cars really go mainstream the manufacturers which have been long established like VW BMW the Japanese and so on will just swoop over and test TLA will go bankrupt hasn’t really happened has it and in fact the
World’s best selling vehicle in 2023 was the Tesla Model y not just world’s bestselling electric vehicle world’s bestselling vehicle full stop was an electric car because believe it or not it’s actually quite difficult to Pivot from internal combustion engines right into the world of EVs and there are great examples of this Mazda
Mx30 the Toyota bz4 Forex especially with Toyota a company which has extensive experience in electrification they were one of the first to the market with the Prius really the first mass Market hybrid car yet they can’t really pull it off and that’s because you do need the real world experience you do
Need the manufacturing Supply chains established you need to have lots of R&D experience under your belt to be able to compete with other electric car makers which have been doing cars for years now because as I said with the the examples of the Toyotas and the Mazdas the car
Hardware is fantastic the things which they know how to do how to change the suspension how to make the interior look nice that’s all good but by and large the software is glitchy the charging is slow the range isn’t very good because the batteries are not very well designed
And integrated with the rest of the vehicle the motors are not particularly strong nor efficient so the core electric things which are the aspects most EV buyers decide on their purchase are bad so they’re not competitive and that’s that’s the problem so if you decided today is the day when the
Electric car revolution has really started taking off and you are ready to push the product out there it will take you about 3 to four years for development two years to GA your feedback another 3 to four years to develop the second gen which is actually good so you’re basically a decade away
You have to work a decade in advance a decade from now on is 2034 which is just one year away from the fullon ban of sales of brand new combustion engine Vehicles so at that point the share of EVS being sold will be very high anyways and you can’t just
Afford to have a good car then because it’s far too late your reputation would have been ruined you will be known as the manufacturer who makes great ice cars but not EVS so now is the time to do it yes some manufacturers will have shortterm losses but you will see those are the
Ones who are going to come out on top long term a fantastic example in my eyes is the Hyundai and Kia group they are sticking to EVS they’ve poured a lot of research and development into them yes the EV Market may have cooled down slightly in the last year or so but the
Long-term plan is there and they will stick to it and they will be the ones out of the traditional manufacturers who I think Will Survive because they focused on the right things as for others I’m really worried about the Japanese but that’s a topic for another video because they really it almost
Feels like they fell asleep and they don’t have a choice now but it’s a bit too late this brings us on to the topic of government incentives because this I agree wholeheartedly with Harry is a little bit screwed up we have done this completely wrong so back in the day
There used to be almost cash incentives which would bring the price of electric cars down I honestly as much as I like EVS it’s not dried way of going about things and now it has gone even worse because company car buyers are incentivized to buy these cars if you
Own a company yourself you really should speak to your accountant about this not listen to some random guy on YouTube but generally speaking if you can write the car off as a company expense obviously it offsets corporation tax and it it’s very counterintuitive because the more expensive car you buy the more
Beneficial it is for your tax reasons and that’s where the huge disconnect happens because obviously that super expensive luxurious premium car now has to trickle down onto the used Market at some point so you have got a market filled with very premium lovely cars which most people can’t afford or can’t
Ensure so yes this really I think should change because it’s not a realistic way of going forward I always thought personally that a good way of phasing out combustion engine Vehicles if there was to be kind of a scheme where the government incentivizes that is that we
Should straight out ban vehicles over a certain bracket to have a combustion engine in terms of price point what I mean for example is that we start at anything 100K plus from this year onwards has to be electric next year we move 10K down so anything 90 Grand and
Over has to be electric because that way you really make sure that the people who are spending big money on cars anyways where the switch from Petrol to Electric is absolutely tiny in terms of outride buying cost they are the ones who actually pay the research and development and enable manufacturers to
Over time bring the price of EVS down and make them very compelling for the masses at the kind of 2030 Grand price point I digressed a little bit but I also agree with Harry that the current scheme created this disconnect for and almost a conflict of interest for main
Dealers because the way it works at the moment is that the percentage there’s like a sales quota where a percentage of your annual sales has to be electric and that share is increasing year on year until we get to 2035 when in the UK all new car sales have to be fully electric
This means that as a main dealer you really want to fill your sales quot otherwise you get fined massively so you have your best interest in selling new cars rather than taking back used EVs and selling those because those will have now depreciated and obviously for many
