Count Your Blessings

[JonE]

we'll all be vegan in the end, after they ditch the idea of cows.
I think the vast majority of the forum users will be glad to know they'll be popping off in a standard manner before the bad sh*t starts happening properly. But the grandchildren, alas, will be dealing with it all.

[Bob Culver]

I dunno about the UK but here they have announced no new i.c.e cars from some date not very distant. I was going to dispose of my old Hillman but it and the Austin will likely be highly sought after. With no electronics or plastics and few critical rubber components both can be kept going forever, whereas all moderns will expire with computer and other problems.. Whatever, I think both will outlive the Tesla which prompted these posts.

[Chris Garner]

I'm not sure what market Tesla are aiming at but yesterday, in a Sainsbury's car park, was an enormous 4 x 4 Tesla in menacing black, blacked out windows and with the most enormous bronze painted alloys. Talk about bling.
It looked HORRENDOUS!

[Tony Griffiths]

Chris GarnerI'm not sure what market Tesla are aiming at but yesterday, in a Sainsbury's car park, was an enormous 4 x 4 Tesla in menacing black, blacked out windows and with the most enormous bronze painted alloys. Talk about bling.
It looked HORRENDOUS!

It was probably owned by a rich, hard-left Woker - you know, the sort who says, "Do as I say and live in a mud hut - but I'll do as I want". Odd, is not, that in many cases new money automatically generates masses of hyper bling. Next move? The bonnet and boot lid wrapped in gold foil, perhaps? Still, if you're a chap who kicks a football about on a mere £400,000 a week, you need some small compensation for being in the top 1% of taxpayers who contribute a full 30% of all income tax collected.
Some good news on Rolls Royce and their small nuclear reactors - that should also provide a great export opportunity. Not sure if this is behind a paywall: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...evolution/

[Hugh Barnes]

I hesitate to prolong this discussion but, as someone who does worry about the way the planet's atmosphere is changing and, as a result, having an effect on our climate, I must point out that one particular comment made earlier is something I feel isn't accurate. I quote from Dr Emily Shuckburgh, a climate scientist working with the British Antarctic Survey.

"Today’s atmosphere is unprecedented throughout human history, prehistory and beyond. To find equivalent levels of CO2 you have to travel back in time more than three million years. Ancient air bubbles recovered from the Antarctic ice sheet tell us how CO2 levels have varied naturally in the past, demonstrating that the dramatic increase since the industrial revolution lies far outside the natural cycle."

[Mick Hobday]

"top 1% of taxpayers who contribute a full 30% of all income tax collected."
And maybe it should be even more than 30%? The top 1% "earn" obscene amounts of money, far more than they can possibly ever need, hence they end up buying yet another little-used superyacht, and yet another luxury home in a fashionable city somewhere in the world, or even flights into space. None of which helps to ease the many problems facing mankind at the present time.

[Anne Griffiths]

How come an Austin 7 Friend is so anti the internal combustion engine? Either you like Austin 7s or you don't..... there's little point in joining a group of like-minded friends if you're just going to belittle their common interest.

[Austin in the Shed]

I'm no scientist but sceptical of some of the climate change theories.just 11,000 years ago the U.K. Was covered in a sheet of ice as far south as London.As far as I am aware it has only been  fully populated in the last 4,000 years since the last ice age.
1912 when the Titanic sunk after hitting a large iceberg the world population was c1.8 billion which must mean serious melting of the ice caps was already happening.
Besides the fact there is already too many of us c7 billion and rising and as Tony Griffiths noted while China,India etc develop in the way they are no matter what we do won't make a scrap of difference.
I do see however in 10 years time we will be on our pushbikes and china india will all be driving their cars.
Add in to the equation the possibility of a nuclear war,earthquake,tsunami,astoride strike,large volcanic eruption,220 of them around the world.Forgot biological warfare.
There was a good article  in the latest vscc quarterly re recycling and the low environmental impact of old cars,and the fact that for a 1 ton lithium battery 72 million gallons of water as used beside anything else in its production.
As for Tesla cars,I not seen how good they are engineered,or driven one,but have seen many on the roads I've driven in the last 2,000 miles .l can't see why someone would want to pay so much for a vehicle that looks like a low quality kit car.

[Tony Press]

Toyota's view on Electric Cars

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refuelling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidised with tax breaks to bring price tags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to Finances Online, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are petrol powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S. market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years, if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re going to need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every petrol station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialised systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

There is biomass but despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the petrol station tends to take when pumps can push 16 to 20 litres into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big trucks that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signalling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.

[andrew34ruby]

How come an Austin 7 Friend is so anti the internal combustion engine? Either you like Austin 7s or you don't..... there's little point in joining a group of like-minded friends if you're just going to belittle their common interest.

'Like minded friends'? This thread has shown that despite us all having a common interest in the Austin seven, we are not like-minded when it comes to climate change and how/if to reduce it.

I like my Austin seven, and my modern car, I'm not anti the internal combustion engine. But I am very much against allowing far too many people drive cars that are far too big and travel too far, at too fast a speed. As for flying.....