Electric Cars For DUMMIES: Absolutely EVerything Explained

Electric cars. Everyone thinks they understand them, everyone has an opinion, but let's be real. We could all do with a little bit of help separating fact from fiction. So with that in mind and because it's World EV Day, 9th of September, in case you're wondering, I thought I'd make a little video explaining everything you need to know about electric cars. Like this one. Are you serious? Okay, fine. An electric vehicle or an EV is a type of car, isn't it? Except it runs on electricity from a battery which powers a motor or two or three or four. And that means you can charge it up at home or from a public charger to get it going. It's completely different from an ICE car. That's an internal combustion engine car which runs on petrol or diesel and also very different from our hybrid which uses a combination of petrol and electric. We'll talk about those a bit later on. Usually an electric car will have a motor at the front or at the back or sometimes at the back and at the front or sometimes two at the back, two at the front. There's a lot of different combinations but basically those motors get their energy from a battery but not this battery. That is the 12 volt battery pack you get in every single car including EVs. Its job is only to start the vehicle. Once it's all powered up the main battery, the traction battery, is the one that takes over and drives the car. The traction battery is normally packaged nice and low along the floor of the vehicle because it's so massive and that's the best place for it to fit. The distance an EV can drive on a fully charged battery is called its range. Range depends mainly on the battery size in kilowatt hours. 50 kilowatt hours is about average. Anything less than that is pretty small and 100 kilowatt hours is a lot. We'll come back to battery sizes shortly. Here's what you do. You take your charge cable, you open your charge flap on your car and then you plug it in. It really is as simple as that except actually it's not quite as simple as that because the way you charge depends very much on where you charge but usually you're going to be doing most of your charging from home because that's the cheapest and easiest way to do it. You'll usually need a private driveway for that though or at least a parking space right near your house. It is possible to run an EV without a home charger. You can use a lamppost charger for example and you can technically charge your car at home without having a driveway by using a system that tucks the cable along the pavement like this one from You can also consider charging at work or in a car park at a supermarket which lets you top up while you work or do your shopping but the quickest type of charging is from a public rapid charger. The sort you'll usually find at a service station or dedicated EV charging facility. More on these in a second. I'm going to answer that in a second but there's some technical jargon that I need to explain before I get to that so ask me about the technical jargon. Ask me about kilowatts and kilowatt hours. Okay so you know how all electrical devices are measured in watts right? Like this light bulb. This is a five watt light bulb. It's the same for electric cars. In fact all cars. This car the Vauxhall Astra Electric Sports Tourer has an electric motor that produces aka 115 kilowatts and that's the equivalent of 154 horsepower. Side note even petrol cars can be measured in kilowatts. For example in Australia they do that all the time. The Ford Mustang GT has a V8 that produces 444 horsepower which is the equivalent of 331 kilowatts. Now you know. So now we've covered power in kilowatts we need to cover energy in kilowatt hours. That's your battery capacity. The capacity in a AA battery is around 3.9 watt hours. Because the battery in an EV is way bigger it's measured in thousands of watt hours aka kilowatt hours. That's how many kilowatts the battery can supply the motor for a full hour. Stick with me. It sounds complicated but it's really not. I'll dumb it down right. Imagine this car had a tiny one kilowatt motor which is the equivalent of about 1.3 horsepower but it still had a huge 50 kilowatt hour battery pack. Well the energy in that battery pack is enough to run that one kilowatt motor for 50 hours. Glad you asked. That depends on whether you're doing AC or DC charging. AC that's alternating current is the type of electricity used domestically at home. DC that's direct current is the type of electricity that you'll normally use when you're out at a public charger and we'll get to those in just a second. There's a fair few ways to charge at home. One way the slowest of all is to use a three pin charger. This thing connects to a three pin plug and the fastest it can charge is at 3.6 kilowatts which would charge the 50 kilowatt hour battery in the Astra in about 13.8 hours. A much more flexible way of charging your EV is to use a dedicated wall box like this one from Podpoint. This thing is much faster. It can send seven kilowatts of power into the battery. Double the speed of the three pin charger which means charging your car is a lot faster from one of these. How fast? Well the charge speed is seven kilowatts and the battery capacity is 50 kilowatt hours. 