Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.
And There are a couple of pieces of EV FUD in your response.
>modular batteries
A battery might be made out of modules, but none of the battery packs I’ve seen have been designed for easy “local garage” module swap out, unlike replacing piston rings. I suggest from experience the replacement of both battery modules and piston rings can be simple or depending on other factors a big job with a big ticket price. I expect in a few years the norm for EVs will be complete battery replacement, with module replacement being performed in specialised factories and definitely not something to be done on the owners drive at the weekend by a couple of amateur/hobby mechanics.
>wear
My ICE has done 200k miles (it does circa 35k per annum) without engine rebuild, I still average circa 45 miles per gallon and 500+ miles per tankful, okay it likes a tipple of oil now (1 litre per 20k miles). So to me if it were to only handle half a tank of fuel and so go 250 miles between refills, it would cause problems; although given the vehicles age and known degradation in EV batteries being able to do 100 miles between refills would be considered good.
> When your diesel Kia has a worn-out engine it will be scrap value.
Given how much of an EVs value is in the battery, much the same can be said of EVs. Having a high annual mileage, I have tended to keep my cars until they are scrap, the reason for scrapping the cars hasn’t been the engine but everything else wearing out; doing £2,000+ worth of work on a car with 250k miles compared to buying a newer version with only 50k miles for £2,000…
I expect similar will apply to EVs, your 2023 state-of-the-art EV will look a poor choice against a 2030 Mainstream EV.
>"move the emissions from my tail pipe to a gas fired power station."
Yes the primary driver for EVs has been tail pipe emissions. The trouble is whilst much is possible to make our power stations more environment friendly, we’ve been very slow in doing any of them, preferring greenwash to action. We also need to take account of the distribution infrastructure upgrade that will be necessary to support large scale EV usage.
> the last point is the big one.
There is plenty of evidence that an ICE vehicle will last 20 years, EV’s give it few generations… However, the big problem for current versions of both is the IT equipment which will be pushed to last 10 years. Which means the costs of production are a larger part of total energy consumption, which given we need to massively reduce emissions in the next 10 years gives us a problem…
Personally, I think governments want EVs to maintain their premium price to encourage less car usage, without having to directly confront people, because a 1-to-1 replacement of ICE vehicles with EV’s isn’t going to give the multiple step change in emissions we are needing to achieve by 2030…