People it’s going to be more attractive to buy a slightly used example which is still under warranty and it just happens to be cheaper especially if you’re buying outright one other thing which I don’t have the data for but it definitely stung a lot of deal was the depreciation bubble when the
Bubble burst you have to go back a couple of years after Co hit we started coming out of lockdown electric cars hugely gained on popularity and it was unheard of all cars in the market generally speaking started appreciating a little bit because the co caused disruptions to manufacturing but people
Still wanted to buy cars especially with people not wanting to go on public transport there was a lot of demand for personal transportation but the supply was really struggling so the used Market really really shot up and on top of that in the UK we had a petrol shortage because there was a
Shortage of drivers to deliver petrol to petrol stations so suddenly ify wanted to go to work you had no choice you had to buy an electric car and on top of that electric prices were quite low because even though fossil fuel prices started Rising gradually for example as
We know the gas prices the way the market works in the UK is that the electricity prices are delayed compared to the wholesale price of gas so electricity was really cheap petrol was expensive difficult to get hold of no wonder people wanted EVS many used car dealers at that point thought well we
Have to stock EES this is where the money is and they did have them in stock and they did sell them but at some point in about I think it was end of 2022 is where the bubble really burst because suddenly fossil fuel prices have dropped the supply of new cars resumed
Back to normal so used cars started depreciating again and of course the demand for EES fell naturally because petrol was suddenly cheap and because of the delay in electricity prices electricity was still quite expensive and many car dealers definitely got stunk by that because you had a massive
Portfolio of EVS which you were about to sell which were either in prep or something like that and they suddenly lost a lot of money so dealers really lost confidence in electric cars whether it’s reasonable and whether they knew what they were doing or whether they
Were just trying to take a box or make extra money no I will let you decide on that one going back to Harry and his car choices He also mentioned that he was interested in the x550 e but there were three things stopping him from getting one by the way
If you’re not familiar it’s just a plug-in hybrid X5 as the name denotes the 50e it means it’s quite high up in the range he didn’t like the design which is fair enough design is a completely subjective thing that’s fine 500 horsepower was supposedly too powerful for him and at
This point is where I feel a bit sorry for car manufacturers because back in the day electric cars used to have the reputation of being slow boring that you would never want to be seen in one as a car Enthusiast so what did they do well with electric motors it actually quite
Easy uh to get extra horsepower out of them so it was almost like a free byproduct of going electric so manufacturer started making these electric and plug-in hybrid cars quite powerful to justify the higher price tag and to attract people who like cars now we are complaining that they are too
Powerful so it sounds like you can’t win because the third point is that it is reflected in the insurance and this is very true on the General topic of insurance yes electric cars can be more expensive to insure than petrol or diesel vehicles but not necessarily insurance is one of those things where
It’s highly individual it’s a complex Market there are so many variables that you can’t just you know look at a car and say whether it’s going to be cheap or expensive to Ure the best thing to do is to do your homework go to the price comparison websites and see what numbers
You get out of there his claim is based on I suppose the data he has is that the insurance has skyrocketed because Insurance need to write off electric cars earlier let’s address this claim one by one firstly has Insurance gotten more expensive for EVS unfortunately we are
In a state where insurance has gotten expensive for everyone and it’s regardless of whether it’s just cars or other kind of branches of insurance home insurance business insurance and so on everything has gone up with cars specifically there is some conflicting data because there are many surveys
Which do say that electric cars are more expensive to Ure but for example if I looked at the data from the money Supermarket they are claiming that electric cars are roughly in line with other combustion engined cars specifically in 2022 the average premium for an EV was £
1,097 a year whereas a diesel was a little bit more at 1,119 and petrol a tiny bit lower at 1,087 but you see all of them are roughly in the same ballpark instead of me as someone who doesn’t really know the insurance Market in detail trying to
Figure out which numbers are correct and which ones are not let me instead just provide some context for Thought yes electric cars can become expensive to ensure for multiple reasons on average if you think about it the electric car Fleet in the UK is much younger than your average petrol or
Diesel car they just haven’t been on the market long enough so many didn’t get old enough to really depreciate likewise obviously it’s a new technology and there is no arguing that especially early on They Carried a substantial premium over your petrol and Diesel equivalents which means that you
Have got a car which is younger and more expensive so regardless of the drivetrain Choice obviously it’s going to cost more to Ure because in case you get into an accident and you need to get a payout the insurance company will have more money to lose there the other thing
Is and Har did mention this is courtesy cars because many insurance policies include Courtesy car hire in them and especially with electric car drivers many of them want an electric Courtesy car and this is where costs really add up quickly and cars do get written off