50 divided by 7 equals 7.1 so it will take 7.1 hours to fully charge from 0 to 100 percent. If that sounds like a long time don't worry most people won't be getting home with an empty battery every single day. You might get home with 50 percent left in the battery in which case the three pin charger would take about seven hours to go from 50 to 100 and the 7 kilowatt wall box would take three and a half hours. Rapid charging totally different story. This is a public rapid charger and remember how at home you can charge at seven kilowatts on one of these you can go way quicker from 50 kilowatts all the way up to 120 kilowatts in this case and even in some cases as fast as 350 kilowatts. Now not all electric cars can charge at the same speed. The speed will depend on the battery in terms of its chemistry and the way it's been designed. Some batteries charge faster than others and that's reflected in the price of the battery and therefore the price of the car. This Astra is pretty middle of the road when it comes to rapid charging. It can only top up at a maximum of 100 kilowatts. The other thing to know is that you won't always get the full charging speed all the time. Batteries charge way quicker when they're above 20 percent full and below 80 percent full so keep that in mind. Hang on there's still more to explain here about rapid charging. So because nobody tends to rock up to a fast charger when they're completely empty on zero percent and charging above 80 percent is quite slow manufacturers don't give out zero to 100 percent times. What they tend to do is give out 10 to 80 percent or 20 to 80 percent as a rough guideline for how fast your car will charge. Now normally that tends to work out at about half an hour. In the case of this Vauxhall Astra Electric Sports Tourer you can get from 20 percent to 80 percent in about 26 minutes on a 100 kilowatt charger. The reason that the speed of charging slows down as batteries get fuller is because overcharging is a bad idea and the battery management systems in the cars need to slow down the rate of charge to prevent that from happening. It's a bit like this. I've got a bottle of water and this little pot here. When I start charging I can go quite quickly can't I but then as I get to the top I've got to slow it down and fill it more gradually to prevent overfilling. This is exactly how electric cars work. You don't want to do this. Not always actually and that's because the smart EV driver doesn't charge their car in the same way that a petrol car driver will refuel their car. You see for example if you're going on a 300 mile trip and your EV has a range of 250 you don't need to stop and fill it all the way back up. What you do is you stop after about 200 miles you top up for maybe 10 minutes get the amount of charge you need and then continue your journey because once you get to your destination you can plug in again. On some cars range was pretty bad. The old Nissan Leaf for example had a tiny 24 kilowatt hour battery. Also some car makers deliberately design their cars with a small battery to keep the price low or their profit margins high but these days they tend to go pretty far. A Tesla Model 3 can go nearly 400 miles on a single charge. 390 to be precise. The new Taycan can go 421 miles. A Mercedes EQS can go 450 miles and that's further than most people driving a single trip. If you're doing a 300 mile journey for example that's a five hour drive averaging 60 miles per hour. Most people won't do that in one sitting so stopping to charge isn't always annoying. It might actually be sweet relief. Here's the thing most domestic properties have what's called single phase electricity which restricts them to seven kilowatt charging. You could go faster if your house has three phase electricity but that's very rare. If you were lucky enough to have it then you could upgrade your charger to 11 kilowatts or 22 kilowatts. With an 11 kilowatt charger you could charge the 50 kilowatt hour battery pack in this car in about four and a half hours. With a 22 kilowatt charger you could charge it in about 2.2 hours but should you bother here's the thing most people are going to be charging their EVs overnight while they sleep so speed isn't really that important. But here's another complication when you're at a public charge point the charge speed is dictated by the speed at which the battery itself can accept a DC charge. However when charging at home it's the electronics in the car in the onboard charger which converts AC to DC which dictates how fast you charge at home. So if your car's onboard charger only charges at seven kilowatts using a 22 kilowatt charger won't make it any faster. Yep there's actually a few different types but the most common is what's called CCS. That's what you find on most electric cars. CCS stands for combined charging system and that's because it's actually two charge ports in one. The top one is what's called a type 2 and that's what fits your regular type 2 plug at home and then there's a little bottom bit down here with two extra prongs which allow DC charging. If you go to a public charger what you'll notice is that they look exactly like a type 2 but with two little extra prongs on the end. There are also other types of DC charger including one called Shadamo used by some vehicles like the Leaf because it was designed mainly by Nissan. But CCS is more universal as it offers AC and DC in one port rather than needing two separate ports or the use of an adapter. If you're charging at home the cost of recharging will depend entirely on your electricity tariff. Electricity companies like to charge you for every single kilowatt hour of electricity that you use. That's called the unit price. Some of them do have EV specific tariffs though which mean they'll charge you a lot less for energy overnight while the rest of the country is asleep. During the daytime the normal unit price is likely to be somewhere in the region of 20, 25, 30 pence per kilowatt hour but at night it's likely to be as low as 7 pence per kilowatt hour which means that fully charging this 50 kilowatt hour battery pack will only cost you £3.50 which is amazing considering the fact that you can drive this thing for 250, 280 miles. But there is a caveat because these cheap rates are only offered between 12.30 and 5.30 in the morning that means you can't fully charge the car from zero to 100 percent so you've got to split it over several nights. That's why it's important