Electric vehicles

Funnily enough, on another site today someone pointed out that when you lock the car the charge leads also lock (at both ends) to prevent theft.

N.

The politicians absolutely don't want any of this. Much easier for leaders to kick the can down the road rather than tackle a difficult problem head on.

What's happening isn't a matter of choice or opinion. No one is in control, it's not an agenda, or a conspiracy. Events are in charge and the future will be different whatever individuals believe, want or need. Rather than clinging to the past we should be seizing opportunities and making the best of it. Standing in front of an express train and shouting 'STOP' won't work. Change tack. Even if it means landing in head first in a cow-pat with a broken ankle!

Dave

Martin mentioned a thing called a "bus" What,s that ? what does it look like, what does it do ?

Has anyone ever seen one ? Please tell !

What about:

Sorry sir I cannot get you out of your wrecked car until that 70 litres of highly flammable liquid has dispersed?.

Fire services are already getting specialist training in dealing with EV fires.

N.

Not universally true. While some cars may have this feature, not all do. Mine does not. Thete is space for a small padlock on the latch release but the latch is plastic and would not resist a determined attempt to remove the plug.

Robert G8RPI.

Derek Hall 1 said

"Well I am thinking to myself to what I would be doing if I was a silly teenager with his mates coming out of the pub/nightclub late at night when every sensible person is asleep in 2031........."look at all them electric cars being charged...lets unplug em all for a laugh"..........."

Didn't anyone hear that alcohol is to be phased out by 2029 for health reasons? Once this is implemented there will no longer be any drink induced tomfoolery.

Dave

Nissan trained their warranty agents how to recover a faulty or accident damaged Leaf within a year of launching the car. That included how to ensure that the batteries were disconnected and safe.

There is a guy in the states who buys right off cars & rebuilds them on youtube. He was at a wreckers called i think IAAI.com. A bit like Copart.

He owns a Tesla of which he repaired. There were 2 in the yard completely burned out. What i did not know that the whole car Base is the battery. Around 3" deep & the full footprint of the car. That's a lot of torch batteries.

Also another guy built an electric mobile home. He demonstrated 2 batteries. The 1st & i have no idea what type. He hammered a nail in the battery & it went off like a roman candle. This was only 3" long & about 1" dia. He then did the same with the latest type & it did nothing. Not even a flash.

What prompted me to start this thread was partly because as Not done it yet says , i am a petrol head but also because i was amazed that on the BBC news last night a caster was questioning a woman from the electric car bit of the government. She could not answer any questions with certainty. One thing he asked was a 3 car family who all do quite a few miles a day. How will they charge them. Her answer was, the standard charger is 7kw. So they could just use one for each car. 21kw. One household. ????

I live near a LIDL they have a charging bay. The point has 3 different plugs. Which i guess means the different companies have not agreed a standard for the charging points.

I know it somehow will happen , it was just how. At present it is impossible. Unless the next ten years sees huge amounts of power available & materials for all this can be sought. Good luck to them. Not sure i will be around anyway by then.

Steve.

Worth reading the headline news on the Daily Express now , ref France electricity problems.

NOT the silly panic headlines but the intent by EDF to scrap the 4 AGRs at Hinkley+Hunterston starting from next year ,towards the end of the report.

I do wish people would stop using abbreviations that a lot of us need to Google, it's not clever AGR = Advanced gas-cooled reactor

Worrying that our nuclear future lies partly in the hands of a French Electricity company which is partly state owned and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
Dave W

i Wonder if you will get a string of Onions with the quarterly bill.

What happened to the Chinese plants that were going to be built here, have they been shelved.

Steve.

I think Bradwell is the only one the Chinese were actually building, though they have a 33% share in Hinkley Point C, if I remember rightly. The recent National Security and Investment Bill may well deter meaningful future investment.

Its going to happen, see the news the other day that BMW are moving all combustion engine manufacturer out of Germany and retooling for doing the electric power packs in Germany. The report suggested so the German workers were protected for the long term.

Steve

I think you will find 'the government' have recently signed off on a deal to get EDF to build Sizewell 'C'.

