How long until we see €2 a litre and will it push more to EV's faster?

It is currently technically impossible. Unless there is some new miracle happening soon in energy storage technology there is no chance to increase EV share in any meaningful numbers. Politicians talking about some targets for 2035 is just kicking can down the road very few of them will be around but now they can pat themselves on back complimenting each other how fantastic job they are doing...

Meanwhile French advise customers to cut down on electrical consumption or they will face catastrophic failure of a grid. Germans and friends are reopening coal mines and restarting coal powerplants.

Motorcars are not considered by road designers to wear roads at all. It is only HGV axles that are considered and thats what they are designed for.

A designed road in Ireland that only carries Teslas would have next to no rutting/wear

The elephant in the room in all of this is the large amount of debt people are getting themselves in to, just to have an EV.

Interest rates are only going one way which means repayments will increase (unless the rates are locked in which I understand they are not).

The second part of this is that BEVs being wholly dependent on electricity to charge at a time when we are hearing that gas is at a premium (gas is used for approx 40-50% of our electricity demand) is not a great idea especially when 70% of our gas comes from one source- the UK!!!!

@patnor1011 The kerb weight argument is very disingenuous. Yes EVs are normally heavier than their ICE equivalents but the examples used in this post are ridiculously cherry picked. A Tesla Model X and a Ford Escape (Kuga) are two completely different cars. One is a 7 seater luxury AWD SUV the other is a 5 seater FWD mid-size crossover. A real comparison would be an Audi Q7/BMW X7 which weigh pretty much the exact same as a Model X. A comparison to an Escape would be something like an ID.4 which like for like is about 300kg heavier than the Escape.

With regards to how much more energy is required to move that extra weight, you are right, more is required to get that heavier electric vehicle moving. However that is also misleading as the lighter ICE is going to be many orders of magnitude less efficient with the energy it has onboard to propel that vehicle. Your example above is using a Ford Escape 1.5L Ecoboost FWD 180bhp based off the kerb weight. That has a fuel capacity of 55.7L and a combined economy of 7.8l/100km giving it a range of ~714km. The ID.4 I'm comparing it to is the RWD 174bhp variant as it's the closest match. It has a 77kWh battery and a combined economy of 17.1kWh/100km giving a range of ~511km.

So there you go I guess, clearly the ID.4 is using much more energy to move it's extra 300kg of lard, which is why it has a lower range. Right? Well no. You have to look at the energy both cars are storing onboard. 1 litre of petrol has the equivalent energy of 8.9kWh of electricity. That means if the energy in the Escape's tank was to be converted to a battery, it would be the equivalent of a 495kWh battery, nearly half a megawatt. It has nearly 6.5 times the amount of energy stored onboard that the ID.4 has, yet can only manage a 40% improvement in range. Why is that? Well if you also convert the Escape's fuel economy to kWh equivalent you're looking at 69.4kWh/100km, meaning it consumes more than 4 times the energy to move it's much lighter body the same distance.

TLDR: Internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient whilst electric motors are incredibly efficient, more than offsetting the increased weight issue.

The future is not fossil, hell even the present being fossil is hotly debated. Ireland's petrol/diesel consumption peaked in 2019 and will most likely never recover to that, demand is only downhill from here. Even US gasoline consumption is expected to hit peak sometime in the next year and decline after that.

Exactly,people convince themselves that the pros outweigh the cons or visa versa, in many cases not based on the evidence but they have to convince others that they are right then, that's why the forums are full of people who won't be swayed on a multitude of issues no matter what the evidence, it's all a bit pointless to be honest 😂.

In a previous discussion about efficiency, @PaulRyan97 ran the math (well-to-wheel type of analysis) and his conclusion was:

So overall in 2018 our grid was 58% efficient, meaning it would require 100kWh of energy to fully charge our ID.3. So that's Golf (54kWh/100km) and ID3 (27kWh/100km). Exactly half.

I was wondering about how the BEV achieves an efficiency double that of the ICE vehicle. If the electric grid is 58% efficient and we assume a petrol engine is about 30% efficient (a typical figure I got on the internet) then that would account for most of the difference. This would suggest that regenerative braking (which BEVs use) does not contribute significantly to the extra well-to-wheel efficiency of the BEV.

Ultimately, as the percentage of renewables on the grid increases, BEVs efficiency will increase further because less of their energy is coming from the 'well'.

I would bet that the diesel would arrive first, every time.