Morris Minor Owners Club

There have been interesting reports in how EVs have been found to be less reliable than petrol and diesel cars in their first year of use. Not surprising given how new some of the technology is.

Interesting read nonetheless.

Article here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/featur ... ak-banger/

The article might be interesting, but the site won't let me read more than a couple of sentences unless I subscribe, which I don't want to do, even for a trial period.

Same here. Not that I'm considering an electric car anyway

Ahh sorry. Here is the article:

We’ve all heard those nightmare stories of early adopters of electric vehicles (EVs) ending up stuck in the middle of nowhere, out of charge and with no access to a reliable charging point. Now, in a new survey by Which?, it seems that charging might be the least of their worries, as EVs were found to be the least reliable fuel type of all cars.

According to the report, they also spend longer off the road than other cars when they need repairs, as the most common faults are the more complex-to-fix software problems. All of which is bringing back rather painful memories of my own foray into being an EV driver.

The decision to buy an EV seemed like the logical one for my husband Neil and I back in 2019. Our ancient and battered Land Rover Discovery wouldn’t be compliant with the extended Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) in the capital, which came into effect in October 2021, so we wanted to offload that sooner rather than later. Also, our growing teenage twins no longer needed to be ferried to and from sports fixtures across the South East, team-mates and bags of kit in tow. Finally, we thought, we could downsize our car and upscale our commitment to the environment. And we could get something brand new and sexy to assuage any pending midlife crises, too.

When we saw the Jaguar I-Pace electric car in a Mayfair showroom – price, a mere £65,000… – we were both smitten, imagining our next lifestage as empty nesters. Things would be much simpler, and we would have more time for adventures in our cool new set of wheels. If only we’d known how curtailed those exploits were going to be, and how short-lived our love affair with our EV would be.
Neil has always been a petrolhead; to say he is obsessed with cars is a bit of an understatement. He will happily spend hours under a bonnet, can fix all sorts of mechanical problems and knows more than anyone really should about the technical spec of every new car. He’d done his research on the I-Pace and, bar some concerns about the UK’s charging network (we felt confident that those would surely be resolved by the government over the next few years), we decided this was the car for us. 

What we’d both underestimated, though, was the amount of software and technology that powered the car, over and above the mechanics of the battery-powered drivetrain, about which Neil is almost as clueless as me.

Within a week of taking delivery of our shiny new wondercar and installing a charging point on our small, off-street parking space, it was back in the workshop. Our fancy new Jaguar wouldn’t charge at all – either from our charging point, or the public one across the road. “It’s a software glitch,” the after-sales service manager helpfully told us, “we’ll come and collect it.” And they duly did, returning it five days later. But those software glitches kept on coming.

There was the time when the centre console wouldn’t come on, which meant we were without the charging and navigation information as well as the radio. That was another five days back in the dealer’s workshop – only this time, when the car was returned they’d forgotten to put our charging leads back in the boot. An understandable human error, but it added yet another couple of days to our off-road tally.

Next was getting stuck in a supermarket car park, where we were doing the weekly shop and thought it would be good to try a charging point while we were at it. After loading our bags into the boot, we couldn’t disconnect the lead. We spent the best part of 30 minutes grappling with it and prodding buttons here, there and everywhere while our fish fingers and ice cream melted in the boot.

Eventually, Neil Googled the problem and found a forum of other drivers having encountered the same experience, with one thankfully sharing a hidden release toggle inside the bonnet, which we’d found no reference to in the leather-bound manual in the glovebox.

A few weeks later we did our first long drive on a motorway in rain and fog, feeling smug in our safety blanket of a car which would warn us of any impending dangers or cars we’d come too close to, thanks to a nifty radar system. Only that didn’t work either, as we found out when Neil put it to the test. I wasn’t too bothered about this as I’d rather rely on my own driving skills and awareness. But Neil wasn’t happy, given the price we’d paid for this car and all its wondrous gadgetry. Back to the garage again for yet another software update.

By this point, we were both wondering what we’d got ourselves into. But the final straw came one weekend when we tested the mileage range on a trip to the West Country. We carefully calculated that we had enough in the battery to get us there, with a few miles to spare. Overnight charging on a regular plug point would add enough to get us at least halfway home; we’d then stop at a service station and plug into a fast charger. We’d done the maths, we checked all the service stations and downloaded the charging apps – we’ve got this, we thought. Only when we arrived at our destination, we were 40 miles short of the promised range. Again, no problem, we’ll just stop at an earlier service station on the way home.

And so we did. But we couldn’t get any of the charging points to work, so after 20 minutes of trying we decided to head for the next service station. Same problem, although other EVs seemed to be charging OK. The horrible thought hit us both: what if we can’t get home, or the car expires with a flat battery in the outside lane of the M4? 
Eventually, after a third failed attempt at charging and with only 10 miles left in the battery, we made it to a Jaguar Land Rover dealership outside Reading, where they thankfully agreed to let us charge the car. And it worked, so we got home – five hours later than planned.

When we called the garage the next morning, we heard the all too familiar refrain: “We’ll have to bring it in to check the software, it must be an interface problem.” After another week off the road, we decided that however much we wanted to be at the forefront of the EV revolution, and however smiling, helpful and polite the Jaguar service team were, our middle-aged blood pressure just couldn’t take it.

A Jaguar spokesperson said: “We are sorry to hear that one of our customers experienced some charging issues with their new vehicle.

“Jaguar takes product quality very seriously, we continuously improve our vehicles with the introduction of software over the air for customer convenience.
“The Jaguar I-Pace is a multi-award winning product having achieved both the World Car of the Year and the European Car of the Year in 2019.”

