Electric Cars

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The aim of the excercise is reduced pollution and road congestion. I cant argue specifics here because I don't have the figures but a large majority of bulk imports are going to end up at some form of distribution center sich as a supermarket wharehouse or courier hub anyway. In terms of containers and HGV loads then logic suggestsonce on a railway wagon (or barge) the automation should get it to at least C without using roads f the infrastructure is there and with fewer people employed.

Replacing road fuel duty, probably by road tax on the car or a mileage tax and / or taxing electricity, maybe just for charging cars but who knows? They certainly cannot afford to loose the billions of pounds of revenue earned from petrol and diesel.

If the government paid for all car drivers to have a new ec, there would be a need for two or three extra power stations, miles and miles of new cables for charging stations. It will never happen. And like most recharge batteries they start to loss charge after a time. The government wants our money from petrol,diesel what ever, they will not pay the billions needed to build power stations etc. I don’t understand why public transport can’t be improved first, made cheaper and the first thing to thing about when planning a jouney.

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The problem with politicians, on any subject, not just electric cars, is that they can never see beyond the next General Election.

The one thing Governments never have problems with is inventing new taxes. Road pricing by monitoring licence numbers is an obvious starting point on main arteries.. if only for the slealth benefit of keeping a log of where everyone goes. It'd be easy to cross reference that with annual mileage figures and adjust annual licence fees too.

The whole thing is a nonsense designed to create business and employment and coerce motorists to gov's will otherwise we'd already have fuel taxes that pay for vehicle excise and insurance etc and do away with all the increasing number of folk driving with neither. Virtually all petrol stations use licence number id to reduce fraud now - it'd be so easy to simply adjust that system so unlicensed vehicles can't buy fuel. Just as it's taken an age to bring in legislation to speed limit cars (from 2022) and get rid of traffic cams on 70mph roads but we have 'smart' motorways that vary the speeds beyond new car capabilities to track by gps so they can still fine you.

Or maybe they can. In 2016/2017 Fuel Tax (not just Petrol & Diesel), raised £27.9Bn whilst the 'Public Sector Gross Operating Surplus' at the same time was £47.2Bn. That could have been used to remove Fuel Tax entirely and also give every man, woman and child in the country £30 in cash.

£27.9Bn is a lot of money, but Fuel Tax is sixth in the UK league table of revenue sources raising over £2Bn each:

Income Tax - £185.6Bn
VAT - £135.4Bn
National Insurance - £125.9Bn
Corporation Tax - £55.9Bn
Council Tax - £30.4Bn
Fuel Tax - £27.9Bn
Business Rates - £26.8Bn

and so on down to £2.2Bn in 'Vehicle Excise Duty paid by Businesses'. The total tax revenue is £726Bn.

Fuel Tax could be replaced by increasing Income Tax. As that would be unpopular, unfair and take steam out of the economy, more likely it would be spread across several tax sources such that most people wouldn't notice the difference. And the door is open to taxing electricity supplied to vehicles, the technology needed to do that is straightforward.

Dave

C’mon guys,

Perhaps I’ll be accused of being condescending again, but it is actually reality (not thinking with the fairies) that all vehicles can be fitted with GPS locators which can pinpoint your actual position to metres, so could calculate/measure every journey. Very simple, then, to charge the registered owner by distance travelled for that particular vehicle. Tesla virtually monitor it already!

No reason, these days, that goods vehicles should ever be overloaded as they can have load cells fitted to monitor how much load they are carrying (as well as the distribution over the axles). Last time I loaded a grain wagon with corn, the driver told us how much more he could accommodate and where to tip the bucketfuls of grain.

Simples.  Make road usage charges by distance and mass?

Only 30 years to develop and standardise the infrastructure? How long have mobile phones been around (in their pocket sized format)? How long has personal computing been available? ICE cars have only been around for about 120 years. Get real, times change, technology marches on. I don’t necessarily like all of that, but it is reality.

30 years ago, mobile phones were ‘bricks’. I bought a Model B BBC Acorn computer with 32kB of RAM (Ive still got it) back in the very early ‘80s.

For our hobby, how long will it be before 3-D printing takes over rather more than it does already? How long before manual lathes and milling machines are relegated to the pastime of the minority of model engineers?

I do hope that the younger generation can be better informed of the dangers that humans cause to themselves and the environment, and actually take it onboard. If they don’t, the end of civilisation (as we know it) will not be far off by the end of this century.

Into my 7th decade, it will not particularly affect me - but it will be a problem for my grandchildren and their off-spring. Thinking ahead has never been a strong point of humans, even though we do have that capability.

That includes Joe Public as well as those large companies that are currently raping the planet and its life-forms. We can think DDT, CFC aerosols and refrigerants, plastic waste, mercury in the food chain and loads of other errors made in the past. Companies could include fossil fuel, cigarette manufacturers, asbestos users, pesticide manufactures, among others. They have all had strong lobbyists at some time or another.

