Electric Cars

Morning all According to a news report today, there has been a huge drop-off in sales of motor cars in the UK. Diesel cars down by 30%. Diesels, you know the ones that Mr Blair told us all to buy. As if proof were needed, my seven year old diesel car tax is nearly half that of my sister-in-law's much smaller petrol engine car. Anyway, the facts appear to be not very clear at present. There has been an increased percentage of electric car sales, but as their purchase levels are so low, the numbers are like a drop in the ocean. So, you come to want to replace your motor, what do you do? Electric car sellers are being a bit cagy, as they prefer not to include the cost of electric car depreciation in their running cost figures. Don't take my word for that. Look at our local electric car dealer, see the price of a new Leaf, then look at the prices at just two or three years old. It means that electric car costs per mile is higher than my dirty diesel or even Marion's little petrol 207. Another issue. Some of us are fortunate enough to live in a home with a drive or garage, so the installation of an electric charging point is fairly straightforward. What about folk who live in a flat, or house without drive or garage. Over half the motors owned in Coventry are street parked, what do they do? At present, much of our public street parking is free & not dedicated to a particular household, but would that all have to change if charge points were to be installed for street charging. That would need parliamentary approval. Talk about neighbours from hell! Can you just see & hear the street arguments. "That's my space!" Even worse when there is more than one car for a household. At present, the only conclusion to this subject is that there is no conclusion. One interesting development has nothing to do with electric cars. A kind of "pre-heated" catalyst for diesels technology, is giving better results than the best of our current hybrids, but that is still in the melting pot. Anyway happy motoring.

Very interesting comments "PhilipInCoventry". I now live in Scotland where the SNP have plans to ban petrol and diesel cars eight years earlier than the rest of the UK. This would indeed be a large challenge, regarding the infrastructure required for electric vehicles, due to the larger distances between inhabited areas. The ban does not seem to extend to hybrids, however, there is no indication which fuel would be allowed as the non-electric part of the power unit! Regarding the on-street charging points, inductive (similar to the electric toothbrush principle) charging is being considered as an option, however you can just imagine the amount of work involved to install inductive loops beneath each parking bay, strengthen the electricity supply distribution to supply these and provide extra generating capacity to cater for a significant level of electric vehicles. The end user would require an account that would be debited for any time the vehicle is drawing power after successfully logging onto the system. I have also noticed that commercial vehicles, including larger delivery vehicles and buses, do not seem to have been considered as part of this process. These will indeed be challenging times. I think I'll stay with my 1965 and 1972 cars for a while longer.

Hi all Street lamps could be turned into into EV charging points Plans to turn some lamp-posts into electric vehicle charging points are to be considered by councillors in Warwickshire. Lamp Posts

Given that they intend to change all heating and cookers into electric at the same time, the existing home and local networks wouldn't be able to cope. You may be able to charge a car at home but you wouldn't be able to do much else at the same time. I can see more electric cars as a second car but not as a primary. Hybrids are more likely. However until they build nuclear the plans will fail. Batteries aren't advancing fast enough to act as a backup for the entire nation and on a still winter's eve with the EU in the same boat, there wouldn't be enough power to go around. You'd be cold, hungry, and in the dark. Even the internet wouldn't work.

Isn't it Jaguar Land Rover who suggest they will be making only electric cars from 2020? How are they going to compete at the Le Mans 24-hour race?

Yes, Helen, hybrids do seem to be the way to go initially but there is a reluctance to go away from the present piston engine and use a small gas turbine with only one major moving part. This has been reported over the years in some technical articles but seems to have been sadly neglected. Indeed Rover produced a gas turbine car around 1950 (not hybrid!) but slow throttle response was always a problem which would be overcome using hybrid systems. This still uses carbon based fuels however. Following up on your comments on the electricity supply infrastructure, the extra generating capacity to cater for just the electric vehicle changeover has been estimated at between 20% and 50%, depending on the optimism of the reporter. I did a quick averaged calculation and this equates to between 4 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations or 12,000 wind turbines, and that's not taking commercial vehicles, cookers or heating into account!

I think it's been a bit misleading when they stated that there would be a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel engined cars from 2040 when what they actually forgot to mention is that this does not include hybrids so there will actually still be combustion going on! I have to say the whole 'drive' (no pun intended!) to electric has been advanced by Tesla. They have transformed the perception of electric vehicles from milk floats to usable real-life automobiles. It's a real transition. I would not be averse to one - the prices will drop as they become more popular although that will in turn see an eventual electric car tax and charges on the type.

Is that really a Lea Francis, Philip?

We've just replaced one of our cars with a 14 plate diesel - and the road tax on it is . . . . nil

Yes my wife's new 'oil-burner' is not quite like the ones of old - £20 pa on ours.

