Chinese Electric Cars

then they'll be condemned as contributers to global warming and environmental pollution

The next generation are coming. Autonomous vehicles, so eventually lots of people will just 'order a car' to arrive when they need it. Look up the latest 'fully charged' u-toob for an insight in how vehicle numbers could be slashed.

that the battery is rented? It seems the batteries are not long lived and soon deteriorate in performance, and expensive.

Some but not all. Batteries are proving to be rather longer lived than anticipated. One taxi, somewhere, is reported to has covered over 350 000 miles and the battery is still around 80% capacity.

Some early batteries were a problem in hot climes, apparently. Now, second use is being made of battery components for electricity storage systems after vehicle use. Many new cars are leased with rented batteries, so when they come on to the second hand market the buyer needs to check that the battery rental does not continue.

A friend has recently bought a second hand nissan leaf and is very satisfied with it for local trips.

Look up u-toob 'James and Kate' for loads of reviews (good and bad) on EVs. Their Tesla will cover a couple hundred miles on one charge and recharge to 80% in about half an hour.

EVs are coming. Make no mistake about that. Even check out jonny smith's Royal Enfield E8000 blog and vids - 1970s(?) EV that is now quicker than the Teslas. Standing quarter mile in about ten seconds with terminal speed of over 120mph. Fastest road legal EV, apparently - but not too much range!

Edited By not done it yet on 05/07/2017 23:13:42

Does this mean that Volvo might decide to let you turn the lights off in the daytime so the charge lasts longer ?

regards Martin

So we all have electric cars and put them on charge when we get home from work. Will the national grid cope with vehicle charging and meal cooking at around 5 to 7 PM daily ?

LED lights will make little difference to the power consumption. Anyway, they are a safety feature, so that others can see you.

The Enfield 8000 could barely make it to the pub & back. But see the, "Who killed the Electric Car" documentary.

Nowadays the average commute is well within the range of an EV, plus they don't only need to be charged up at home. Most cars spend the working day in a car park with their drivers at work nearby. They could be charged then, too. If all suitably oriented buildings, not just houses but factories, warehouses, industrial sheds etc. were built with solar PV roofs, which nowadays don't need direct sunlight to work, and the rest retro-fitted, problem solved!

Geoff

It was a joke . .

Martin

Just out of curiosity I got the fag packet out and did some rough sums.

If you take the charging point rating as 7kW and assume it to be fed from solar only. I seem to come to answer that you would need 1,666 ish square kilometers of panel for all the cars in the UK assuming that they were on charge at the same time.

Thats 1kW/m2 average solar enery density at the surface 15% system efficiency in conversion. 36million cars.

So that would be around 0.7 of the total surface area of the UK.

That compares to around 7% which is classified as Urban and approx 3% which is actually built on.

OK I know they are unlikely to require charging simultaneously and clearly there are other factors which come into play I just wanted to get a feeling for the figures.

Shout if the sums are wrong, I was a rush calculation.

regards Martin

Edited By Martin Kyte on 06/07/2017 09:50:27

Like many people, I mainly use my car for short trips and an electric car would be economical for that use, at least until the government decides to tax the electricity used for charging. However I also occasionally make trips of 1000 km or more and can do 1000 km on one tank of diesel. Refueling takes just a few minutes so longer trips are no problem. Therefore I would need two cars which is not economic.

I think that the plug-in hybrid is going to be a better solution for most people with say 200 km range on batteries and a small IC engine for longer journeys. The battery could act like the KERS system on F1 cars and give good performance with the small engine.

Russell

Which is fastest? Bugatti Veron or Enfield 8000?

**LINK**

Neil

Many years ago I read an article about an electric car called the IRIS (It Runs In Silence) I think this car was made about 1900 ish , I can't remember exactly, but it seems that the battery set was on a railed platform ,was rented and could be quickly exchanged for a recharged one at the renter's "filling station". Colin

Well we can convert all the soon to be disused golf courses to solar farms...

Neil

(Who is very sad that lots of wonderful habitat such as near-irreplaceable sand dunes and unimproved meadows went to golf course in the 70s and 80s, and that now golf is going out of fashion, the opposite is most unlikely to happen, indeed marginal habitats around golf courses could be under threat as they are turned over to farmland. Wildlife struggles to keep up with human fads and fashions.)

Funny enough most of the newer golf courses round here were old farms so they added habitat

Edited By JasonB on 06/07/2017 20:42:37

There is a more logical way to run cars electric on roads and rebuilt railways

http://i.imgur.com/vbtoHXR.gif

Very much smaller batteries loaded on the go.

Edited By Niels Abildgaard on 06/07/2017 20:58:35

Edited By Niels Abildgaard on 06/07/2017 21:00:38

I would just like to point out that our old family business ran an entire fleet of electric vehicles for many years. Very successful and mostly very cheap. We did keep a horse on through to the late sixties for a route with a very steep hill: not sure if he counted as low emission, but there was a bucket on board for that.

A retail dairy, of course, and long gone. One of the best things was that electric milk floats were so quiet, the gentle whine and chink of glass bottles (remember them) was quite a pleasant sound to wake up to early in the morning.

