The Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a 74kWh battery which takes it about 440km, the average Australian drives 36.4km per day. Say you want to recharge when you get to 25% charge, you can drive approximately 330km before you want to charge the car. What’s that? about 9 days.
So that will add 6Kwh to the average daily household electricity usage of 18kW per day. The average solar system for households is about 6 to 8kW.
Electric cars are hardly a problem, in fact might be a boon as the 74kWh car battery can be used to store and provide energy for the house when the sun doesn’t shine.
There is also the outlook that future shopping malls will use their roofs to provide free charging power for electric vehicles to attract customers.
Now those are Australian figures but I would suggest that the mileage travelled in the UK are less and even overcast days provide some solar input so things are not as dire as people on this forum have predicted.
It is not cheap, a 2 way charging system could cost $10,000 so not much use for people our age but if you were young a solar system and an electric car would be the way to go.
Just off hand Bruce I can see a problem with your figures relating them to here in Yorkshire.
Solar panels have not been as successful here, and most houses don’t have them and neither do shopping malls or workplaces. In the summer months they are great, supplying some of the energy to run a house. Lighting, small electrical gadgets and chargers, but in the winter, you will be lucky to get six hours of daylight, let alone sunshine. Just at a time when you need power the most as everyone reaches for their thermostats and hot meals. And how far will the Hyundai get when the heater will be blasting away, headlights and wipers on at every journey? Not to mention the cost of electricity is sky high here at the moment, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to come down any time soon. Well somebody has got to pay for all the new charging stations and extra capacity required to supply it all…
Wouldn’t the car use the battery and motor cooling system to heat the passenger compartment? I don’t know but I can’t see that being a major problem, its the A/C I would worry about.
EVs rely on their batteries not only for motion of the car, but also the electrical fans, heating and (as OGF says) the AC and all other electrical equipment. That’s why they’d be particularly problematic in the winter.
I’d never have one, at least until they develop a nuclear powerplant that fits in the boot.
A lightning strike would not have melted the fixing bolts Foxy, but V strong wind gusts above the design loadings could cause the failure. No, definitely a design fault and I expect many more are the same. The UK used be known for over engineering, but not any more.