However, we are now the happy owners of a very reliable hybrid, doing our around-town mileage on electric, and longer journeys on E10 petrol. According to Which?, hybrids are the most reliable cars of any fuel types, so at least we’ve finally got it right.

Thank you for posting the article. Always thought that electric cars may not be such a good idea in an emergency but even well planned journeys seem to be tricky! I will keep my lovely petrol motors for as long as possible!! Long live our beautiful Morris minors!!

Yes, I still find our Morris Minors very reliable but, more to the point, on the very rare occasions that they fail in some way, I can generally fix it quickly and simply myself

Downsize to a 60k Jaguar I-pace !

Haha. Yes, a different world Les isn't it ? Mind you, I wonder how much of that sum they had ACTUALLY paid off by the time they swapped it in?

Yes, It tickled me to read—- a mere 65k, was that written as a joke ? Regarding paying off the debt, I doubt Minor owners have that problem !

apart from all of the above just google reports of how much the EVs save the environment ,You may be surprised how much MORE pollution they cause.,when you take into account all of the pollution from start to finish ,Mining the rare earth metal to the finished on the road car.
Then what about the secondhand value. Most have a battery warrantee of approx 8 years,(life of approx 10) A new battery is between £5 to £10 thou Would you buy a second hand 9 year old EV unless it had just had a new battery. I think a lot will end up being scrapped after 10 years adding to the pollution .I certainly wouldn't buy one.

Mind, roll on it'll put the demand and price for conventional s/hand car up maybe a 1960 moggy will be worth £60thou.

Not for me ,Ill have packed up driving by the time there are no Non EVs available.

I dunno why people get conned into buying this over-complicated stuff. Especially for £65K!
Most of the gadgets are practically useless - I wonder how we were possibly able to wind down the window before electric windows were foisted on us!

A few tired tropes in here, aside from The Telegraph being utter trash since circa 2004. Here they're reporting an anecdote as a generalisable fact about EVs that they know will get people riled up, sad times for the paper.

EVs are generally more environmentally costly to produce but the zero-low tailpipe and fuelling emissions after production make them the better option after fewer than 7,000 miles. So yes, a true but misleading point regarding production, and material sourcing is changing all the time. Let's not let the perfect get in the way of the good. Drilling for oil, transporting it to refineries and distributing it to petrol forecouts is horrifically inefficient and environmentally costly.

For the causes of their reported breakdowns - I think we can agree that adding overcomplicated electronics is a worrying trend but isn't unique to EVs! Note the classics converted to EV remain simple and are bulletproof.

Really we should be investing in decent trains and buses!

My father told me years ago....the best sort of electric car should be a diesel / electric hybrid...

The older I get the more I understand his thinking...electric is not free either and taking on a 65,000 debt to save on gas is just backwards thinking at this point in time...

I would have loved to have been alive back 100 plus years ago when the automobiles were getting a foot hold in our society and the horse was on its way out...it took years and years of changes before we would end up what we have today in the Morris Minor...

Thanks for sharing that article.

MikeC

Couldn’t agree more with Monty-4. Investment in public transport to form a cheap and viable alternative to private vehicle use is the way to go. I’m not saying restrict private vehicle ownership.

Back to the bandwagon… EVs have already been test piloted and found successful: milk floats - simplicity themselves and a common fixture in society from the 1920s through to the 1980s

We've been signed up for a milk delivery service for a while - I was devastated to hear him coming down the road in a diesel van!

My Leaf is a great car, though I doubt it would suit everyone as it's an old EV (62 plate), and thus has limited range. On a full charge, I get around 80 miles in summer, about 60 in winter. However, that's all I need. No VED, and it sailed through its last MOT with not even a a single advisory. It was on sale for £5K, two years ago. I had gotten thoroughly sick of cheap old bangers that always needed major work - last two petrol cars needed clutch replacements, I ditched the final one before replacing it, sold it cheap and made a huge loss - so I was in the market for something better, and this Leaf came up at a local dealer that I trust. I loved it as soon as I test drove it. Apart from classics like the Moggies, I wouldn't go back to petrol/diesel willingly.
And even with the massive energy price hikes, I think that it's still a bit cheaper to run than a petrol or diesel car. Mind you, the solar panels help a little bit with that, they were £3K in total, including fitting and parts. Some energy companies were offering good fixed rate deals for EV owners, and I managed to get one last year, going to renew soon to get fixed in for the next year. And fossil fuels have to be sourced, extracted, refined and transported before use, so incredibly inefficient for mass transit, perhaps? And nasty chemicals are also used in the fossil fuel extraction and refining processes, too. The developed nations like ourselves have always inflicted high costs on the rest of the world for our lifestyles, be it cars, mobile phones, consumer goods, food, etc.
So I guess, although I do love the classics, for my daily driver, my Leaf is a superb little car that suits me perfectly. Obviously, I'd still love a Morris, I like the idea of a beautiful, older classic alongside something so oddly different as a weird little EV.

JudyP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 30, 2022 8:56 pm And fossil fuels have to be sourced

https://zeropetroleum.com/how-we-do-it/
(These are the people who the RAF used for the worlds first synthetic fuel flight)

Bosch also run their company vehicles (in Germany) on their own brand of e-fuel in their combustion engines, Porsche are meant to be working on one as well to allow owners of their classic cars to keep using them. Mazda are researching the use of Algae to create theirs.

Have to say I've been in a Leaf (taxi) and thought it was quite a nice car to be in, also the fact the driver didn't drive like a maniac like some taxis I'd been in helped the opinion too

Why we all need to ditch our gas guzzling Moggies & get a Tesla instead:

https://youtu.be/PLxPAwIeL0w

A VW Beetle converted to electric in one day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVtOss1U7_s

But with a range of 80 to 90 miles why would you. Still interesting to watch.