to keep plugging in your car every single night to benefit from that cheap rate. How do you make sure your car only charges during a specific window? Well a lot of cars will actually allow you to set the charging time in the driver display. You simply set your charging time and the car will only charge during that window. You can also set that charging window using an app for the car or an app that comes with your wallbox. Public chargers are a different kettle of fish. They tend to be far more expensive by a long way. Some rapid charge companies will charge you 85 pence per kilowatt hour so if you're filling up a 50 kilowatt hour pack that'll cost you £42.50. Yep and you do it in exactly the same way as you would if you were trying to make a petrol car use less petrol. Petrol cars use a metric called miles per gallon and electric cars use one called miles per kilowatt hour. There's also a couple of other ones including kilowatt hours per 100 kilometers but they all tell the same story of efficiency. Just look at the dashboard readout. If it's saying three miles per kilowatt hour that means you can go three miles for every kilowatt hour in the battery. Multiply that by your battery capacity and you'll have your real-time range for any given trip. Well yeah and the reason is they use an industry standard test to figure out the range. It's pretty much the same test that they use to figure out miles per gallon in a petrol car and it is of course wildly optimistic. Again it all depends on how you drive. You could be driving up a hill with a car full of people towing a caravan and that will all reduce your range in the real world. Yep I'm afraid so. In the case of the Tesla Model Y that I'm running at the moment range in summer is normally around the 250 mark but in the We're back to public charging? Fine. Listen most charging stations don't require you to have a subscription. Usually you can rock up and use your phone or your contactless card and pay for your charging that way. There are some benefits to having a subscription. Namely your electricity can be a tad cheaper but you can just pay as you go. Yeah of course you can. All EV charge ports are designed to be weather sealed and you can use them in whatever weather you want. Imagine if they Longer than you think. Normally when people think about batteries they think about their mobile phones where the batteries tend to go bad after a couple of years but electric cars are completely different and that's because of something called cycle life. Cycle life measures how many complete charges and discharges a rechargeable battery can experience before it no longer holds a useful charge. In other words if a fully charged battery is discharged to zero percent and then fully recharged that's one cycle. If it's discharged to 50 percent and charged to 100 percent that's half a cycle. It's very common for most of us to run completely out of battery with our mobile phones so 100 to 0 to 100 is fairly common on a mobile phone. But that's bad news because that battery has a limited number of cycles it can do before it might be considered unable to hold a useful charge. Now let's look at EVs. The average daily journey distance in the UK is around 18 miles and at the end of the week you might only have driven 127 miles which in a car like this means that you haven't really taken the battery down from 100 to 0. You haven't yet completed a full cycle. Remember that. If you discharge from 100 to 50 percent and then top up again that's only half a cycle. Complete only one cycle a week and by the end of the year you may only have done 52 cycles. In the same period of time a mobile phone might have done 730 cycles. Depth of discharge is another issue. Running the battery completely flat which we all do with our mobile phones reduces battery health. EVs will never let you completely empty their batteries. They all have a buffer that prevents the battery getting to really low levels. Notice I've been telling you the Astra has a 50 kilowatt hour battery pack. It doesn't. Its real size is 54 kilowatt hours. It keeps about four kilowatt hours as a buffer for safety and then you add in things like thermal management. Batteries don't like extreme heat or extreme cold and in a mobile phone there isn't really any protection from those elements but in a car you can have all sorts of fancy extras like heat pumps or fans to cool the battery and that allows them to work in a very specific operating window without being negatively affected by extreme heat or extreme cold. They can last a really long time. We did a series on a Tesla Model S that's still running after 430,000 miles on the clock and the person who owns that car has another Model S with almost as many miles. He uses both of them as taxis. If you look after an EV they might outlast petrol cars. An electric car is a lot more environmentally friendly than a petrol car once it hits the road that's because these things don't have any tailpipe emissions whatsoever. A petrol car or a hybrid car will always keep on spitting out CO2 from the moment it leaves the factory until the moment you crush it and get rid of it. With an EV once it leaves the factory it's a lot cleaner. That said emissions are produced when making electric cars plus during their transport from the factory to your driveway but it's still nowhere near the total emissions of equivalent ICE cars by the time the cars reach the end of their life. Volvo did some comparison work in this area recently comparing the whole life emissions of a petrol XC40 SUV against a similarly sized EX30. At the end of the 124,000 mile mark the electric car had produced 60% fewer CO2 emissions than the petrol car. Car batteries have a much longer life than you probably think. Even when a battery's dropped to 70% of its original capacity there's still plenty of use left in it. In the case of the