Electric Seven

[JonE]

you could just watch videos of other Austin 7s and turn the sound off

[Ivor Hawkins]

Excellent! Well said Jon!

[Dave Prior]

Clearly electric Sevens are far from a new concept! 

[Dave Mann]

Did anyone see Guy Martin on channel 4 last night with his electric Beetle, faster off the mark than a McClaren F!?

[Dave Mann]

I'd forgotten until I looked at the cartoon again but our crazy PM has considered installing a trial section  overhead catenary on the M18 for electric HGVs.

[Ray White]

I have been watching "vintage voltage" .  I am sure there is a place for classic cars that have been converted to electric;  for sure the ones on the programme seem to be very good... but surely it will never become more than a niche market?

[Ivor Hawkins]

I’ve watched vintage voltage and wondered why anyone would convert a historical vehicle to electric, when the attraction is the combination of the heritage and the idiosyncrasies of old engines and transmissions...it just seems such an odd thing to do...

I’m wondering how long before someone puts a supercharged big block motor in a Tesla.

[jansens]

I do lots of project people can't fathom. People always wonder why. I always feel sad for them and their lack of imagination. So many people just see the destination and forget about the journey. All my projects have made me a better thinker, better problem solver and a better engineer and I have met lots of interesting people and got to do many interesting things along the way because of them.

Given these days building an old car the old ways is becoming impossible (at least in NZ) I have pondered in future doing an electrification project because that can still be done if you follow the rule book as it is written and use modern parts and techniques. It would be an interesting technical project with many engineering issues to overcome while still trying to stick to the spirit of a historical car. It won't be vintage of course but you can't build vintage now anyway so the problem to solve is what could you build and still follow the spirit. Given how the rules keep changing now though I doubt I will actually do it as by the time I finished the rules would probably be all different again. And I suspect what you end up with is a hot rod which at the moment isn't where my interests lie.

Seeing acceleration figures and comparisons for electric vehicles is always amusing since there isn't really anything special about it due to how electric motors work vs how fuel endings work. Back in the mid 90s the company I worked at doing electric cars we had to limit the acceleration in software because otherwise the huge torque from zero revs would just spin the wheels. With modern traction control systems better able to handle the power it's no surprise the vehicles can launch quickly. The fact it's a Beetle in this case doesn't really matter. It's just a body shell on a platform but it makes for a better headline.

I find the engineering aspects of a top fuel dragster far more interesting. 0 - 100mph in 0.8 of a second is impressive and the number of engineering challenges they have to overcome to get up to such performance is very interesting to look into.

Simon

[Tony Press]

The rush to Elrctric Cars is a bit premature- as most engineers would know the very large electricity supply problems must be solved first.

The Worlds largest car manufacturer Toyota has the following discussion:  

"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."

Can you imagine China mandating an immediate change to electric cars - the present scary leader could do it when he takes offence at some imagined slight ! They would need to immediately build hundreds if not thousands of coal fired power stations 

Perhaps we should all go for the Mercedes alternative mentioned earlier :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1tbf8muMc

[jansens]

In NZ the other night (one of the coldest of the year) the power companies had to shut off power to bits of the country as demand outstripped supply for a while. That's a worry before you even factor EVs into things!

Simon