You can’t move or push them apparently. There’s no neutral to disengage those motors etc. Necessary to actually lift them, am I right? The article says handbrake engaged. But isn’t it that even if it isn’t you’ve still got to apply enough force to turn all those motors?
And they are heavier than the equivalent petrol or diesel vehicle – so do they require some sort of specialist low-loader to shift?
Are there no bulldozers in Wiltshire?
Or tractors, to pull it away, whether the tyres turn or not?
Potential Liability to those who move the vehicle probably an issue as well…. But seriously. The driver ran out of battery? Do they not have chargers everywhere now?
These electric cars seem to be all pain, no gain. I ran the numbers last year, so let’s take a look again with today’s figures:
Peugeot e-208:
* £3,174 down, £464pm lease
* Electricity cost 2.1p/mile (dedicated EV tariff)
Peugeot 208 (petrol):
* £2,076 down, £269pm lease
* Petrol cost 12.1p/mile
The electric model only works out cheaper if you drive over 2,000 miles per month. Most people go nowhere near that.
@AndrewM
But if you did do 2000 miles a month you’d be eating into the battery life considerably. So one should really fold the battery depreciation in with the per mile cost. My guess is it would put the per mile cost higher than the petrol. Especially if you were doing a lot of fast charging.
Oddly enough, it works the other way round with a petrol. 2000/month is the sort usage ends up with cars happily having 200k on the clock & still driving like new. It’s city, stop start, always being started cold, low mileage usage kills petrol engines.
Do they not have chargers everywhere now?
Lol, no. Not round here. Hardly any.
I don’t understand why they couldn’t just lash a strap to it and drag it off the road.
Even if the wheels don’t turn, you only have to overcome the friction of the tyres to the road to pull it. Any half decent pickup or lorry should be able to do it.
Of course, that doesn’t let the police inconvenience everyone and boss them around, so isn’t going to happen.
What Chernyy Drakon said: I can remember, from yonks ago, two guys bouncing a car (parked with its handbrake on) to get it out of the way in an emergency. You would probably need four or five to shift a Tesla that way.
Chassis is not solid enough to pull it away without damage, and doing that risks rupturing the batteries..
And you really don’t “bounce away” a car that’s as heavy as a Tesla. Peeps have tried, y’know..
What you need for towing/removing a Tesla ( or similar EV ) are the wheelie things used by parking control for towing illegally parked cars, regardless of handbrakes/ turned wheels / other tricks.
Over here every professional towing service has at least onw flatbed with those things on board, dunno about the UK..
To respond to a number of comments:
EVs are heavy – most large EVs are over 2 tonnes
There is a Tesla Supercharger station at Solstice Park, so my guess is that the driver was trying to extend the range to charge up at that charging station and the actual range achieved was less that originally anticipated, hence the breakdown a few miles from the destination.
From what I’ve read, Teslas can be optimistic about actual range and the numbers on the dash only apply in perfect conditions!
I helped a friend have his Tesla recovered, it was completely dead, couldn’t get inside, wheels locked – essentially a lump of metal.
It took a specialist recovery truck, and to get it in to position the wheels were jacked up and put on sort of roller skates, which couldn’t really take the weight. It took 4 of us to push it inch by inch a few yards from where it could be winched on to the truck.
Took all day. Hardly the flying cars I was promised we’d have by now
Well at least the poor misguided fool got attention, which is the only reason these people buy tosslers isn’t it?
And at least it didn’t catch fire.
Just think of the fun in a few years when they’re evacuating towns and cities facing natural disasters.
Why aren’t these things designed to have a free wheel mode? Surely that is physically possible?
Possibly it is an anti-theft design. Democrat cities around here are suing Hyundai and Kia because their cars are too easy to steal. Because it is more expedient to sue rather than arrest and incarcerate tinted youth for car theft. Even though said thefts are well documented by TikTok videos.
My assumption is that the whole battery car thing is going to prove a fiasco. Can anyone think of a comparable technological fiasco in the last, say, three centuries?
IIRC Jeff Taylor, a commentator on YouTube, recently claimed that a major motoring organisation said it was dangerous to tow electric cars in case they caught fire because of not being able to put into neutral. So all breakdowns would require a craned rescue. How convenient.
Why aren’t these things designed to have a free wheel mode? Surely that is physically possible?
My plug-in hybrid has electric motors on both axles, but the ‘gear change’ is a conventional automatic style: Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive. I use neutral if I want to roll it down my 1:6 driveway. So it ought to be possible on a BEV.
Of course, if the battery is really totally exhausted, to the point at which the car electronics won’t work, you’d have a problem.
@Dearieme
That’s a very good question, and the answer is an obvious yes – unusables, on which, probably trillions have been spunked away uselessly so far.
Whether the milk float crime against industry and good sense will catch up and beat it in terms of money wasted, remains to be seen. As for the environmental damage and waste (and toxic legacy), it may well have done so already (and that is saying something!)
