[David (2)]

cant see this working here - the distance between my home and work is too great, along with 2 hills as well. Might just be able to get to the closest shops and back, mostly flat, but one of these things doesnt hold much shopping compared to even a smallish car boot.

[Si_Crewe]

Sums finished.

I compared a Nissan Leaf with a Nissan Note 1.5 DCi.

Basically, the Leaf costs around £26,000 and the Note costs £14,000.

A Leaf will cost you £0 to tax and is group 25 to insure.
The Note will cost you £20 to tax and is group 14 to insure.
Based on my own insurance costs, I've speculated that the Leaf would cost around £400 to insure and the Note would cost around £300.

A Leaf costs around 2p per mile to run and a Note costs around 10p per mile (based on the current price of diesel).
At 12,000 miles per year that yields fuel costs of £240 for the Leaf and £1180 for the Note.

So, let's look at the cumulative costs....

Year 1
Leaf: £26640
Note: £15500

Year 2
Leaf: £27280
Note: £17000

Year 3
Leaf: £27920
Note: 18500

.
.
.
Going up by £640 per year for the Leaf and £1,500 per year for the Note.
.
.
.
Year 12
Leaf: £33680
Note: £32000

Year 13
Leaf: £34320
Note: £33500

Year 14
Leaf: £34960
Note: £35000

Yay! The Leaf has FINALLY proved itself to be more cost-effective than a Diesel Note after only 14 years.

Course, the battery is only warranted for 100,000 miles so the Leaf owner will certainly have had to replace the battery once during that period with the attendant added expense IF it's even possible.

Incidentally, if I was to buy a 3 year old Note for around £6,000 it'd be TWENTY THREE YEARS before the Leaf proved itself more cost effective.
And it's more environmentally friendly to buy a used car than a new one too.

[TerraCanis]

(snippage)

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

Yay! The Leaf has FINALLY proved itself to be more cost-effective than a Diesel Note after only 14 years.

Course, the battery is only warranted for 100,000 miles so the Leaf owner will certainly have had to replace the battery once during that period with the attendant added expense IF it's even possible.

Then there's the range of the battery (about 100miles followed by a few hours' charging). You might be able to devise a system by which people used electric vehicles for everyday use and rented a larger car for long distances, and a readily-swappable battery pack might make the idea more practicable. Good luck with that - I don't have a single battery-powered device that can use the same battery as any of my other devices - so if we can't manage interchangeability for mobile phones, what chance for cars?

One possibility to extend range might be a kinetic energy storage system. Except, for a really good flywheel, it should have a high density. Which gives us the choice of tungsten (pricey!) or depleted uranium. Can't see that being too popular.

[Skyclad]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

Sums finished

....maths....

Aye, the high cost of the Leaf ruins it (although you fail to account for residual value so it's not a true whole life cost, but that's a grey area because at the moment nobody knows what the true disposal performance is for the new generation all electric vehicles).

If you are interested in true WLC then our figures put the Note at £640/month on 3 years 60K and the leaf at £856.

Where it does make sense is as a company car - because the Note will set you back another 3 grand in BIK (assuming high band tax payer) whereas the leaf will cost you nothing (but only if you buy it this year as the exemption expires in 3 years, not to mention the 3% diesel surcharge being removed in 4.

The manufacturers are doing amazing things with traditional combustion engines at the moment which is doing a lot to negate the benefit of electrics - at the annoyance of the government.

Our analysts tell us the extended range electric vehicles are the ones to watch out for!

Having driven both a Note and a Leaf I have a personal opinion on which is superior - but that's subjective, and my new car is neither

[Stegan]

Originally Posted by Heikoworld

It wont be long before the "Loony" govenment tax it in some way. They wont let people get away with that.

Even if a large percentage of the population started walking everywhere it wouldn't surprise me if the government insisted everyone slap a registration number on their back and started charging them tax for using the pavement and crossing the roads!

I wouldn't put anything past them - any of them.

[TerraCanis]

Originally Posted by Skyclad

The manufacturers are doing amazing things with traditional combustion engines at the moment which is doing a lot to negate the benefit of electrics - at the annoyance of the government.

Audi, for example, are claiming 65mpg combined cycle for a 136PS 2.0 diesel, which I assume is achieved purely through engine management.