Daily Mail article on electric car polluters

It's always been obvious to me, as an engineer, that all this excitement about electric cars being a panacea is more hype from the government, to make politicians look good to the general public. Leaving aside other negatives such as the limited range of an electric car, the toxicity and weight of batteries, cost of replacing the batteries etc., it's a fact of nature that you don't get energy for nothing. If our country had sufficient natural resources to generate the colossal amounts of electricity needed to charge electric cars from wind power, sun, hydro-electric generators and suchlike, that would be fine. But we don't have those resources. There's a cost. The electricity has to be generated. All that happens by using electric cars is that pollution is moved from one place, such as city areas, to somewhere else. The pollution has not magically disappeared or gone away. What is the point? Electric cars are more dangerous to pedestrians. When crossing a road, they are so quiet that they can suddenly appear from around a bend, and cannot be heard, unlike a normal car where you can hear the engine and/or the exhaust. Politicians: I was in London last Tuesday, listening to an "expert panel" of 5 people, including the Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP. Holy moly can he talk! Every time he "answered" a question, he waffled on and on without really saying anything of substance. On several occasions, the chair had to intervene with "but you haven't answered the question - you've talked about something else".

I see the problem with electric cars not being the power source but the vehicles themselves. There are too many and they're too big. Since their invention they've come to dominate our lives, ever more and wider roads, the clutter of street furniture, the concrete landscape that serves only as the space to park them. Coventry of course have played a big part in this. Now the developing world is proceeding headlong on the same path to multi car ownership so we will eventually live in a world with billions more of the things. Every new model is bigger then the last, the new Fiesta is now as big as the original Focus, and coupled with the vanity that results in a monster 4x4 being used just for the school run, where are we going? Very few families need a car bigger than a mini (the original one, the longer mini is no longer mini). The plan to replace fossil fuel power with electricity is sold on the cost savings. But petrol is as cheap as water, it's the tax that makes it expensive. So where is the government going to get that income from when demand for electricity exceeds supply and they need to build a dozen new power stations to cope? So called renewable energy is surely flawed; how many windmills are needed to produce enough energy to produce one windmill? Or solar panels to create one more. And each of those needs several more to make them, ad infinitum. The system is only workable when they are produced using polluting power sources, fossil fuels and nuclear. Conveniently in the west we buy our solar panels from another country where they suffer the polluting effects while we no longer have to mine 'dirty' coal here. The future is surely in improved public transport and cheaper taxis. We should be working towards a world where I can call a driverless taxi to take the kids to school and have it return empty to take the wife to the shops/gym/hairdressers, then come back again to take me to the train station/pub/library. All roads can then be a single lane in each direction, no need for road signs or traffic lights, or multi storey carparks, or private garages or driving licenses, or 'multi-car' insurance etc. Private car ownership should be exhorbitantly expensive to subsidise public transport. I can't see that happening in my lifetime though.

Mcsporran, you make some good points, all of which I agree with. The modern "Mini" is a misnomer as it's way too big. I think BMW are having a laugh. Or maybe they've lost something in the translation. 4x4s: I hate them. Far too many on the road. Gas guzzling monsters that block your view of the road ahead. If you're behind a bus or big lorry, driven by a professional, and it's slow or stopped, you know there's a good reason. But a 4x4? Many are driven by people who are frightened of their own vehicle, who think you need clearance space for a Chieftain tank before overtaking a cyclist or parked car. A combat vehicle like this should be off-road only, e.g. confined to building sites or farm estates. School run? Shouldn't be allowed. It should be dealt with in the same way as kerb-crawlers. From the age of 5 onwards, you should be making your own way to school and back, just as I and my friends did. Never did us any harm. Instilled confidence. But we have the nanny state now. No initiative expected. And why is it that over the years, as the roads get more gridlocked, they make roads narrower - pinch points, chicanes, etc., whilst at the same time cars get wider. Back in the day, you could slot a proper Mini or Triumph Herald through the same gap as a motor bike. And of course, parking spaces have got narrower over the same period. The real root of the problem, of course, is one the politicians dare not mention in this world of political correctness: there are too many people.

The main problem seems to be the way the subject is approached. If the electricity to charge a car is considered as additional to normal demand then this would require the most inefficient coal/oil/gas fired generators to be brought online to cover this extra demand, making the electric car effectively more polluting. To add to the confusion wind and solar generation requires sufficient back up generation capacity to cover periods when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, particularly at the coldest times of the year. I have seen some calculations indicating that wind generation, by the time all grants and subsidies have been applied, actually costs nearly four times the amount that nuclear generation does, considering all capital and running costs over the lifetime of the respective plants. Just another thought; there have been suggestions recently that electric cars could be used to store energy while solar and wind generators are producing excess power and then be used to support the grid when electricity demand is high. I wonder how well this would be received when 'electric' commuters prepare for their regular journey only to discover their batteries only partly charged!