247 - The Back To ICE Episode

Gary:

Hi, I'm Gary, and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at the unthinkable, going back to an internal combustion engine vehicle. Before we start, I wanted to ask you for questions.

I'm putting together a Q&A episode for the latter part of the season, so let me know if there's anything you want addressing specifically, either about electric vehicles, charging, infrastructure, payments, renewables, whatever. Just email me at info@evmusings.com, please, and I'll see about getting it on the show.

Coren Telegraph article from: 2023

Now, my view on articles like this is that whoever gets an EV without checking beforehand whether it fits their lifestyle or not is basically asking for trouble. But I have had a conversation that changed my mind. I spoke to a podcast listener last year, who was forced to give his EV back due to circumstances beyond his control.

He's a disabled driver who has no home charging. He bought an original Hyundai Ioniq, can't remember whether it was the 28kWh or the 38kWh model, and he used to use the local Tesco 7kW chargers, which were free, to do his overnight charging. But then Tesco started levying a tariff on these chargers, which made it very expensive for him.

So he ended up using some rapid charging, which was a problem due to his handicap, and once again ended up more expensive overall. And the long and the short of it was that he finished up not keeping the car and going back and buying a cheap internal combustion engine vehicle. Now, if you read social media, you'll also hear that there are any number of people who have supposedly ended up sending their EV back for any number of reasons. Some of them legitimate and some of them quite spurious.

So today I want to talk about this in a little detail and see if we can determine a number of underlying factors. Research carried out by several institutes in the UK, including EVA England and the podcast sponsor Zapmap, has determined that once people have an electric vehicle, the chances of them going back to an internal combustion engine car is about 3 in 100, i.e. 3%. So 97% say that they're happy, but it does mean that there are circumstances in which they will make a move backwards.

But I maintain that there are only two real reasons why anyone would go back to fossil fuels after driving an electric vehicle. Number one, the decision to move to an electric vehicle was flawed in the first place. Number two, they were forced to due to some external circumstance outside their control.

So let's dissect these two statements. Firstly, the decision to move to electric was flawed in the first place. Now I've long maintained that at this moment in time, electric vehicles are not for everyone.

If you don't have the ability to charge at home or work, there can be cost and convenience implications, although this isn't a deal breaker for some people. If you have a large family and you need a vehicle that seats six, seven or eight people, the range of potential EVs is small and still quite expensive. If you regularly need to travel long distances with large loads, possibly towing a trailer, then your options are quite limited.

And for quite a lot of people that I know, if you only buy six-, seven- or eighth-hand vehicles for a thousand pounds or less, then again, the electric options are also very limited. Now, I do want to reiterate that these limitations exist currently just as they did when ICE cars first came onto the market. And just as they did with ICE cars, they will also be removed with electric, but they still exist at the moment and probably will for a few years.

I also want to reiterate that some of these limitations are self-inflicted and manageable. I know of numerous people who have no home charging and yet run an electric vehicle without any issue. Just as I know of several people who do very high mileage, 50,000 miles plus per year using private and public charging without any issue.

So anyone who has these limitations and still buys an electric vehicle could right now find themselves in a situation where they're compromised or spending more than they were with an ICE car. And I can fully understand people in that situation moving back to internal combustion. But there are also a group of people, and I put journalist Charles Coren in that category, who have an expectation of electric vehicles that is not met with reality.

And as a result, feel that an EV is not for them. And usually that expectation looks something like this. I will get into an electric vehicle that I've never driven before without understanding anything about the way it works.

And I will expect it to be able to do everything in an identical way to how I currently do it with my petrol car. And if I can't, then the problem is with the electric vehicle and not with me. This typically manifests itself with new drivers by wanting to do, for example, a really long drive right out of the box.

London to Edinburgh, Norwich to Exeter, that sort of thing. And they set off with limited charge in the battery. They run down to 5% state charge, navigate to the first charger on their satnav and plug in without realising that it's an AC charger that's meant for charging while parked and not doing a long run.

Or they got into a nice rapid charger and sit there for two hours, filling up to 100%, not realising that 80% is optimal for most EVs and it's quick to head off at 80% and charge again later than it is to stay on that charger until they get to 100%. And they conclude that. that charging is too slow.

Or they choose the first charger they come to, which might be one of the more unreliable ones, I'm looking at you genie point, and find out that it's broken or it's not working and they then don't have enough charge to get to the next stop. And they look at that as an EV problem. But let me switch this around.

If you got into an Intel combustion engine car that you'd never driven before and you were pooting around the highlands of Scotland, you ran your car down to almost empty, only to discover that most of the petrol stations in the highlands close at seven at night, and some even stay closed over the weekend. So you can't fill up. Is that a nice problem?