[Bulletguy1]

Originally Posted by Lyricalis

I really don't understand why you are getting so worked up about this. This technology is rolling out now. Parking assistance on some models is already here. Vehicles will eventually no require a driver, certainly not for routine trips. I expect it to roll out on motorways to start with.

Twenty years time.........maybe.

The 5 - 10yrs you quoted in your post......being realistic......very unlikely.

[yappy]

haha was this an april fools?

[Bulletguy1]

Originally Posted by cultureman

Err,....my comments were on the abuse of buggies, not their legitimate use. Guess which category 82 year olds with mobility problems comes under?

Since when has mobility been categorised by age?

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by Skyclad

Aye, the high cost of the Leaf ruins it (although you fail to account for residual value so it's not a true whole life cost, but that's a grey area because at the moment nobody knows what the true disposal performance is for the new generation all electric vehicles).

Hmmm, not too sure about that.

I suspect that residuals for leccy cars will, initially, be quite high but then, once the true life of the batteries becomes apparent, I suspect they'll go through the floor.

For example, I dunno how the warranty on the leaf is worded but they state the battery is warranted for 100k miles or 8 years.
Based on the factory range of 106 miles per charge that DOES equate to a lifespan of 1,000 charges.

Trouble is that if your daily commute is only a 40 mile round-trip and then you charge it up again, does that mean you're only going to get 40k miles out of the battery before it snuffs it?

Also, most people will probably be charging it every night so that would give the battery a lifespan of 3 years rather than 8 years.

Seems like the only way to get 100,000 miles AND 8 years out of the battery would be to drive the car 34 miles per day and only charge it up every 3rd day which doesn't seem like terribly realistic usage IMO.

Be interesting to see how many warranty claims for batteries Nissan start to get in the next few years.

To digress for a minute, a mate of mine recently had a huge kick in the teeth when he tried to sell his flat.

It's a leasehold property which started off with a 100 year lease on the land.
My mate bought it in the 1990s with about 35 years of the lease to run. Probably figured he'd be rich and famous by the time the lease expired.
Now he's married and wants to sell the flat so he can buy a house with his missus.
Trouble is that, with less than 20 years remaining on the lease, buyers are VERY dubious of it and he simply cannot sell it.
Instead he's being forced to rent it out and then supplement the income to rent a house hor his missus and him to live in.
It is, basically, a ticking time-bomb.

Seems like it's a similar thing with buying an electric car at the moment.
Seems like there's a rather narrow window of profitability, where you buy it, run it for a couple of years and then hope that the residuals, coupled to the low running costs, will allow you to sell it at a lower loss than an equivalent ICE car.
That doesn't really seem like a particularly good bet, especially if you also consider buying a 2 year old ICE car instead, except perhaps to corporate fleets.

Beyond that, I can't help looking at other new technology to see how that evolved.
What is a 1st generation laptop or digital camera now worth, compared to it's retail price?

Sure, Nissan are making a big deal out of claiming the Leaf is made out of hemp and daisies so it can be recycled but that's probably not going to be much of a comfort to somebody who buys a 5 year old Leaf for, say, £10,000 and then finds it's worth about 50p when they come to sell it whereas a 5 year old ICE car will cost half as much to buy and can probably be sold for about half the price a couple of years later.

If somebody gave me a Leaf as a company car I'd probably be quite happy but the whole idea is still VERY shaky for private customers.

[Jackboy18]

What about motorized scooters that you stand on? Are they legal in the UK?

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by Jackboy18

What about motorized scooters that you stand on? Are they legal in the UK?

Unless I'm mistaken, they're too fast for pavements and don't have the stuff to qualify as an unlicensed road vehicle.

[neo_wales]

How about
http://www.milkfloats.org.uk/milkfloat1.JPG
you could convert it into a campervan

[Lyricalis]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

It's a nice idea but I'm not sure it's gonna happen any time soon.

Assuming you can get the actual route-following system working correctly there's still way too much of a possibility that a car could, for example, elect to drive across a big patch of standing water or black ice, skid, crash and kill the occupants.

We ARE certainly working toward this sort of thing, with GPS, self-parking and collision-avoidance systems but although they share some superficial similarities they're about as far away from a truly self-driving car as Apples SIRI is from a star-trek voice-activated AI computer.

