GigaFactory

Misinformation based on older generation BEV's . Fastest chargers deliver upto 350KW though granted few cars can accept that (yet).
Battery reality is that fastest charge is between 10-80% which on model3 is 55KWH which it can suck in in about 30mins.Since it's cheaper to charge at home most folk top-up just what they need - 20mins..
The new Oxford superhub will have 38 high-speed chargers
There are already several 16 charger Tesla sites UK (2 in Birmingham)

pgk

Those charging plugs will have nice thick copper wires attached to them

just saying

no-one would be daft enough to... would they?

Do you imagine the average Motorway service station is equipped to charge 'how many ' EV's at the rate of 350Kwh/car ?

Or your average house ?

I recently did some checking for EV mileage on a few cars using the range calculators on manufacturer’s websites.
Altering speeds temperature etc could make some surprising changes to potential distance capability.

I’m actually just as interested in the decline in Diesel cars as we really need to get them off our streets as soon as possible. Luckily the message is getting across. Hopefully the complete ban on using Diesel cars can be brought forward by ten or fifteen years.

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Here’s a recent story to balance that thought : **LINK**

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22559051/porsche-taycan-ev-recall-12-volt-audi-etron-gt

MichaelG.

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I couldn’t agree more, Vic

… and why are there so many ? : Because it was decreed that they were good, and the market was manipulated to encourage their use.

It’s happening again with EV … but [hopefully] this time there is better logic underlying the manipulation.

MichaelG.

It is too late to 'go nuclear' , like France , to produce electricity , which means it will be gas that does all the ' heavy lifting.' to make up for the lack of renewables.

And making electricity from gas, is the next thing to criminal, in terms of thermodynamic conversion, heat to energy.

There seems to be lots of research into energy storage so I wonder if the ultimate goal is to go almost fully renewable at some point? I did read an article some time ago that suggested we could as a species go virtually fully solar if suitably interconnected. They even suggested the acreage of panels required and it wasn’t as large as you might expect.

I am afraid that I think people are worrying about stuff too much, but not by a huge margin.

Supply of cars is not the issue, the Chinese are producing plenty that are affordable and the costs will drop as less fully-loaded versions come onto the market. Some European brands went up-market and stopped being affordable by the masses long ago (Jaguar Land Rover for a start).

Charging at home is easy, just plug it in for 16 hours and you can top up anything. On-street parking could be easy but councils don't even have the staff to do the paperwork let alone do any planning and the electricity companies are run for (huge) profit not to help people.

The one biggy is service stations for long-distance travel. I don't mind the idea of plugging in, I prefer to stop every few hours, ideally every hour, but I don't want to wait for a charger or have to sit there for half an hour longer than my cup of coffee took, the flow through service stations is huge so every parking place needs a charger.

That will be unaffordable without some seriously cheap borrowing. The usual model in recent times is that the taxpayer gives a cheap loan to a company to make profit out of the taxpayer. Both Labour and Conservative have done that so I hope it is not considered too political by the moderators. Its very interesting that the railways have become more state-owned of late and I suggest that that is the way we need to install the charging systems.

Its also worth noting that Tesla have managed to satisfy their demand without state intervention, so it can't be anything to worry about.

New cars of any type have never been and never will be affordable for hundreds of thousands of motorists .

Second-hand battery cars will never be affordable by the same motorists if the car is being sold because the battery is reaching the end of its life.

Re-charging at home will never be possible for hundreds of thousands of motorists - including me - as we do not have private off-street parking!

Street-side charging is just not practicable or affordable except perhaps in a few estates of very expensive homes being built with the facilities from new. Even some modern estates now built, are 'Nouveau Pastiche' style terraces enforcing on-street parking that can be some distance from one's home. Their aim was to deter car ownership on a notion that no-one needs or should go anywhere other than work-places near-by. The idea of chargers on lamp-posts came from one or two politicians, most of whom show no technical knowledge at all. In any case the system would require vast quantities of high-power cables and chargers installing in thousands of miles of residential streets with enough room for all those charger parking bays as well as the normal parking, to be at all realistic.

The half-hour coffee-break while your own car is re-charging to at least a reasonable level is only part of it. As a hint on waiting times, VW claims for its latest electric model, a theoretical 180-mile range from a high-power charge for 30 minutes. There will never be enough public chargers, or the space for them, on busy motorways and commuting-routes, to avoid queues that cannot possibly be forecast; especially on cold, dark Winter nights. So a long trip will require considerably more planning, timing and precautions than we would presently think normal.

The public chargers and car connectors must also be of one consistent standard and the units must offer the option to pay by credit and debit cards as on many petrol-pumps now. Easy for us on this forum to say that though. We are engineers. Politicians are not!

Humans have poor memories. The arguments made against modern and future technologies are very similar to those made against the very ones we use today. Many people don’t like change and make illogical arguments about things they don’t fully understand. Some of them are even second guessing technologies yet to be developed. We really don’t know how this is all going to play out but the decision has been made to get rid of out dated technology that had a limited timescale anyway. Whether EV’s remain long term or are replaced with something else shouldn’t be of any great concern to anyone on here as they won’t be around anyway. There are many myths about EV’s already and making up more just because some folks have no imagination to tackle the problems isn’t fooling anyone. And it’s certainly not fooling those in power - at the moment.

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I saw my first example of what I think was an EV charging cable laid across the pedestrian pavement last week

… it had one on those ‘speed-bump’ cover strips over it.

Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come !

If I see it again, I will check the vehicle.

MichaelG.

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Ref: https://www.evcableshop.co.uk/can-you-run-ev-cables-across-a-pavement/

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 10/07/2021 22:12:03

I’ve come across a few guys who have had to do that . Generally it all gets coiled up after the charge is finished.Big issue is whether you get to park outside own house - need cooperative neighbours
What are the other options for such folk? Either a right to have a cable run under the pavement and a locked cover-box on the kerb or perhaps a pole on the kerb and an overhead pulley?