I seem to remember Harrods running electric delivery vans around London when I was a lad.

Our milk was delivered by battery powered milk floats as well, they used to be parked in a row at the big depot for charging overnight.

A couple of the local Breweries used horse drawn wagons long after lorries were in common use, great pride was taken in the turnout of these wagons and horses.

I find it quite amusing (in an odd sort of way) that a Chinese owned company is going for electric and hybrids in a big way, because as far as I can find out China still produces a lot of its energy using coal.

I find it quite amusing (in an odd sort of way) that a Chinese owned company is going for electric and hybrids in a big way, because as far as I can find out China still produces a lot of its energy using coal.

It is all relative. Not very amusing for the city residents who are seen scurrying around wearing face masks to reduce the inhaled pollution/smog. London's poor air quality is not a patch on what many chinese have to endure.

China most certainly does produce a lot ot electricity derived from coal burning, but they are reducing that %age. They have installed probably more wind power recently than all the rest of the world put together. Same with PV.

They are still developing because utilising all that renewable energy potential is another problem yet to be solved - the grid distribution in China is rather less developed than in the western world. But give them time and they will succeed. They have a lot of catching up to do, but are progressing. They are working hard at it - not like the trump administration. Western pollution has been reduced by moving manufacturing to China.

Just like it was in the UK by moving to natural gas - combined cycle gas turbine generation is more efficient by about 50% than coal, now, and produces less CO2 (methane burns to CO2and H2O) per unit generated..

Smart meters and smart grids will limit the use of peak electricity by pricing it so high in the early evenings that most will defer EV charging to night time when power is cheaper. The EV batterries will be feeding energy into the grid at these peak times, too (already being trialled).

But think also that summer PV outstrips the depths of winter generation by about a factor of eight. But every little helps.

The new HCCI combustion will make the 2018 Mazda car 30% more fuel economical compared to the non HCCI engine model. At that, you will have to think if a hybrid will be viable. When they get the HCCI even better, how much more can they get out of the fuel. Apart from a more complete burn, it is ment to also have lower emissions as well.

Neil

The original New York taxis were battery electric. So were the original Blackpool trams - my M-I-L lives opposite a building that used to house the charging station in St Annes, long ago converted to flats.

In the south of China (Shenzhen, next to HK), all motorbikes and mopeds are banned and they will crush any they find. That's pretty much the case in much of China's cities, as you can often only get a permit for a gasoline bike / moped if you live out of town and need it to get to work. Which means that almost all powered bikes are electric. Of course, the authorities around Shenzhen will crush any electric bikes too, as they are involved in something like 80% of RTAs. So it's cars, buses, trains and pushbikes only down there.

Plenty of electric buses and cars already in China. The government has been funding hybrid and EV programs for many years (rather like France and other countries)......which is how I have been to China so often over the past 12 years or so.

ICE engines can't keep magically and dramatically improving their fuel efficiency, as the laws of thermo will continue to apply for the foreseeable future. You'd have to look into the 30% figure to understand it but there simply isn't that much opportunity left. There are clear opportunities to further reduce emissions and increase specific power and fuel consumption but they cost money and the trade-off is always the rate of improvement that governments will legislate vs the cost to the customer. The vehicle manufacturers will already be preparing solutions to enable them to meet the next levels of legislation.

Murray

The Mazda car will have a fuel economy in the range of 3.3 l per 100 km. The hcci is a real game changer for F1 and will be for cars and motor bikes as well. The Mazda patents are under their Rotary engine technologies. It seems just when something else comes along the technology gets to it's peak. Hcci is not new, it was done with bikes in the 1930, but needed the cylinder heated before it could start as they had no spark plug at all. But now the control and sensors and chips are fast enough that the control can happen to make it a reality. F1 has progressed HCCI the most over the last 3 years and continues to do so. Just real neat to see the electric turbos powered with super capacitor stored power.

Neil

It very much depended on the farm. Back in the 70s/80s there were still lots of farmers who started farming before WW2 and hadn't come through the agricultural colleges. Yes, many of them had removed hedges and ploughed up grassland as part of 'dig for victory' and then the continued urging of the Min of Ag, but farming approaches were much more varied with much less of a formula approach to farming (in my mind this is as much of a cause of the uniformity of approach that eliminates diversity as 'agribusinesses'. Many of the small family farms still had plenty of wildlife and bits of unimproved grassland (although it had been nosediving since the start of the war).

The problem with golf courses 'adding habitat' is that it takes a very long time for newly established woodland or grassland to develop real richness and natural character (wetland does much better - wetland species are adapted to recolonising after big floods etc.) It can look very pleasant and natural, but it isn't the same. I've recently been looking at a lot of woodland planted in the 60s, the contrasts with small areas going back at least to Victorian times or earlier is dramatic. It's also striking how much more diversity is in the hedgerows incorporated into the new plantations which stand out a mile despite the surrounding woodland now being half a century old.

An amusing review of that Yorkshire electric car, the VW e-Up, here.

Also worth noting the moves to cordless changing - induction loop in road surface to coil under car. Resonant power transfer can be remarkably efficient.