Very early on to make sure that the insurance company doesn’t have to go through the expense and the hustle of sourcing a suitable Courtesy car that doesn’t mean that the car is written off and it never makes it back onto the market it means it’s written off it’s
Sold off quickly so someone can get on with repairing it but in the meantime the previous owner is already in a new vehicle sourced on the used Market also keep in mind writing over car if you’re not familiar with the motor trade that doesn’t mean that it goes into the
Landfill in fact it almost forms a lovely closed loop system where as I mentioned option A if there’s enough time for it and there’s enough value left in the car it gets repaired if that’s not the case with the cost of spare parts becoming quite high and
That’s just a function of cars becoming more safe and sophisticated with every passing gear the cars get broken down for parts and those get resold so they can help fix cars for cheaper which otherwise would have needed to be written off if that makes sense and the
Proof is at the moment at the bottom end of the electric car market because of course if you go from a VW pad which has 170 horsepower has done many miles and it’s worth about 105 Grand on the used market and you jump to a Tesla Model 3
Which is worth £25,000 on the used Market very young car much more expensive and has a lot more horsepower of course the Tesla will be more expensive to ensure but if you look at cars which have comparable horsepower comparable price the electric car doesn’t really carry a significant
Premium anymore this again as I said is highly individual so it’s best to do your homework before committing to any purchase regardless of petrol diesel electric but it just shows that it’s not in the drivetrain and honestly think about this when a car gets into I would
Say a medium sized accident it’s not something very minor where you just you know scuff a wheel or brush against the Hedge but it’s not a completely written off car you haven’t driven it 70 mph into a solid wall the things which actually need fixing and replacing are absolutely identical between petrol and
Electric versions imagine your front bumper which is these days filled with many radar ultrasonic sensors your modern LED lights those are the things which are going to impact the cost of repair the most not the cost of the battery nor the motor nor the engine or the transmission realistically speaking
Enough of insurance let’s talk battery degradation because this is where Harry feels a little bit disappointed he used to love his Range Rover plugin hybrid and he mentioned that when he got it new it would show about I’ve got it noted down here 31 miles on a charge whereas after years of
Use that number would gradually drop down to 22 miles now as someone who is involved in seeing and inspecting and selling electric cars on a daily basis pretty much I can tell you one thing this is not how you can measure battery degradation there are so many factors which go into the power
Consumption of EVs and how batteries degrade and so on that the only true way to do it is to run a battery degradation test and usually if you want the most accurate results it will be done at a main dealer with very specialized discharging equipment which can measure
How much exactly you manage to squeeze out of the battery pack Harry was supposedly offered this but he didn’t have the time to leave the car Ed a dealer for a day so he never got the numbers for that he does reference billand and his uh tests which are
Absolutely fantastic he is definitely the name in the EV kind of industry but a couple of claims which did come up which are of questionable value it’s down to how you use the car and the climate it’s used in which determines the battery degradation and that electric cars don’t like rapid
Charging and yes I will agree based on what we know so far about electric cars those two things can have an impact but the impact is very very small it’s not something you have to worry about and I’ve got the data to back my words up
Because the inl has done a DC fast charging study they had four Nissan leaves in total and two of them would be only level two charged which means charged from something like domestic wallbox we would have here in the UK and two of them would be exclusively DC
Rapid charged and over the course of the test which was a 50,000 m test the cars which were only slow charged experienced a 24 a half% battery reduction however the cars which were only r charged yes they did degrade a bit more but only at 27% battery degradation so yes there is
A difference but it’s so minuscule that it’s not something worth obsessing about and in fact the Nissan Leaf is probably the worst examples for battery degradation in fact Harry says that himself in his video based on Bjorn’s data they used to degrade terribly so if you’re worried about battery degradation
I would say from my kind of personal experience it’s not about variance from Individual Car to car of the same make and model it’s about the differences between the models so if you want a car which has minimum battery degradation do your research on Which models have the
Batteries which degrade the least and just look at those on the used Market because even an old Nissan Leaf which has been well taken care of only slow charg has been kept indoors in a garage it will have much worse battery degrad than something like for example BMW I3
Or a Tesla Model S with equivalent mileage because the batteries and specifically the battery Management systems on those cars are so much Superior I hope that kind of makes sense in Harry’s eyes the state of health is a critical number and I have a quote here saying we simply don’t know and that’s