Such things will come out in the wash

" And it is not fooling those in power----at the moment ". Vic

Totally disagree with you there , it certainly has them completely fooled.

This whole "renewable energy" policy is way above their little heads to understand.

This has been quite a fasinating topic. I must say that the prospect of electric cars in the hands of the general population fills me with dread with their so rapid accelleration and quietness. Its bad enough now with the speed little boy racers, and little girl racers too (around here the girls seem as bad if not worse than the boys, in that at least they have achieved equality!) drive at, but in the future I can just see so many accidents just waiting to happen.

What has not been really discussed but has been alluded to is where all this charging power is going to come from, although the lack of practibility for recharging facilities for many living without private driveways has been well noted. What we are basically doing by going electric is removing loads of little power plants from the road and replacing them with big power plants elsewhere.

To put this into some sort of numbers to illustrate the scale of the problem, and considering just cars, a quick search of the internet revealed that there are some 32 million cars on the road in the UK, give or take a few hundred thousand, of which just 4 percent are on the road at any one time - the other 96% are either parked up at home (80%) or someplace else (16%) according to the RAC, so 4% of 32million gives 1.280,000 cars on the road at any one time average. Assume the average car engine is 100kW, (some will be greater, some less but you have to start somewhere!) then thats 128,000,000 kW or 128,000mW. A big power station was considered to be 2000mW, Hinkley Point C nuclear being constructed is 3200mW. What would be a base load to recharge all those 1,280,000 cars on the road is anyones guess, but if we were to consider just 500,000 x100kW cars would require charging at any one time that's 50,000 mW, or just over 15 Hinkley Point C power stations. You can play with percentages and can come up with all sorts of figures, greater and smaller. but this serves to illustrate the size of the problem, and before distribution losses add to the demand.

And have we embarked on a massive programe to build masses of power stations to recharge not only the cars but all the other electric vehicles - no, of course we haven't, we're too busy shutting down perfectly good fossil fuel power station to do that. I'm being a bit sarky here! But the point here is that sometime along the line we will run out of power unless we do something about it sharpish; alternatively, invest in warm clothing, blankets and candle, you may need it when the lights go out in midwinter when the renewables and whats left in the power geration game struggle to supply the county's base load results in frequent blackouts.

The recharging points availability has been discussed but we also have to consider that this massive roll out of electric vehicles will need a new power distribution network across the countryside to the recharging points, and also upgrading the supply cables to private houses especialy if this hasn't been done for many years and the current supply is down the equivalent of a piece of wet string which it may be in some old areas.

Where is the money, the labour force, the materials (materials especially for batteries and copper for cables on top of the general building materials) and the political will to enact all this work coming from. I have no idea, but none of it appears to have been thought through to me at this time.

I am all for a greener and more sustainably future, with less damage to the plant, but we need to be sensible in the targets sets and it needs to be achievable and I am far form convinced we are going about things in the right way.

And the stupidity of stopping supplying gas boilers for private houses is mind boggling.  It makes absolutely no sense to use gas to produce heat to generate electricity for that electricity to provide heat for a private house - makes more sense to cut out the middleman and use the gas to provide heat directly in the private house.  

As I grow older I find less and less make any sense any more.........!

Chris

Edited By ChrisH on 14/07/2021 12:35:45

I’m actually just as interested in the decline in Diesel cars as we really need to get them off our streets as soon as possible. Luckily the message is getting across. Hopefully the complete ban on using Diesel cars can be brought forward by ten or fifteen years.

As a modern diesel car is no more polluting than a modern petrol car, but is more efficient - why the hate ?

Diesel car emissions are not the problem in cities - it is diesel lorries and busses that cause the problems & their contribution is reckoned to be less than wood burning stoves.

If the real issue is CO2 (as we were told at the time diesels were being popularised), modern clean diesels would appear to be still a major contributor to reducing CO2 emissions until something really game-changing comes along WRT to battery technology (less weight, longer life, less environmental impact).

I will miss diesel cars when they are no longer available - modern diesels are more economical, have longer service intervals & are better to drive (IMO) than modern petrols & no more polluting.

Nigel B

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But the real issue is the particulates … but they weren’t trendy

MichaelG.

ChrisH

Your math assumes large numbers will recharge on the road. The reality is most folk with BEV's top up at home usually at night when the grid has spare capacity and some cheap deals can be got. Power usage therefore will be based on annual mileage - what's that these days 5K?
Lockdown has eaten into my driving intentions - I only do some 7K miles at the mo' so car only needs plugging in once a week for 6-8hrs

pgk

But the real issue is the particulates … but they weren’t trendy

Check out the latest Euro 6 emission levels for both petrol & diesel cars - the particulate levels are the same for both. And a major source of vehicle related particulates is not engine related - brake & tyre dust - EVs will also produce these. By all accounts, both sources are less than particluates from burning wood ineffieciently in wood burning stoves in built-up areas.

One of the things that came out of VW cheating situation was a more detailed examination of what actually comes out of tailpipes in "Real World Driving" rather than during "official" test regimes. One suprise was that many direct injection petrol engines were worse for particulate emissions than some earlier generation diesels, but they were not at that time tested for such. If you look at the current Euro 6 levels, you will see that particulate levels are set for both diesel & DI petrol engines now.

I had (for a while) a Euro 6d Ford Transit motorhome - a not particularly economical vehicle, but after 5600 miles (when I got rid of it) the exhaust tailpipe was clean to the point that when a white paper towel was wiped around the inside of the pipe it was barely discoloured.

Nigel B.