By Paul Homewood
The Audi e-tron – electric, expensive, useless, but the “car of the future”
https://www.audi.co.uk/uk/web/en/models/e-tron/e-tron.html
You can pick one for £64725, £19K more than the diesel equivalent:
And as for those famed savings on running costs?
Audi reckon you would get consumption of 23.4 KWh/100 km, on an average drive.
Currently household electricity prices are around 20p/KWh, which equates to 7.5p per mile:
The diesel gives an average of 44.8 mpg. At the current cost of £6.80 per gallon, this works out at 15.2 per mile.
However, this includes fuel duties of £2.63 per gallon. Excluding this, the diesel comes down to 9.3p per mile.
EV drivers will therefore save just 1.8p per mile. On, say, 10000 miles a year, that adds up to a princely annual saving of £180.
However, EV running costs will inevitable be higher for many drivers, who rely on using public chargers. Typical prices for these are now 45p per KWh, making the running cost 16.9p per mile.
The Audi website also has a useful tool for calculating range. The battery has a useful capacity of 83.6 KWh, apparently typical for this bracket of car.
You can play games with it, altering the various parameters, but motorway driving at a temperature of 5C gives a range of just 162 miles:
https://mobilitycalculators.online/ukmicrosite?selected=range
As the website admits, the actual range may well be less, given driving conditions and so on.
In practice then, the realistic range would be no more than 100 miles, given the fact that nobody would run the battery down to the bone. At this level, long distance driving would be painfully slow.
Audi also offer a Charging Time Calculator, which again can be set to different parameters:
Assuming a home wall box of 7.4 KW, charging from empty to 80% capacity would take 11 hours. Obviously it is unlikely the battery will ever be empty, but even a half charge takes 7 hours.
https://mobilitycalculators.online/ukmicrosite?selected=range
The 22 KW charger is obviously faster, but the on board charger in the car is only rated at 11 KW! If you want 22 KW, you have to pay extra for a factory fitted option.
Also many homes will not be able to use 22 KW chargers, as they need 3-phased power.
As for public charging, a 150 KW charger would take 30 minutes to charge to 80%. However, these are not commonplace. Most chargers on the M1, for instance, are 50 KW or less. You will need an hour or more to charge up with one of these:
Our nearest M1 Services have just two chargers on each carriageway. I gather this is not untypical; Toddington for instance also only has two. And this situation is unlikely to change much whilst there are still few WVs on the road; businesses simply won’t be able to afford spending hundreds of millions installing chargers, which will stand idle most of the time.
Heaven knows what the queues will be like when we’re all driving electric cars!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
November 29, 2021 at 06:24AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 