The worst scenario, of course, might be the (inevitable?) use of modern-day nuclear warfare, which could easily mark the end of most life on the planet (any read Neville Shute’s ‘On The Beach’? Published in 1957, only about 60 years ago, but could still turn out to be starkly true. Humans do seem to have a certain propensity to destroy themselves and their surroundings.

Go on, have a real think before condemning the inevitable change from ICE vehicles. They are totally unsustainable in the longer term, in their present form.

Edited By not done it yet on 13/07/2019 10:16:49

One of the factors that makes an electric vehicle viable is the whole life cost of going electric, at the moment the vehicles are more expensive but the fuel is cheaper, if the government move the tax loss from fossil fuel onto electric vehicles then the cost of motoring is going to go up, I doubt that electric vehicles will really get cheaper as the manufactures will try to hang on to as much of any savings as they can. I would think the drive train for an EV is cheaper to make than a petrol or diesel apart from a very expensive battery. Maybe the plan is to price people off the roads. Maybe the future will not be the simple replacement of personal cars, as most of our cars spend the vast majority of their life just parked then maybe shared vehicles or driverless taxis will become common, if the countries vehicle fleet spends its life on the road then we may have clear streets instead of using them as car parks.

Mike

Shared vehicles, will never work, insurance companies and lawyers would have a field day if said vehicle was in an RTC.

The future may very well take car ownership away from the public and replace them with Autonomous vehicles. I can’t help thinking that those that come after us will laugh at the concept of paying many thousands of pounds for a metal box that gets left outside our houses or place of work for maybe 20 hours a day doing nothing. Call up a car when you need it and hopefully at a cost that everyone in society can afford. Perhaps it will result in less pollution, no car crime, fewer accidents, etc etc. Think of a world without ever getting stuck behind a caravan!

Edited By Vic on 13/07/2019 12:53:26

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As part of their vertical strategy Tesla are reported to be actively looking at the insurance market for that very reason and have already claimed that owners will be able to place their own vehicles into the Robotaxis network when not needed by themselves (If/when they ever get autonomy working well enough). And with unique access to vehicle logs they will be able to quote premiums based on user data re speeds, road types, driving behavious etc.

Additionally, they would have access to all the data prior to, and including, the incident!

Fully automatic vehicles already share the factory floor with other vehicles and pedestrians.

Mike

Never is a long time and I'm not sure i have enough left to collect on that wager. I do think it will happen but with restrictions such as fully autonomous only on motorways or on geofenced urban routes at limited speeds

Logically one shouldn't allow bicycles and cars on the same roads but our legislators are too chary of public opinion and too frugal to invest in real cycle routes.

As for your grenade: If you had 100 or 1000 folk taking part I wonder what proportion would catch and throw back, or dive into the orchestra pit or stand stunned and unable to move or run away or run towards? And if you repeated the excercise again next week and the week after would the same proportions do the same thing? At least with AI the machine would (eventually) learn the best survival option.

One of my many criticisms of self drive as it is is indeed the very lack of looking far enough ahead and of not making statistical choices against the unknown. ... for example...

I live rurally so when i drive on quietish single carriageway roads I tend to straddle the centre and move over when I see any on-coming traffic - simply because if farm kit or stray sheep etc breaks through a hedge or overhanging tree branches come down I have more time to react. I'll also adjust my road position to give me the best view ahead approaching bends. And indeed I'll moderate the degree of such action depending on the time of year and the weather, The roads here get narrower this time of year as the vegetation grows and then again when the snow drifts happen.

I am very cynical when I look at the huge changes, social, financial and otherwise that the imposition of all electric vehicles will mean, I look around and see that we as a nation are unable to conquer the poverty and social deprivation that we have already created.

Dave W

Barnaby, glad the message is getting through, no one likes to think or hear of unpleasant issues but I despair of our dog eat dog society that gets more and more divisive. I think the huge costs of the electric vehicle revolution will inevitably have significant social consequences for our society, which must be considered.

Dave W

Barnaby, no doubt you'll claim this video is 'Fake News' put out by 'Main Stream Media' only to befuddle half-wits and you're not going to fall for it. Actually you owe me your house.

Not to underestimate the difficulties, but I think autonomous vehicles are clearly possible today. Whether they're legal on the public highway or not depends only on our attitude to risk. I suggest autonomous vehicles should be accepted as soon as they achieve accident rates lower than humans. As computers don't get tired, drunk, go racing, show-off, misjudge distances, and aren't distracted by leggy blondes it may be sooner than expected!

You still haven't explained your earlier post about about electric cars being more expensive to insure than internal combustion. Possibly you are mistaken about that too!

Dave

PS is Barnaby Wilde really Mick Charity in disguise?