No, a self-driving car would handle those sort of driving conditions far better than most drivers would. You're probably right that a Daily Mail pitchfork and torch campaign by its Luddite readers would start up the first time a self-drive car was involved in an accident though.

[Treble]

Originally Posted by rasbo

I don't see why there isn't a sort of cross between a scooter and a car

There is!

They are called qpods - but they're quite expensive.

http://www.qpod.co.uk/

[hooter]

earlier today the BBC lunchtime news carried a story of a family that had stopped using their 4 by 4 and had gone back to using a horse and cart........saved hundreds of pounds

[David (2)]

thing is what is the range of a Nissan Leaf....100miles?

My car costs a fraction of the Leaf, and i can easily do 80-90 miles on a full tank before the needle even drops of the stop. I even managed 100miles once.

Some weeks back we went down to Dorset, with a round trip of 90 miles....I am not sure a Nissan Leaf would make it, when you take into effect the hills.

Nissan Leaf....Must do better.

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by Lyricalis

No, a self-driving car would handle those sort of driving conditions far better than most drivers would. You're probably right that a Daily Mail pitchfork and torch campaign by its Luddite readers would start up the first time a self-drive car was involved in an accident though.

It'd only handle those conditions if it was programmed to.and, in that case, there's always going to be other unforseen hazards instead.

I guess it depends what you expect from such a system.
If you just want a glorified line-following robot (perhaps with some collision avoidance capability) then you can have that tomorrow.

If you really expect something that you would trust the lives of 30 million motorists to in any possible conditions then I fear the solution is still much further away.

S'funny but Apples SIRI is a really good metaphor here.
You use it and you find yourself thinking "Holy shnitz! For the first time, I actually believe that Star Trek style voice controlled computers might be a reality one day".
Trouble is that, in all honesty, all Apple has done is take existing technology and given it a fancy front-end which makes it look whizzy.

I suppose it's possible that one day somebody WILL simply invent a proper "neural" chip which can become the brain of any AI machine and that'll be a big leap forward but in the absence of that we certainly DO need all these little baby-steps toward refining technology to the point where it can do new things and, on that basis, the current gizmo's are certainly a step in the right direction but I'd say we're still decades (at least) away from a properly self-driving car.

As things are, I reckon we'll see at least another half-dozen fairly major improvements to stuff like lane-following, speed-control, collision-avoidance and GPS interactivity befor we even start to consider self-driving cars.

[mrkite77]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

As things are, I reckon we'll see at least another half-dozen fairly major improvements to stuff like lane-following, speed-control, collision-avoidance and GPS interactivity befor we even start to consider self-driving cars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by mrkite77

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

All good stuff but still a long way from everyday use.

Was it on Top Gear where they recently did something similar and it was all going fine until the car had to make a very sharp turn at an angled junction and it threw a wobbly half way around the turn and was headed for a house?

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE this stuff. I just think that it's gonna be a while before the tech' is available and robust enough for everyday use and then probably even longer (much longer) before the law will be prepared to allow such a thing.

I mean, in the future two cars collide and the respective owners have to claim off Google and Apple's insurance or something?

[Bedsit Bob]

Originally Posted by ustarion

This is ridiculous. What is the top speed on one of these?

8mph.

[Bedsit Bob]

Originally Posted by Old Bloke

Not really - see http://www.nippi.co.uk/trippi/

Except it requires a Driving licence, which some/many disabled people won't be eligible for.

[Bedsit Bob]

Originally Posted by Si_Crewe

I'd love to build an electric version of something like THIS, using a pair of hub-motors to drive the rear wheels

How about something like THIS?

[Si_Crewe]

Originally Posted by Bedsit Bob

How about something like THIS?

That's not bad looking but the motor is pitiful.

For me to consider using such a vehicle it'd have to be either attractively priced (to buy and run) or it'd have to be terrific fun and, unfortunately, the vast majority of these vehicles are just grossly overpriced golf-buggies IMO.

[Syntax Error]

The Renault Twizy is the future of motoring.

I wouldn't be seen alive in one, but I have to say it's the coolest car on the road.

You don't need a Lamborghini Aventador to turn everyones heads when you can get a Twizy for a the price of what a set of tyres for an Aventador would cost.

Joking aside, although it's expensive for what it is, it's cheap for an electric vehicle & has a better range & recharge times that standard electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf etc.