Is buying a diesel car now silly?

These motorway trips, how frequent are they and what distance? Do you have facility for home charger?

These are the questions you need to answer. If you have ability to charge at home then the electric range will suit nearly all people. Diesel is still viable, but so is electric.

The likes of Volvo do "mild" hybrid Diesels

You've left out basic information - what sort of mileage are you doing? And what length are your journeys.

The big advantage of diesel used to be the cheap price of fuel for doing long distance driving and high mileage - I could get to Killarney and back to Dublin on one tank in my last car, a diesel Octavia.

If you're not doing high mileage/long distances, petrol would probably be better for you than diesel - cheaper to maintain in the long run as the service intervals are longer. You might save 5c a litre with diesel over petrol at the pump, but as it sounds like your car will be sitting outside your house for 5 days/week, the amount of fuel you're putting in will be minimal, anyway?

But if you're not doing high mileage/long distances regularly, then yes, electric or plug-in petrol hybrid would be better for the environment and cheaper again to run. EVs don't like cruising on motorways for long distances, but they can certainly do it when needed and range shouldn't be a problem if you can charge at home?

I can't seem to edit my post without quoting it, which would look messy.

Just to add, the terminology around hybrids and mild hybrids has next to zero standardisation and leads to expected confusion among the general public.

By extension too, all ADAS features right now are a complete confusing mess and mean different things to different manufacturer, as does "fast charging" and the like.

As for the OP's question, I would have no hesitation in buying a diesel today, they will be around for decades to come.

If your motorway trip is less than 200km round trip. Go electric and have a nice pleasant drive instead of adding to the pollution your little one gets to breath in.

OP - buy what is necessary when it is necessary.

See what you can afford without assistance from your Mom, and then work from there is my advice.

Diesels aren't going to be outlawed soon, but rapid depreciation may be an issue over the next few years with consumer sentiment changing.

🙄 You're right, why should we bother, just set fire to the planet now!

The truth is that while Ireland lags behind the rest of Europe in moving to renewables/avoiding fossil fuels, we are catching up. In 2018 the overall renewable energy share in Ireland was only 11%, compared to the 2020 target of 16%, by last year some energy providers had reached more than 40% renewables.

How many litres of diesel were used to ship your last tank of fuel from the U.S. or the middle east?

How many litres of diesel were used to ship the natural gas / diesel / coal used to power the electricity plant that generated the electricity to power your electric car?

I'm not suggesting we burn the planet. Energy discussions should be based around engineering, science and mathematics which looks at the

actual energy usage of different modalities (ICE Cars vs electric etc...). Many electric car advocates use simplistic arguments that don't include

the cost of manufacturing the car and especially its batteries or that fact that electricity doesn't magically appear but has to be generated.

It may be that there is a case for small electric vehicles for use in Cities etc but there is little evidence and no current technology that can match ICE engines for a significant percentage of the read miles that are currently made.

Producing anything has a detrimental impact on this planet now no matter how green you are told it is and over the last number of decades we have become a throw away society where we just want to replace one thing after another because we like new things and they make us feel better. If you want to make a difference to the planet then keep your existing car until it is no longer fit for purpose rather than replacing it every 3 years on PCP. Same goes with mobile phones, tablets or tvs, we continue to buy new ones when the existing ones work fine because we are brain washed into thinking the new one is way better than the old one.

Makes sense but they are still too pricy for a lot of drivers to afford. Have the manufacturers racked up the price to take advantage of the subsidies? I wonder if the margin on electrics are more than ICE cars?

Was hoping to be able to buy an electric for 25- 30 grand by now to do my 90km commute but it seems the prices are 35- 40 grand for something decent.

Not the smartest move.Eamon Ryan and the Greens will punish you.

This argument is so common but thankfully there's an easy answer due to "engineering, science and mathematics". Well to wheel, electric cars are cleaner than their best ICE equivalents, by a considerable margin. Electric cars emit more co2 in their production process than ICE's (~50% more), however the global average for how many kilometres you have to drive before you begin saving emissions is just 20,000km. In Ireland it's slightly lower than that again as we have a large renewable sector in our electricity generation. About a year's driving one can say.

A full year before you've actually reduced any co2, terrible you say. It does sound that yeah, however once that point is reached the gap begins to open up dramatically due to the ridiculous inefficiencies in how the fuel for ICE cars is gotten to the car and then by how inefficient the car is itself. The best engines on the market at the moment barely have a thermal efficiency of 40%, most of your fuel isn't used to actually move your car. It's wasted as heat. Electric motors on the other hand can regularly hit 90% efficiency.

Take for example a VW Golf vs and ID.3.

2021 Golf Style, 130bhp 1.5tsi Petrol + mild hybrid, 7 speed DSG, WLTP 5.6l/100km, 50 litre fuel tank.

2021 ID.3 Tech, 145bhp single RWD electric motor, 1 speed automatic, WLTP 15.8kWh/100km, 58kWh battery.

On paper, the Golf has a range of ~900km while the ID.3 can only do ~370km. Golf wins, right? Well you have to look a bit deeper, 1 litre of petrol burned at 100% efficiency produces about 9.7kWh of energy. So theoretically that Golf with a full tank has a potential 485kWh of energy stored onboard. That's over 8 times what the ID.3 has yet it can't even manage a 2.5x increase in range. The ID.3 works out to be nearly 3x more efficient with the energy it's given. Even if you power that car with 100% coal generated electricity it will still produce less indirect co2 per kilometre.

