Electric vehicles

[Austin in the Shed]

Seeing as the powers that be believe the future of person transport is the Electric vehicle,(EV's) and most manufacturers are now producing them,What do you think ?
I personally can't get excited about Formula E or an electric supercar,what can beat the sound of a big vee twin.a straight six, or V8 etc.
Do any 7 owners own an EV,Will you buy another.What do you think we will be driving, or sitting in, in the future.

[andrew34ruby]

I just can't see all the streets being dug up to put thicker cables to supply all the houses with charging points. And we would need more power stations. Then there's the 200 charging points needed in a big car park.

Then we have losses along the power lines, losses in the batteries, and losses in the electric motor in your car.

Now for local delivery vans it might work.

[Tony Press]

I wonder what percentage of the worlds electricity is generated by coal fired power stations - here in Victoria we still largely rely on electricity from our massive brown coal deposits from the Latrobe  Valley in  Gippsland - especially in times of high demand. 

Imagine if all the cars were consuming electricity as well 

[Tony Griffiths]

It's all over-hyped and mired in obfuscation - I'm waiting for the much-touted, it's-just-around-the-corner battery breakthrough. You know the one: "it'll-be-in-production-next-month-and-give-500-miles-of-range-with-a-5-five-minute-recharge." Trouble is, it's not going to happen, and if it does, I want to be the first in the queue for the company's shares. For popping around town electric might be OK - but in any case, who wants to "pop around town" with traffic wardens dressed like SS officers, eye-watering parking charges and run-down high streets.
You see headlines proclaiming, "Electric cars sales up 80%." But, 80% of what? 80% of diddly-squat is still diddly-squat. In the USA, in 2018, 17.2 million light vehicles were sold - that's cars and pickups - but number of all-electric cars sold (BEVs, not hybrids) was 361,307, That's 0.2% of the total, a vanishingly-small number and just 40% of a single model sold by Ford in the same year, the F-150 pick-up. The only reason car companies produce BEVs is to lower their corporate CO2 emissions - as required by, in our case, the EU.

[Rick F]

Leaving aside all the fall-out caused at the battery factories during production, all an electric car does is move the emissions from the roads to the power station as over 50% (in the UK at least) of the extra electricity required for the constant recharging is generated by burning fossil fuels!

[Tony Press]

Not to mention the battery disposal costs and problems 

I suspect India and China will use Coal fired power for a long time to come.

[Bob Culver]

Over the decades on trips on a very few occassions for various reasons I allowed the petrol to get perilously low. The stress was considerable, especially so when the wife was present.  With an electric vehicle it would be the situation on very many trips. The constant planning for range and recharge facilities will be a huge burden.
 If owners were content with the space and performance and common touring speeds of cars of the 1960s and earlier there is scope for considerable further efficency from fossil fuel vehicles. Not so long ago the likes of the Morris Minor were family vehicles.
There has been a lot of fuss here about going electric, esp as a lot of hydro power. But far and away the most popular new vehicles are 4 door utes, now generally of gigantic size! A major objection here is that e vehicles cannot tow large boats, which many own.

[Marcus Ling]

Hi Bob,

Our thermal generation in NZ is typically around 20% of total generation it varies from year to year depending on lake levels etc.

However as by definition E cars are additional load that didn't exist before, they are load that tends to go onto base load thermal generation so while they are Electric cars, they are usually actually running on electricity produced by coal, gas or oil.

I read an article from Scandinavia on the CO2 emitted in the manufacturing process of batteries for E cars, apparently the battery for a Nissan Leaf emits 7 tonnes of CO2 being manufactured, just the battery, not the entire car. For one of the Tesla models the figure given was 17 tonnes.

Cheers

Marcus

[Tony Press]

Does this suggest this worldwide electric car madness is being driven (pun not intended) by zealots not in full possession of the salient facts or do they know something we mere mortals don't ?  

[Marcus Ling]

Hi Tony,

Of the 4,192 vehicles accounted for being produced in the United States in the 1900 Census, just 936 of them ran on gasoline, 1,575 were electric, and 1,681 ran on steam.

I'm not sure if we are going "Back to the Future" or "Forward to the Past", but Electric Cars were overtaken within about 10 years and have dominated, and still do, the light vehicle market. The problems 120 years ago with electric cars (short range, long charging times and cost) still seem to be significant and will be for the foreseeable future.

Cheers

Marcus