Or is that a you problem? This is actually an education problem. Despite all we may think, an EV is not like an internal combustion engine car in many ways, just as internal combustion engine car was not like a horse in many ways.

Would you have expected a horse rider to get into a Model T Ford and understand how things like clutches, accelerators and brakes work? What about refueling and the fact that you had to get your petrol from a nearby drugstore? It was a learning curve.

And we're on that curve now. Friend of the podcast, Gill Nowell regularly posts updates indicating how comfortable her young children are with charging, even to the point where they can plug in and start charging themselves. When they become old enough to drive, they'll know instinctively how EVs work and not be saddled with the issues of those who think that it should be identical to petrol.

And we'll come back and address this in a moment or two. Now, the second reason I highlighted earlier is that people may be forced to move back to internal combustion engine for reasons outside their control. I know of someone who had an EV as part of their salary sacrifice package.

They left the company, mainly due to a house move, and they ended up in a house with no driveway and a company that had no salary sacrifice package. So they had to buy a very cheap run around to keep themselves mobile until they were able to work out how and if an EV would work for them with their new circumstances. I'm aware of several people who were in similar situations.

But I'm also aware of people who said, I've gone back to petrol because I can't find anywhere to charge without a queue. In fact, there was a, I may have mentioned this before on the podcast, there was a post from someone late last year who reckoned that 90% of the charges he did in public have meant a long queue. And that meant that quote unquote, the infrastructure isn't ready.

But the interesting aspect of that is that it would appear that 90% of his charging in public occurs at the same charger, which is an Ionity charger off the M40 at Beaconsfield. And what's specific about that is that Ionity have some really good charging deals through their subscription service. Now I did a whole episode on subscriptions last season, episode 225, and you can reduce your charging costs down to around 45 pence a kilowatt hour, which is cheaper than petrol or diesel.

Ionity of work deals up with a lot of OEMs, original equipment manufacturers, the car makers, where basically if you buy a car, they give you this reduced deal as part of the service they offer. It's called an eMSP. We will be talking with Ionity in a week or two about what they do and this sort of eMSP. So make sure you look out for that episode.

But coming back to this, what naturally people have done with this sort of deal is that they're going to go to Ionity chargers. And as I write this on a weekend in early January, and I check the usage of the Ionity chargers around the UK, I find that the site that we're talking about at Beaconsfield is almost completely occupied.

And it's one of the very small number of Ionity sites in the UK that is almost completely occupied. So maybe the issue isn't with the charging infrastructure overall, it's with that specific Ionity site, Beaconsfield. But I'm firmly of the opinion that a lot of people who move back to ICE were determined not to like EVs anyway.

They're the ones who went into it with the attitude of, my current car can do 600 miles on a tank and refill in 5 minutes and if an EV can't do that then it doesn't work for me. But is that not a little bit like saying, my horse can jump hedges, fold streams and it needs a bale of hay and a few carrots every night as fuel, plus I can use a manure to feed my roses. If an ICE car can't do that, I'm not moving across.

You can see how stupid an argument like that is in hindsight, right? 600 miles as a measure of range is meaningless because nobody travels 600 miles without stopping. The more accurate measure should be, I can travel 3.

5 hours in my diesel car before I need to stop for a break. And that's exactly the same in an EV. Can this EV do 3.

5 hours without me needing to stop and charge? It's a bit like saying, my water bottle can hold 40 litres of water. Fine.

But you don't drink all that in a day, you drink about 4 or 5 litres. So you're carrying around extra water. My water bottle takes 4 litres, I fill it when it's empty and I still get the same amount of water every day as you do.

The refill in 5 minutes thing is because you can only refill a petrol car. You can't do anything else. You can't go shopping or go to work or go to sleep or even go and get a coffee.

It's a serial activity. Do something fill the car, do something else. With car charging, it's a parallel activity.

Do something, plug the car in, do something else while the car's charging, unplug the car. Of course, you want to be as quick as possible unless you're sleeping. But that's why chargers have different power settings.

Let's loop back a moment to what I said earlier about EV utilisation being different to internal combustion engines. While they're both 4 wheel, usually vehicles, 2 wheels in some cases, 3 wheels in others, that get you from A to B, the similarity ends there. EVs are a different paradigm.

Big word of the day alert, Sarah Sloman. They operate differently and they need to be dealt with differently. But for us early adopters, that's fine.

We know this. We understand that we might have to make compromises and we're fine with it. When I got my first EV, I went from driving an ICE vehicle all the way to my mum's with a quick rest stop at Leicester Forest East to use the loo, to having to make two 20 minute charging stops at the back of various hotels off the M1.

Now I was fine with that because I was saving a huge amount of money doing so. At 7 pence a kilowatt hour with Chargemaster at the time, I was prepared to make that trade off. Things have changed now, however.