Now the co2 involved in getting the fuel to that Golf is going to stay relatively constant, but as renewables start taking a larger portion of our electricity generation the co2 required to keep that ID.3 moving is going to continue to fall. That's why electric cars are being pushed so hard.

So just quickly checking your calculation I'm assuming you're taking the cost of petrol to be €1.50/l. Electricity can be a bit harder to get an average figure for but at a standard rate it could be €0.18/kWh or half that at a night rate. We'll assume a standard rate to be fair.

I couldn't find a 1.0l Golf with that listed fuel economy at the price you mentioned, 4.7l/100km would be very good for a hybrid never mind a straight turbo petrol. There's the Golf Life 1.0 110bhp for €28.6k with 5.4l/100km under WLTP which seems to be the closest match.

The €36k price you listed for the ID.3 Life (15.5kWh/100km) is actually exclusive of the SEAI grant (again grants are a whole other debate I'm just looking at the cost to you if you bought right now), it would bring the cost to the buyer to €31.2k so a price difference of €2.6k.

So for every 100km you can expect the Golf to cost you €8.10 while the ID.3 will cost you €2.79 for a net savings of €5.31 per 100km. That would mean if would take 48,964km to offset that initial purchase difference through fuel costs alone. For those curious, if you had night rate electricity and took advantage of it, the distance would be 38,800km.

So obviously there's still a sizable cost difference due to electric cars being more expensive to produce, this is almost entirely due to the battery. Though the cost per kWh has been dropping considerably over the last decade. Currently you're looking at ~$135 (€115) per kWh, this is expected to drop to around $100 (€85) per kWh by 2023-24. That is widely considered the price point that would help EVs hit price parity with ICE cars. Quick calculation says it probably costs around €6700 for the ID.3's battery pack at the moment, while it could be sub €5000 in two years.

When considering switching for ecological reasons and doing these calculations wouldn't it be appropriate to factor in the ecological cost of replacing a functioning car that has already been manufactured?

Personally I think if we were serious about things there should be huge tax on any new ICE cars for sale and any revenue from this should go to heavily subsidising electric cars to make them accessible to the ordinary consumer. Instead all the penalties seem to fall on the drivers of older cars, the people who can least afford to change are paying the heaviest penalties for not changing.

Post 08 Diesel is still a good option once reliable and cheap tax.

Its works great if You have an existing option to use the alternative.

The apt Ive bought have over 300 car spaces and none chargers planned, when I asked about that, I got info that, yes they could install one if I would like to get one, for a small fee of 2000€, on top of 6000€ I would be paying for parking spot Oo.

In my hometown, which is roughly the size of Bray(Wicklow), theres only one charging point.

Homeowners have it easier, they can just slap the charger in their garden. But what about other people? The question which bothers me is will the upcoming 10-15 years be enough to build up infrastructure for all the demand they plan to achieve?

With petrol station its easy, 10 minutes and You have your car ready to go. With the amount of them scattered around its not hard to get to one when needed. Would be perfect if we could achieve the same with charging stations.

i've never said that one size fits all .... I live in a rural community with a single bus passing through the village twice a day. Private transport is the only option. Likewise some people living in apartments in the city centre probably don't even need a car and something like Gocar is a better option.

What I was trying to get across is that the savings on fuel isn't the only / biggest deciding factor for me.

Interesting analysis. However, to be "fair" to the petrol Golf, we need to recognise that the coal-fired power plant in your example will have a similar level of thermal efficiency as the ICE. To keep the argument balanced, we need to know the energy value of the coal which must be burned to put 58kWh in the ID3 battery. If we assume 40% efficiency in the thermal plant and ignore losses in transmission then it's going to be 145kWh. So that's Golf (54kWh/100km) and ID3 (39kWh/100km).

So even in worst-case (ID3 running on coal!) the electric car wins out. If we run the numbers for the typical fuel/renewable mix in Ireland then it will be even better.

Yes, though to be fair I should work out the CO2 required to extract, refine and transport the fuel required to generate the energy for both vehicles but that math I can't do on the back of a napkin.

As for how the energy input vs output looks for the Irish grid, I have some numbers from 2018 to help do that.

Left side is energy input, right is output. As you can see we lose a lot of energy during the conversion to electricity, mostly among the fossil fuel powered section as they have relatively low thermal efficiencies. Coal, oil and peat are the worst with efficiencies between 35% and 40%. Gas is a bit better at a little over 50%, while wind and hydroelectric power are 100% efficient.

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.

Against the price pf petrol and he gets more MPG, government wont go to mad with diesel prices as all couriers trucks drivers will have to use diesel for years to come, they cant afford to upset the haulage market.