Where my problem is with this video because that’s 100% wrong and we simply do with most electric cars you can literally just plug in a regular OBD scanner just like you would have for reading fault codes from a normal engine and you get a number spit out at you
Which shows you the battery state of health just so you see that I’m not baking stuff up here I am in my mini electric about to charge from a lum post OBD dongle plugged into the diagnostic port and if we look at the phone you’ve got the exact number state of health
97% the reason why I think many manufacturers don’t show that number proud in the dashboard somewhere or in a diagnostic menu in the touchcreen is because it’s not what you think it is and we see this often when I get sales calls and people are very worried about
These battery degradation figures we do them and I do them and we are happy to provide them when I sell cars but it’s not something we do for us anymore and by the way I’m not the owner of the business so I have no stake in electric
Cars selling well or not well really I can choose wherever I work so yeah going back the reason why these numbers are so complicated is because it’s not just an exact number you can’t measure battery degradation just like you know you measure how much fuel you have in a fuel
Tank there’s no way to put a float sensor in there or any type of sensor into battery and you get how much energy it can hold it’s a very statistical estimate based on the previous use of the battery the cars systems monitor the usage monitor the voltage and many other
Factors and then they can spit out a number so as mentioned the only way to get an accurate number is to do the degradation discharge test using the specialized equipment don’t worry though the systems have gotten very good so those Health numbers are usually quite accurate now but the other thing is that
90% battery state of health doesn’t mean that you have 10% less range because state of health and battery capacity are not exactly the same thing likewise it doesn’t mean that you get 10% less Peak Performance so it’s just a very complicated topic and honestly one for
Another video but yes we can see how these cars were used with many of them you actually also see the split between AC charging and DC rapid charging and most importantly if you look at this from first principles with a petrol or a diesel car you can look at the mileage
You can look at the age but that’s about it that doesn’t tell you a whole lot these days with how complicated cars have gotten to drive the point home if you are in the market for an ice car do you know how many cold starts the
Previous owner has done has it only been used in the city for short Journeys or was it used as a Motorway Cruiser and the engine always got up to temperature what about the state of the DPF filter has that had time to do its regeneration
Or was it only used for short drives in town what about the state of the EGR valve is the entire exhaust gunked up is the head gasket about to blow these are things which you simply don’t know and because of how mechanical combustion engines are I don’t think we will ever
Get to a point where you can predict these things whereas with electric cars because they’re mechanically simple and so technologically advanced you’ve got far superior logging of how they were used and you can much better decide whether it’s the one which meets your expectations or not next up the Hot
Topic of public charging because I think this really is where Harry was let down during his ipas ownership and sadly I can relate to him when he got the ipas it really was the worst time to buy an electric car in terms of the ease of running one on long distances you have
To keep in mind back in the day electric cars really were for the kind of car and Eco enthusiasts who wanted something different and the infrastructure was there to support the low numbers of EVS we had on the road as Co hit as the situation I explained earlier in the
Video many people who were not interested in EVS previously suddenly wanted to drive electric and the market became flooded with new EVS which could now do longer distances so the market appeal has really broadened but it means that the infrastructure was lagging behind because if you wanted to do these
Long trips of course you wanted to charge at the services but you know most Services had one or two Chargers so cues would start to form many Chargers would become broken it would take long to fix them because there was not enough engineers in the system so all just a
Bit of a mess luckily I would say this is something which can be Revisited and it has gotten a lot better in the last I would say just 12 months where a lot more Chargers have gone online and I would say that now they are keeping Pace
With the adoption of new EVS from my personal experience when I’m delivering cars I’m up and down the country and it’s very rare to have the Q for Chargers it’s the equivalent of being quite rare to Quee for petrol yes in some situations you may need to
Especially if it’s kind of a bank holiday and everybody is on the roads but by and large on most General average days it’s not a problem to get petrol and it’s not a problem to get your electricity what is unfortunately sad and problematic is the price of public
Charging and this is a huge concern in my eyes as well and I’m very interested to see how we will work this out in the future because there’s no simple way to fix it basically if you charge at home and especially if you can charge overnight on an off peak energy tariff
You can sometimes pay as little as 2 pounds to fly charge an electric car whereas if you want to charge that same car on a rapid charger on a public rapid charger it can cost up to 10 times as much so you have got a massive span and
You can see this with petrol a little bit as well your local petrol station may be a little bit cheaper than the motorway Services because you pay for convenience at the motorway services but it’s not 10 times as much and this I think is a huge barrier to entry not