old Model S that we were running a battery with that level of degradation can still do 190 miles on the motorway, more around town. When the battery's completely done for it can have a second life as a renewable energy storage system for homes or businesses. Some car makers are getting creative with that idea. Nissan for example gives its batteries a second life by using them as backup energy storage at the Amsterdam Arena where Ajax football club play. Recycling EV batteries is also possible and there are a fair few companies springing up waiting to take advantage of that but the truth is recycling isn't really a big deal just yet and that's partly because EVs are still relatively new and also because the batteries in EVs last a really long time. Plus there's also the fact that when they're finished in an EV the batteries can be used as second life batteries to power your home or your business. But in the future recycling is definitely going to be a thing. This one is a big issue and it probably needs a whole separate video to explain everything but here's the claim. EVs require a lot of raw materials mined from the earth usually in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Australian outback or Chile and they leave behind a lot of local environmental devastation and human rights abuses and that is only going to get worse apparently as EVs get more popular. That's the claim but the reality is that it's not nearly as bad as people say and the alternative that's ice cars isn't immune to the same criticism. According to a US geological survey 130,000 tons of lithium is mined but that's dwarfed by other materials. There were 2.6 billion tons of iron ore mined for steel in 2022 and 4.4 billion tons for oil. The silver lining for battery mining is the fact that 80 to 90 percent of an EV battery can be recycled which will cut down on the requirement to keep mining in the future. With a petrol car the mining never stops. Okay we're gonna do some quickfire questions now Well maybe but that's the theory anyway. What people are saying is that because EVs are heavier that they're more likely to cause damage on the roads but no one has ever actually done a study to prove that that's the case and hopefully as EVs get lighter they're much less likely to cause damage on the road. Can I take an EV through a car wash? Yes you can. Aren't electric cars a fad? No. The transition is happening worldwide and in fact by 2035 you won't be able to buy a new petrol or diesel car in the UK. You'll have to buy electric. Will I have to scrap my petrol car in 2035? No. Petrol and diesel won't be banned you just won't be able to buy them brand new. Why are they so expensive? Well the main cost of an EV is the battery pack. Batteries are very very expensive but over time as more people make batteries economies of scale mean that batteries should get cheaper and EVs should become much more affordable. Should I buy a used EV? Yes depreciation is your friend here trust me. Don't EVs burst into flames all the time? No. Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service looked into vehicle fires and what they recorded was that there was 1898 fires from petrol and diesel cars and guess how many from electric? 54. EVs don't make noise isn't that dangerous for pedestrians? Well they do make noise in fact they're mandated to make a noise at low speeds and the noise has to be around 54 decibels in order for pedestrians to hear your car approaching. So they do make noise. Can you get a manual gearbox in an EV? Not really. Toyota is working on a solution. Hyundai in fact have a solution in the Ioniq 5N in which they simulate a dual clutch gearbox in the car and it works really well and there are some aftermarket companies that are putting old-school manual gearboxes into EVs but for 99% of EVs it's automatic. What's the difference between an EV and a hybrid? Well an EV or a battery EV, a BEV, is a car powered entirely by batteries. A hybrid is a car that's powered by a combination of batteries and petrol. A mild hybrid has a small motor which helps the battery chug along. A full hybrid has a much larger battery which helps the motor in order to reduce the amount of petrol you use. And a plug-in hybrid has an even bigger battery which means you can plug it in, charge it up and drive it around on electric only mode for considerable distances of around 30 to 70 miles in most cases. But a battery electric vehicle runs only on battery power and that's the only way you can drive it. Nice and simple. Why is everyone pushing EVs? Well it's all about air quality and emissions isn't it? Basically normal petrol and diesel cars pump out a lot of carbon dioxide and that can cause the planet to warm. When you've got a warm planet that can mess up the weather and the environment, raise the sea levels and disrupt the way of life on this planet and that's why we're trying to reduce the amount of CO2 that gets spit into the atmosphere and electric cars are one way of doing that. Are they really the solution? Well what I always say is not by themselves. It's a bit like living in a house where every single room is messy. If you tidy one room that's not going to fix the whole problem. But in order to fix the whole problem you've got to start by tidying one room and electric cars are that room. You've got to start somewhere and do something in order to move on to the next step. Oh and one more, they're boring to drive though aren't they? Have a look at this. Right that's enough from me. I hope that you learned something today. I hope you understand EVs just a little bit more than when you started this video and I hope you enjoyed it enough to like and subscribe. I know that there's a lot more to cover and maybe we will. Drop a question down below if you've got anything that you want to ask me but in the meantime thanks for watching. I'll see you guys soon.