Lovely to hear the spokeswoman say, " it will be cheaper because it will be identical to Hinkley and they will know where all the mistakes in design are ".

And certain elements are provided by ................the Chinese.

I wrote to 'the government' reminding them of where Dunwich is..........underwater.

Reassured to know they are already raising the natural ground level to compensate for rising sea levels.

Well yes, I am sure that sometime in the future we will all be running around in electric cars, but I feel at the moment that transition has just not been thought through.

We will be basically be removing millions of small ICE power units from running around the roads and replacing them with cars powered by power generated from static power generators, that is, power stations. Trouble with this is that power generation capacity is near full at some peak power times already, like in very cold mid-winter conditions here in the UK as it is - where is the spare capacity coming from to re-charge all these battery powered cars at those times?

We have shut or are shutting all the coal fired power stations, some ahead of the end of their natural life, gas and oil powered power stations are also frowned upon, and I've read recently that a fair proportion of our nuclear power stations will also be closed within a very few years. Whilst renewable power sources do well, the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow as required, sometimes not at all and sometimes too much, so you need a back-up to the renewables. I don't read anything about a whole new wave of 'clean' power stations being built, so it seems obvious to me that in the future the way things are going we stand an excellent chance of power shortages..

Then there is distribution. All these charging points planned to swamp the country over the next few years are going to need new distribution cable networks installing - again I see no evidence of that planned. Current distribution networks will not cope with the increased power load, for sure.

Charging at home for many is a non-starter, even if the current power distribution in the street and homes could supply it, which many probably cannot. Thinking of terraced houses, new "affordable homes", village houses in the sticks built with no drives, blocks of flats - where are those cars going to be charged?

Electric cars will also produce the same amount of brake and rubber tyre dust pollution as any other car, so emissions will not drop to zero as some think, and as have been suggested already, in their total life cycle will electric cars produce any less climate change pollution than ICE cars?

Cost. Even if electric cars reduce in relative cost to current ICE cars levels, will the all population be able, and willing, to afford to buy new electric cars - I know by then I probably would not, and even if I could at my age would I want to commit to that sort of currently unplanned capital outlay?

Batteries. Where are all the materials coming from to make all these batteries? We could very soon be in the same position as now with oil, where we are running out of reserves and what reserves we have is 'owned' by a small number of possibly hostile countries able to hold the rest to ransom.

We seem to be only thinking UK here, but the same will apply world wide, it will be a global problem.

I do not know what the future will bring. We face an uncertain and probable hostile future. The rocketing world population requires fuel (or energy), food and water and the possibility of future wars as countries seek to ensure that their citizens have enough of all three are high; transition to electric vehicles is part of that equation.

But it needs to be thought through properly before implementation; currently it seems to be little more than just a statement on someones wish list being pushed forward.

And no-one seems to be talking about trucks, farm vehicles, heavy earth moving vehicles and the like.

Chris

Lots of edits to correct spelling mistakes!  Have always claimed any engineer worth his salt can't spell, but try not to prove it!!

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:11:32

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:12:08

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:14:35

To fuel the discussion: **LINK**

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-19/china-defies-elon-musk-s-warnings-and-pushes-ahead-with-hydrogen

MichaelG.

Is it the intention to eventually get away from all IC engines? or just cars?....

Like ChrisH mentions its not just cars to be considered is it?, where is the "line" drawn?...what about all the static standby generators for hospitals, sewage and water pumping stations?

Another question about the green credentials of going all electric...how much copper will be needed to be mined and special coatings manufactured for all the extra cables that will have to be run - plus all the digging up of the roads by those nasty polluting diggers....

I am not against change but I think the true cost of going the totally electric vehicle route is not as green as it appears.

I would have thought phasing in of hybrids first then gradually introducing all electric would have been sensible or is that just "kicking the can down the road" and perhaps we should "bite the bullet"......??

Regards

Derek

PS Could we end up having a "war" between different and incompatible electrical connections for different cars? much like betamax and VHS? - just a thought.....