Just because of cost but because it also creates a lot of confusion you know when I’m asked how much does your car cost to charge well I don’t know it depends where I charge when I charge Etc and it obviously creates this huge divide between homeowners who have a driveway
And who can charge at home who usually are already a bit better off than flat dwellers who generally have less disposable income and now will on top of that have to suffer the higher charging costs one of the reasons is that uh yes as rightfully pointed out you pay more
VAT on public charging because at home you pay 5% VAT on electricity whereas public charging is 20% V8 just like any other Goods or product there are advocacy groups trying to push that down to 5% but how much of a long-term solution is that I don’t know even if
That happens obviously for now the road tax or vehicle excise duty to be exact for electric cars is zero contrary to popular belief that doesn’t pay for the maintenance of the roads that money goes into like a general pot I believe whereas most of the road expenses are
Covered from the fuel Duty and obviously with electric cars you don’t you don’t have that and there’s a quite substantial chunk of what you pay at the gas pump which is just tax which helps maintain the roads so how will this work in the future I don’t know we may need
To move to cost per mile where we pay per mile and the users who are on the road more often will have to pay more will be based on weight or efficiency I don’t know this is something which I really have no clue about how it will work out in the
Future in the meantime I would say if you want an electric car and you do lots of long distances it actually still makes sense because it’s only a matter of choosing the right one so for example if you buy something like a Tesla and you’ve got access to the Tesla
Supercharge Network Tesla is one of the networks which provides electricity at a very cheap rate so even though it’s very reliable and fast rapid charging you only pay about between 30 and 50 pens per kilow in the worst case scenario Tesla started opening up the network to
Non- Tesla EVS as well not all stations are open yet but you can go on the Tesla app and you will see which ones are available to plug into but the rate is a little bit higher than for Tesla drivers you can pay 10 a month and become a
Tesla member and then it brings it in line with the Teslas but even without the membership it’s actually quite competitively priced and better than all the other options I think it comes down to the fact that Tesla does not need to make too much money on the charging
Because they make their money on selling cars whereas all the other kind of third party networks they obviously are in the business of selling electricity and as I said this is really tough at the moment because electricity prices are still up the wholesale prices have definitely started coming down but it depends on
What kind of contracts these charging providers are on and at the end of the day they do have to make a profit they do have to pay for the rent for the land where the charges are at and for the Chargers being installed you know there has to be some return on investment
Harry also says that it’s always going to take longer to drive an electric car compared to a petrol or diesel because it simply takes longer to reenergize these cars compared to the liquid fuel equivalents and while on paper that is true so if you manage to do 700 miles in
One goal without stopping and you be in a bottle while or driving then perfect a petrol car or a diesel car makes more sense for you but realistically if you drive like most people in the UK do which is you know you drive for 2 to
Three hours and then you take a break even if it’s a short break the difference between the electric car and the petrol car really drops and there is no point in kind of trying to explain this in this video I will leave that linked in the top right hand corner the
Card will take you to video where you can see a journey from Glasgow to London with two very similar cars and see how much longer one takes over the other in fact I will not spoil it but the results may surprise you the last Point Harry highlights is the cold temperatures and
EVS supposedly not mixing this is a common misconception and I truly believe that he may have had some experience where he was left disappointed in winter with the range of his plug-in hybrid or full electric cars but the quote which got me is that the winter range or the
Winter efficiency is much worse than wltp because and I quote that’s what electric cars do and yes the winter range and efficiency is worse than the summer one but guess what the ice efficiency is also worse in the winter compared to an ideal scenario in fact if
I look at the website here which is energy.gov they have done their numbers and their research and it comes out to a simple fact that gas mileage roughly drops 15% when you are going from 77° fahr to 20° fah and it drops even more if you do short trips by about
24% because obviously the engine doesn’t have enough time to fully warm up and get to the peak operating efficiency but all of this is down to physics if you are driving through cold air cold air is denser than warm air you need more energy to push through it that affects
All cars equally where EVs do have a disadvantage is that obviously if you want to stay warm in the cabin that’s where the drop can be really significant because you are burning extra energy just to keep yourself warm whereas with an ice car you get that almost for free
But this is a slightly flawed way of thinking and I will get onto that in just a second and there are by the way many Technologies to try to minimize the drop from warm weather performance to cold weather performance and didn’t think Martin back again I got distracted