The article is a bit confusing about the problem. If it’s a flat battery AIUI recovery vehicles now carry a charging system so they can get enough power in to least get to a charger or safer location
If it’s battery discharge causing an electronics problem charging it should at least allow the doors to be opened and neutral to be selected as Chris says. If there’s a single point of failure that doesn’t allow the doors to be opened or even battery to charged that seems like a major design problem.
“Why aren’t these things designed to have a free wheel mode? Surely that is physically possible?”
My understanding is that towing without the control electronics powered up is likely to damage the inverter drive unit which is directly connected to the motor(s). In theory a simple isolator, or even easily accessible bolted terminals, could be provided. But considering the extremely high voltage & currents involved (and the addition of a potential failure point), this isn’t going to happen. If the bloody thing is also locked getting to terminals or isolator(s) is going to be problematic, and you’d still be faced with an electrically actuated parking brake, so you’d have to lift one end of an already heavy car to move it.
AIUI recovery vehicles now carry a charging system so they can get enough power in to least get to a charger or safer location
An increasing number of recovery vehicles have a generator for this purpose, but by no means all of them.
My Porsche Taycan has a small gear lever that you use to toggle between (D) Drive, (N) Neutral and R (Reverse).
Not sure whether this would work if you’ve run out of battery power though.
This is far from unique – a quick Google search for “Tesla stuck” reveals many similar stories.
Landrover managed to offer freewheeling hubs in the 1960s, have we regressed so far that such technology is beyond us now?
I think – and you will know that my mechanical knowledge is, umm scanty – that the electric motors drive the wheels directly. So freewheeling might not be an option?
“the electric motors drive the wheels directly. So freewheeling might not be an option?”
So its beyond the wit of man to design a small gearbox or driveshaft connector that allows the drive from the motor to the wheel to be disconnected then?
On the subject of bouncing cars: Sloan Street, the eve of the Chas & Di wedding there was a large bunch of oiks bouncing a white Rolls Royce full of head-dressed Arabs. Quite made my night.
I have watched as a large heavy Tesla – dead on the road – was simply dragged off the road sideways by a very common dual-rear-wheel pickup truck.
So it can be done, trivially.
Most likely, no one in charge wanted to be stuck paying for damage to the cool expensive car, and so it took forever.
Shirley, if the vehicle is towed for a bit the electricity generated by the electric motors should start to get the battery up to a useful charge level ? An electric engine is, after all, just a differently wired generator.
What bobby b said. Easy enough to fix if you don’t give a shit about screwing up the vehicle. Probably the road surface as well, but that would be the council’s problem.
I work in roads and tunnels, fortunately not on the day to day operational side (my job is to make sure the control systems are available to the operators), but I still have nightmares about what would happen if one of these damn things quit in the middle of the tunnel, or worse, caught fire. There are contingency plans drawn up I think, but hasn’t happened yet so who knows.
EV’s with no gearbox should have a disengage drive (freewheel) in hubs. It’s not new, most Land Rovers are retro fitted with them
I’d add, those little ICE Smart Cars seem to have same issue.
@bis
it works the other way round with a petrol. 2000/month is the sort usage ends up with cars happily having 200k on the clock & still driving like new
Agree. Bought a 1987 Rover 820i, 160,000 miles in 1992 for 5% of new value. Owner drove 900 mile round trip to London most weeks
Still going strong 100k later, mostly fast driving, in 2012, but rust had destroyed chasis and even dodgy MOT not viable
Best car I’ve ever owned. In 2005 bought a BMW 535 Sport to replace it, awful. Sold it on for a £2k profit and kept Rover
@Chernyy
police inconvenience everyone
Bingo
A Tesla Model 3 Performance is about 2 tonnes (1919kg totally unladen).
There is no reason why an EV should be totally dead when it runs out of motive power as it’s perfectly possible to have a separate battery to run the door locks, computers etc.
@ Charles
“no reason” – except arrogance
Telsas do have a separate 12v system to run all the ancillaries. The problem is that if the car is “turned on” all those ancillaries will chew through the 12v battery in less than half an hour. Solution: get out, lock the car, wait for recharging van to show up.
You get loads of warnings that you’re low on power, and 5-10 miles of restricted performance: to actually run out you have to be an absolute fuckwit. Of course, the performance variants do attract absolute fuckwits: just as said wits switched from BMWs to Audis in the early 2010s (because Audis don’t go sideways into trees/lampposts in the quite likely event that you don’t know what you’re doing) they’re switching to Teslas now because they’re require even less skill to drive fast and the model 3 performance is both faster and cheaper than an RS4 or an M3…
My Mitsubishi PHEV has a similar system, and what Matt says is equally true of it, but the mini 12V (lead acid) battery is automatically topped up from the main drive battery, if that still has power left.