Electric cars – Would you hire an electric car?

Electric Cars – Entering the Mainstream, or Still Too New?

At Priory Rentals, we love our cars. Our vans too. In fact everything with wheels and an engine is likely to turn our heads. While we might be described as ‘petrol heads’ there’s an increasing number of vehicles on the road which don’t use petrol, or diesel either. There’s an electric vehicle revolution promised and we can’t help but wonder what car hire will look like in the future.

Electric vehicles aren’t as new to the road as you’d think. Naturally, milk floats might be the first vehicles you think of, but the first electric vehicles go much further back. Believe it or not, the first commercially successful internal combustion engines were invented in 1859, the first electric car, however, was created in 1828 – over 30 years earlier. Indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, electric vehicles vied for popularity with cars powered by petrol and even cars powered even steam, all sharing the streets with more traditional horses and carriages. It seems hard to imagine.

So why aren’t there more electric cars on the road today? It’s a fair question, especially with the generation and distribution of electricity being increasingly widespread by 1910 to 1920 and electric vehicles enjoying increasing popularity, it would seem they should still be around. Primarily, the problem with the original EV’s was the high cost of batteries and their limited range, a problem which has persisted up until the last few decades, where improvements in battery technology have once again made electric vehicles begin to look attractive again.

Thanks to the incredible advances in mobile phone technology, where an arms race of phones which had to b smaller and smaller, but with better and better features, manufacturers have spent an awful lot of time and research creating batteries which hold more charge, for longer, while being smaller in size. Exactly the thing which, when scaled up, has started t solve the size, power storage and price problems of the batteries from the original electric vehicles,

The Electric Cars of Today

Fast forward to today’s electric cars and they’re a far cry from the originals. They’re lighter, technologically advanced, sleek and out of necessity, as efficient as the manufacturers can make them. Battery technology has come on in leaps and bounds, so has motor technology, but in the absence of the electric car for so many decades, the internal combustion engine has had decades to establish itself and it too has evolved. It’s only in recent years that modern EV’s have started to look like they’re approaching a point where they’ll start to rejoin the mainstream.

Electric vehicles are no longer niche and with almost every major car manufacturer either planning or already producing electric cars, interest in such vehicles is at levels not seen in over 100 years. While the power of electric vehicles allows them to compete with petrol and diesel cars in terms of acceleration and speed, range is still an issue, it’s not the problem it once was and with fast charging and an expanding network of charging points, range may cease to be as much of a problem.

What are the advantages of electric vehicles?

Electric vehicles have a number of advantages over their internal combustion based competitors, some of which have always been the case, others are more recent and hae come about due to the public being encouraged to consider such vehicles.

• Noise – Electric Vehicles have always been far quieter than their internal combustion powered counterparts.
• Emissions – No fuel is burnt by fully electric vehicles, so there are no exausts an no fumes genrated by the cars themselves.
• Maintenance – With far fewer moving parts, there’s less to go mechanically wrong with an electric vehicle.
• Cost per mile – Electricity is far cheaper than petrol or diesel, so the ‘fuel’ cost per mile is drastically reduced.
• Electric cars are largely exempt from road tax and places with emissions or congestion charges may well exempt EV’s
• Battery technology continues to improve leading to greater range and power.
• They are far easier to drive due to not needing gears.
• Plans are in place to offer subsidies on EV purchases and new houses may soon have to be built with charging points.

What are the disadvantages of electric cars?

With carbon fuelled cars having enjoyed several decades of dominance, it can be hard to make the move to a technology which, while promising, isn’t a perfect replacement for petrol and diesel-powered cars. Some of the following problems with electric vehicles may well be dealt with over time, others are intrinsic problems which will require a compromise in expectations.

• Noise – From a road safety perspective, a car which makes no noise can’t be heard approaching by people or animals
• Emissions – While electric cars don’t have exhausts, the electricity they’re charged with may well have been generated by burning fossil fuels, so their cleanliness may be a little overstated
• Pollution – Manufacture of car batteries, particularly the extraction of nickel is reputed to be quite an environmentally harmful process.
• Range – Electric cars are still hampered by the range you’ll get from a charge and by how long it takes to recharge once plugged in. Trips over 100 miles or so are likely to be broken up by recharges which take a few hours to complete.
• Availability of charging points – Electric vehicle charging points are being installed in car parks, homes and town centres at a terrific pace, but they’re still hard to find at times.
• Batteries decline in capacity over time and are still quite costly to replace.

Would you consider hiring an electric car?

Naturally, we’re interested in the views of drivers concerning electric vehicles, at some point, we expect to be adding EV’s to our fleet, but when this happens and to what degree remains to be seen. For use as city cars, electric vehicles seem an ideal option. They have zero emissions and are a dream to drive in stop/start traffic, there are plenty of charging points dotted around urban areas too. For people who need a car to travel shorter distances, with plenty of time parked up in which to recharge, an electric vehicle may well be a perfect option, either as a hire vihicle or even as your main owned car. For those of you who need a car to travel long distance, more traditional car types are likely to still be the only viable choice. Of course, if you have an electric vehicle for your day to day driving and only travel long distances occasionally, hiring a petrol or diesel vehicle once in a while gives you the best of both worlds.

Will your next vehicle purchase be an electric vehicle? Would you hire one long or short term? Is the technology still not quite up to the point where such vehicles become attractive? We’d be delighted to hear your views. Feel free to get in touch via our contact form or leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.