And never got to the point so let me actually give you a practical example trying to wait for an electric car which has the same energy consumption including Heating in the winter as in the summer is like asking for central heating for your house which has the same energy consumption in Winter and
The summer it simply doesn’t work you can artificially set it to the same heating level all year round but what it means is that in the winter you will be comfortable and in the summer you will be absolutely sweating and you will have to open all the windows to get the hot
Air out and that’s what an internal combustion engine does yes it’s nice that it’s quote unquote free in the winter all of the heating effects but it means that in the summer you are wasting even more energy 60% of the petrol energy is wasted as heat regardless of
Whether you need that heat or not I do agree that you can’t trust the wltp range numbers here in Europe they are far too optimistic I never managed to get anything close to them so the best way if you’re shopping for an EV is to look at either the EPA numbers from the
Guys over in the US because their test Cycles are much more realistic and it’s actually very easy to beat those efficiency figures or go to a website called the EV database where you get a lovely breakdown for every car of how much range you can realistically expect in different driv driving conditions if
You want to see my take on the whole situation stay tuned because my daily driver at the moment is an electric Mini Cooper and yes while the range is truly Terrible by modern EV standards because it is quite a small battery pack one of the nice things is is that the battery
Management system and the heating system in the car is very well done so the range is very stable and consistent so make sure to stay tuned to see that video because I’ve been running some tests and they will disprove what you may think about e let’s conclude this with what needs to
Change for the EV Revolution to really take off Harry has his points in mind which is that first and foremost we need to introduce efficiency scales and I agree with this wholeheartedly but it’s not what he thinks it is if you go back a few years ago outside of cars think
About buying a TV or a washing machine especially a TV is a good example back in the day you would have plasma TVs which were terribly inefficient then you had also LCDs which were not too bad but not great either and then when LED back LCDs came along all of those would score
Basically A++ Plus on the efficiency labels what has happened over the years that basically plasmas were completely discontinued because they are not energy efficient enough they were practically banned from the market what used to be kind of the A and B’s the kind of average ones back in the day on the
Market Market are now the absolute bottom of the barel stuff and what used to be A++ and absolutely exceptional is now somewhere in the B scale because those efficiency scales became stricter over time which pushed manufacturers to make more efficient products and it also made it easy for customers to choose the
More efficient one without understanding much about how the TV works and so on you just can see a standardized label across all of them and of course if two of them are priced the same the image quality is the same why would you not go for the more efficient one I’m very
Confident the same thing will happen with cars and manufacturers will have to focus more on efficiency so while yes efficiency may have gone out of the window for the time being keep a few things in mind number one with an electric car more horsepower and a more powerful motor doesn’t necessarily mean
That the car is less efficient this is an old way of thinking from the internal combustion engine where if you wanted more power you would need to put more fuel in you would need to put a bigger turbocharger in ETC with electric cars the easiest way to squeeze out more
Power from the motor is not to dump just more power into it but it’s to tweak the design to make the motor more efficient so for the same amount of power you put in you can squeeze out more horsepower and torque out of the electrical machine and this is why Teslas
Specifically are so fast and so powerful and it’s one of the the biggest selling points of Teslas that they are absolutely Rapid yet at the same time they are probably the most efficient electric cars in their segments on the market so yeah don’t necessarily think that you need to focus on low-end low
Horsepower motors to get efficient vehicles likewise he mentions a Lotus electri which I had a chance to sit on is a wonderful car but yes it’s a bigv which is not very efficient which does achieve about 2 m per Kow hour in the real world which any electric car driver
Will tell you is absolutely terrible the worst electric cars of kind of normal dimensions do about 3 m per kilowatt hour the best ones like the Teslas they are upwards of 4 m per Kow hour but going back to those efficiency labels and how much energy the car is actually
Using to propel itself over a certain distance when you take into account that a UK gallon of fuel is about 40 Kow hours of energy those 2.1 m per Kow hour Translate to an equivalent and this is an energy equivalent not how much it costs to run but how much energy you
Need to move the car about 81 mes per gallon so please try to find me a big luxurious premium 7 or 800 horsepower SUV which can do 80 MPG that’s simply impossible and that’s how far the bar has been moved with EVS that the worst
Ones on the market now do about 80 MPG equivalent and the best ones are of reaching 120 140 150 MPG so what I think will happen in the future is that yes we will get energy labels especially with EU loving to put kind of these a toe
Labels and everything we will get that but electric cars and petrol cars they will be held to the same standard and over time the reason why all the electric cars are now in the A++ category like back in the day LED TVs is because they are so much more efficient