It’s going to be interesting how the government will collect the revenue lost on petrol and diesel, will it be a simple tax on electricity for recharging or a road pricing scheme or something else? One of the carrots to go electric at the moment is the cars are not cheap but you dodge the tax on fuel. The loss of revenue to the government is going to reach a point where they switch the taxation somewhere else, the free ride will end for the early adopters at some point. My cars spend most of their life parked on my drive so a decent solar array could be useful especially in the summer with strong sun and long daylight hours. It will be interesting to see if people’s travel habits return to pre virus levels or whether the great working from home experiment encourages a large part of the workforce to give up the long commute. If you are working from home and you tell the revenue you have a home office you may be liable to capital gains payment when you sell the house, the room needs to be a dual or multi purpose facility.

Mike

ChrisH

Gov stats show the average age of cars on UK roads is 8.4years. There is no suggestion that ICE vehicles will be instantly removed just that new cars will be EV (or hydrogen etc). The transition to all EV will therefore take in excess of 10 years after new ICE are banned. That allows a transition to all electric to be some 20years from now.

Electricity use UK has been in decline in the last 20years so there is spare capacity at the moment although some generating capacity is coming to the end of it;s useful life hence the planning for new nuclear.

EV's brake with regenerative aid so actually less brake dust but possible more tyre wear from their extra weight.

There is plenty fo time for the inrastructure transition. As has been said - wherever people live they have to park their cars somewhere and logically charge points get fitted in a proportion of those 'somewheres'.

Steviegtr

Charge ports at the moment are a mix of types but a standard is slowly emerging throughout europe. I think all new cars now have type2 connectors as standard from 240v single phase inputs and CCS is the new standard for DC input. My own car uses type2 for it's DC input as Tesla specific type2 but all new euro Teslas come with ability to use both type2 A/C and CCS. The chademo adapter I bought for use from non-Tesla chargers is redundant since I can have my charge port upgraded to take the CCS input. I donlt think anyone is making new 43KW A/C input cars. Such (fast) charging points are kept as legacy for older cars.

The US uses different standards as do other continents but a global standard will finally emerge.

Derek hall 1

Speculating about drunk yobs unplugging cars is amusing but I recall such yobs going down the road and nailing all the tyres on every car. They did all 4 on mine. No, it wasn't funny but at least if they did it to my Tesla I'd have them on it's security camera footage (all four sides).

Battery packs vary in tech. Yes they lose storage efficiency over time. In the case of my Tesla (I choose that 'cos I know how it's arranged) it's packed with many thousand 2170 lithium cells - each one is quite small and arranged in sub-bricks surrounded with coolant and computer monitored. the packs can be rebuilt, dud bricks replaced and the battery components can be recycled and reused. Rebuilds will become uneconomic as tech changes happen.

MichaelG

When it comes to heavy stuff and very long range stuff then battery weight needing to be carted around has it's own significant impacts. As you know hydrogen at the mo' is generally from fossil gas and energy losses in making it from more environmentall friendly hydrolysis seems illogical. The UK already is trialling a hydrogen train. If we ever get to significant spare leccy generation from wind/wave then H2 production and storage losses become less important since at least the 'free' energy is being stored. I like the idea of H2 avoiding battery weight and gov would find it easier to tax.

ChrisH (again)

Road haulage - again Tesla in the forefront with their Semi (or artic tractor unit) already trialling on roads. they are working towards the million-mile battery (as in being able to do that many journey miles before replacement) and being charged from more than one charge port at the same time Tesal Semi

I'm sure other haulage manufacturers are looking at similar including smaller battery reserves and overhead power on motorways.

As others above have rightly said - things have no choice but to change and any change will be a slow conversion.

Farm tractors electric? Yes - Link

Personal view

Some of the bigger issues are ignored. - self indulgence and greed. I consider it a nonsense that we airlift blueberries from Chile and sell them cheaply out of season. Even more ridiculous that we buy in apples that have been stored (as opposed to fresh) when we are perfectly capable of growing them here or that the US buys it's applejuice from China. Bizzare trade deals that include wasteful transport because we have become too grand to pick our own fruit.

pgk