I can do the same journey up there with just the same single stop that I used to do. Although, this time I stop at a place with a charger and I plug in. It's added a conservative 15, maybe 20 minutes to my total journey time.

Coming back's a little bit more because I can't charge at my parents, thanks to Volkswagen not including a 3-pin plug charger in their ID range of cars. Mm-hmm. So I have to make a slightly longer additional stop on the way back, but again, it's fine and I'm okay with that.

But we're now moving to the early mass adopters. These are the folks who want to move across for reasons other than the fact that it's new tech. They're getting good deals through salary sacrifice, through reduced benefit-in-kind payments, through good charging subscriptions, and what they don't want is some sort of convoluted process to understand what they need to do to make this work and they want it to be seamless.

Which brings me back to the constant refrain you'll hear on this podcast, education. With all the best will in the world, driving and charging an EV is not rocket science. It's far less complicated to drive than a manual car.

Ask any teenager who's tried to learn the biting point, an uphill start, and an emergency stop whether he or she would rather have a clutch in gears or a simple one-pedal solution. But there are aspects that are a little bit more complex. Charge speeds, charging curves, CPOs, networks, et cetera, but it's not beyond the wit of man to learn these things.

After all, over 1. 2 million people in the UK already have done so and 90%, 97% feel comfortable enough in what they've learned to actually stick with it. Now as usual, I equate this with when dumb mobile phones became smartphones.

First you had to buy something that was a little bit more expensive. Then you had to negotiate a different user interface. Then you had to buy a special data package to allow you to use the internet on your phone.

Then you had to deal with a load of apps, user profiles, two-factor authentication, antivirus packages, face ID, touch ID, front and back facing cameras. The list was endless. But was it insurmountable?

Absolutely not. My 83-year-old mother can do everything she needs on her phone and iPad. And this was a woman who grew up in a time when if you had a phone in the house, it was generally a party line shared with neighbours.

If not, you had to walk to the end of the road and call someone from a phone box. So she knows a thing or two about adaptation. I also read a post from someone who said that she's sent her EV back because her insurance trebled over three years.

Fair enough. I'm not sure what car she had or what the circumstances were around the insurance increase. But the comment she made alongside that was, I can now also delete the 389 charger apps I have on my phone.

So I question her about why she felt she needed a charger app for each CPO and why she didn't use RFID-based roaming. And her answer? No idea what RFID-based roaming or CPO means.

She went on to tell me, when I was out, it seemed like every working charge point wanted me to download a different app. So I did. Once again, an issue where education could have saved a lot of issues.

Obviously, it wouldn't have stopped her insurance from trebling, but it would have made her charging experience less arduous. Which brings us full circle back to our original topic, leaving EVs for internal combustion engine. Now, I think it's going to be something that will continue to happen.

I mean, we still have people using dumb phones and not smartphones, right? I think there's going to be a legitimate reason for this, as I've already stated. I think education is key to ensuring that this is something that happens as little as possible.

So what are you doing to help educate those you know about the differences between ICE and EV? Let me know using the socials or info at EVmusings.com.

It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with you listeners. Can EVs do long distance trips in the cold? Well, volunteers drove 41 different EVs on a 621-mile winter trip in Finland, with most completing it in under 14 hours, which is similar to combustion cars.

The Tesla Model S Long Range was the fastest, finishing in 12 hours and 15 minutes. And overall, EVs showed improved performance and charging efficiency, making long winter trips more feasible. Most of the EVs fared better than the diesel or petrol cars, as drivers of those cars said a journey like this would take between 14 and 16 hours.

So check out the link for details of the cars, the journey time and the charging time. And that's the show for today, hope you enjoyed listening to it. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at EVmusings.com. I'm on the socials, on BlueSky at evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at EVmusings, where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. Why not follow me there?

Thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon on a monthly basis, and through Ko-fi. com on an ad-hoc one. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, why not buy me a coffee? Go to ko-fi. com slash evmusings and you can do just that, k.o.- f.i.com/ evmusings.Takes Apple Pay too.

Other listeners will know about my two ebooks, So You've Got Electric and So You've Got Renewable, the 99p each are equivalent, and you can get them on Amazon. Check out the links in the show notes for more information, as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles.

Now, I know you're probably driving or walking or jogging now as you listen to this. If you can remember and you enjoyed this episode, drop a review in iTunes, please, really helps me out. If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you.

Why not let me know you've got to this point by messaging me at musingsev. bsky. social with the phrase 97% hashtag if you know you know nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co-founder Simone, he's been quiet recently, too quiet. So quiet, in fact, I don't have anything to tell you about him. Thanks for listening.

Bye!