Than the outgoing technology but as that outgo going technology gets phased out the scale will become stricter and manufacturers will definitely have to focus on efficiency and we will finally see the real kind of nice spread in electric cars so it will be much easier to compare which electric cars are more
Efficient than others because they will not be grouped all in the same category also not to dwell on this point a bit too much but one of the reasons why manufactures kind of forgot about efficiency for a while is because of those dropping battery costs as I
Mentioned back in the beginning of the video and if Co didn’t happen and that was going as expected basically at this point it’s cheaper to put a bigger battery into an electric car rather than spending the research money and time to develop a motor or an entire vehicle
Which is a little bit more efficient because the gains are so marginal even the worst electric motors are already very very efficient but yeah that has changed with now the supply chains being a bit more fragile everybody is trying to reduce how much of these expensive
Materials are used in their cars so I’m sure that manufacturers will refocus on it but it goes back to what I was again saying in the beginning of the video that the development Cycles are quite long so what manufacturers thought would happen in the next six years six years
Ago may not have panned out quite as they were planning to so now they need to adjust their course and the strategy and that will reflect in their products in the next 5 to 10 years time the other thing which Harry highlights is the battery degradation that needs to be a
Bit more prominent possibly yes I just think it will create a lot of Confusion And obviously every manufacturer will do that number a bit differently so if you look at a dash symbol saying you know that a Tesla has 10% degradation it may not necessarily mean the same thing as
10% degradation on a VW so you know what do you go by maybe the industry needs to create some sort of a standard which everybody uses and then it’s very easy to compare the values from different manufacturers but yes in the meantime I think this is going to be a problematic
One to crack as I mentioned this is something I get to deal with on a daily basis and it’s funny because the people who are the most worried about battery degradation are the ones who are new to EVS who have never had an EV and they’re asking about battery degradation on cars
Which are a year old and have done 10,000 miles guys practically there will be there will be no degradation visible those cars will be like brand new and it’s the people who had a navy and are prod changing that in and are looking to go into a newer shinier car with more
Range more Tech and so on those are the ones who generally speaking don’t care about battery degradation and it’s even if they had for example those Nissan leaves which suffered badly they know that those cars used to be Troublesome that the newer cars have better battery Management Systems both in terms of the
Charging software and of the thermal management side of things and they just accept it it’s a fact of course it improved and it’s not something to worry about and very lastly Harry thinks that electric cars are not the be Ando solution which is fair enough and he
Thinks that the world needs and I quote a reality check because EV is only an element of reducing the carbon footprint at the moment about 7% of man-made emissions are from Passenger cars so even if we went all EV and all of those cars were built and powered by green
Energy it means we are reducing our Global carbon footprint by about 7% which he thinks is not much of a difference but you have to think about this differently that’s huge those are absolutely huge numbers and I often see this where people focus on oh well why are we
Penalizing car drivers whereas the aviation industry is producing a lot of emissions let’s focus on that and then the aviation industry blam for example the farming industry that you know those are producing massive CO2 numbers and then the blame just gets passed on but what gets lost in the translation is
That we are so late into this that the only solution is to not choose one segment which we can be perfect at we need to reduce everything all of them we need to focus on the aviation carbon footprint has to reduce the car carbon footprint has to reduce the farming Etc
All of that has to come down and actually cars in many cases are low hanging fruit it’s very easy now the technology has come to a point where it can really go Mass market now it’s not about the technology needing to evolve it’s about bringing it to the masses and
Rolling out the charging infrastructure to support the change think about this if your employer comes to you and gives you a 7% pay rise you will not say oh that’s nothing I I don’t care about that I mean that would impact you quite significantly so even a 7% reduction is
Quite important and what I found shocking is that after emphasizing the efficiency so much that you know it’s all about efficiency we need to strive for better efficiency which I do 100% agree with for records then he goes to say that well maybe hydrogen and Fuel
Cell EVs and also synthetic fuels have a point in the future because Toyota reckons that only 30% of cars will go Electric in the near future and to do this sustain ility transition some cars will need to use e fuels and hydrogen and let me tell you if efficiency is of
The utmost priority you need to be able to recognize that this is the biggest pile of BS you can imagine let’s take a practical example if you use 100 kows of energy to charge an electric car like a Tesla Model 3 that car will be able to cover
459 km just like with petrol cars if you want a bigger more powerful luxurious car like the Tesla Model S or X yes they will cover less kilometers from the same amount of energy that’s understandable let’s say that now you want this hydrogen system to be the future because
It’s so easy it only takes 5 to 10 minutes to refuel and you will have a massive hydrogen tank in the back of the car so you can have decent range well if you use electrolysis to make hydrogen so use electricity to split water molecules into the hydrogen and oxygen and you
Then pump the hydrogen into a fuel cell electric vehicle and you then use the hydrogen back into creating electricity you will only cover 173 km from the original 100 Kow hours of energy I’m sorry if you care about efficiency how does this add up you are literally saying that a car which is
About two to three times less efficient is part of the future I mean that just simply doesn’t work we would need to have so much energy capacity that if in the future at some point we have got energy abundance then it may work but we’re not there yet and especially you
See we are in an energy crisis we are trying to reduce usage where possible the solution of hydrogen just does not fit into the world we live in not now probably not in 10 years maybe in 50 to 100 years time then we can have a chat
Alternatively if you think that this is too complicated well you can do the hydrogen combustion which is keeping a combustion engine but instead of combusting your petrol or diesel you will be combusting hydrogen that’s even less efficient youve got much bigger thermal losses so the 100 Kow hours of
Original electricity will only get you 46 km of range 10 times less than the Tesla Model 3 as I said this is the same thing for E fuels trying to capture carbon and turn it into synthetic fuels it simply does not work the numbers are not there yet and and the laws of
Physics still apply so they will probably never be there the more processes there are along the way there’s always a loss with every energy conversion so it just the more complicated it gets it also gets less energy efficient well I appreciate that you may say that electric cars are not
100% clean at the moment because the fossil fuels still make about 35% of our power here in the UK as of the latest 2023 data and that’s true but guess what if I bought an electric car in 2015 fossil fuels would have made a much bigger share of the electricity to power
That car and without changing the car without changing my driving style it would have gotten more efficient and more environmentally friendly because now only 35% of the electricity used to power it is made from fossil fuels in the next 5 years time the number will drop even further your petrol or diesel
Car will always stay 100% fossil fuel powered and there is no way around it so once that car is on the market the only way to improve the efficiency of it is to scrap it and build a new car and how is that sustainable and good for the environment just something to think
About so yeah what will the future look like in 5 to 10 years time I don’t know I hope it’s electric I know there are massive companies fighting for it not to be electric and Toyota is one of them but you have to keep in mind Toyota got
Caught out and they are not ready to enter the EV Market because they don’t have a product they kept saying for the last at least 5 years how they are coming out with a lineup of electric cars well can you see them anywhere they are selling one which is mediocre at
Best so of course they are going to say that it’s not the future and that you need to look at hybrids synthetic fuels and so on in the future I do think synthetic fuels have a place in the market but it will literally be only for Niche Sports Car application ations it
Will become just like horse riding yes you can have a horse yes you can have a classic car which you will be able to power using synthetic fuels but that’s it the mass Market will go to full electric vehicles for now battery electric vehicles are the best solution
Going forward and you have to keep in mind this is not a massive conspiracy if a manufacturer comes along with a better technology that technology will become established the rules at the moment the way they are structured with the sales of cars and the sales quotas is that by
2035 all cars have to have zero tailpipe emissions whether that’s in the form of hydrogen fuel cells or battery electric cars or something else that’s free for the market and the companies to decide so yeah I think that’s a good point to end the video on I could go on for much
Longer but even now I’m looking at the camera I’ve been rumbling on for probably about an hour so yeah if you made it this far thank you very much hit the like button if you found the perspective interesting if you think that I’m completely wrong I’m sure that
You will have let me know in the comments by now and I don’t know hit the dislike button twice or something if you want to see the tests of EVS which are going very in- depth quite technical make sure to subscribe because the next video will in fact probably be the range
Test of the mini in the different driving conditions and yeah that’s it thank you again for watching I will see you in the next one
Harry Metcalfe recently published a video to his @harrysgarage YouTube channel explaining why he is switching back to a diesel Range Rover Sport after driving fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars in the past years.
While his analysis of the UK market situation may appear comprehensive, it is quite clear that he lacks the in-depth knowledge of battery electric vehicles to make a valid assessment, so in this video I try my best to provide some important context on the matter.
HARRY’S VIDEO:
EFFICIENCY INFOGRAPHICS BY MICHAEL SURA:
Tweets by Michael__Sura
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Finance Example
04:10 Battery Costs
07:51 UK Vehicle Sales Statistics
09:59 Customers vs Manufacturers
15:15 Government Incentives
21:52 Insurance
27:34 Battery Degradation
34:52 Public Charging
41:46 Cold Weather Performance
45:27 What Needs to Happen for the EV Revolution to Take Place
