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[STEMO]

Oooooo, Jimmy....I do like it when you're forceful 

[Migv6 le Frog Fan]

I currently have a car which uses no fossil fuel and costs even less than an electric car to fill up. It has a range of approx. 500 miles and cost me £350 four years ago.
Your all behind the curve in this. 
When petrol / diesel cars are banned, expect huge tax rises in one area or another, as the amount of taxation lost to the treasury from petrol/ diesel sales would probably bankrupt the country if they didn't replace it with some other form of taxation.
I probably wont live to see the end of the internal combustion engine, but I feel sorry for future generations, that they wont have some of the experiences I had when I was young. Buying a powerful rwd drive car and learning to steer it on the throttle through a series of bends on country lanes.
If there is still such a thing left as young men in the future (doubtful, but that's a different argument), they will have a pitiful existence.

[Sir Tigger KC]

Young men of the future won't have to find a quiet car park or gateway to get their leg over, they'll be doing it on the move in their electric driver-less cars! 

[Migv6 le Frog Fan]

Using gender labels such as "young men" will probably result in a spell in a state re - education facility by then. 

[Sir Tigger KC]

Using gender labels such as "young men" will probably result in a spell in a state re - education facility by then. 

Just describing someone as young will probably be seen as offensive and discriminatory! 

[Viral_Jim]

Oooooo, Jimmy....I do like it when you're forceful 

You know it sweetheart

[Doctor Gollum]

Mind bleach to Gen Dis

[Rods2]

Hydrogen is the future. Electric cars have been around for a century or more.

I'm working on teleportation.

The problem with teleportation is - what happens if you have more than one receiver?
Can you imagine more than one copy of Lord Sittapong Meerkat?
SHUDDER!    and forget to turn the caps lock off when writing your name.

rON.

fixed.

[LC0112G]

When a battery is dead, you recycle it, and make another. You argue that lithium is difficult to mine/obtain and then claim dead batteries which contain loads of it will be just thrown away?

But you don't get one new battery from every old one. You get perhaps 80-90% of a new battery and 10%+ waste that has to be got rid of. And you need to use energy and spend money to do the recycling. If it's cheaper to dig the Lithium out the ground and refine it than it is to recycle that is what will happen.

Bizarre. This is another false equivalence that people trot out when talking about electric cars. How do you equate digging up a material that can be used again and again to one which is dug up, burned and then takes millions of years to reform? It makes no sense.

Just because the current fossil fuel usage is unsustainable in the medium-long term doesn't mean that battery/electric cars are the correct solution. And using stuff again and again is spurious - you're just moving the point of consumption from the petrol/diesel in the engine to the gas/uranium in the power station.

Also the electrical generation argument is partially valid, but it makes the assumptions that a) we don't grow our use of renewables and b) that petrol is brought to the pumps by the petrol fairies. The co2 release and environmental impact of oil drilling and refining needs to be considered if you are going to consider the environmental impact of the source of the electricity generated. Otherwise the comparison is at best skewed or, more accurately invalid.

Environmental costs are impossible to measures in terms of money required to restore back to original. Once stuff is out of the ground it ain't going back in whether that is Oil or Lithium. Oli drilling/refining won't stop even if cars stop using petrol/diesel. Aircraft and ships will still use it, and plastics/synthetics will still be made from it. The choice is do we continue as we are, or do we stop. We aren't going to stop, so any alternative has to have similar or better attributes to what we already have, with no significant downside.

We know the actual cost of the petrol used in our cars at the moment - it's about £1.10 per litre round here. That includes all the costs of the petrol fairies, the extraction and refining costs, the profits for the petrol companies and the petrol stations. Not to mention the taxes - the RAC recon 65% of the cost we pay for petrol is tax - so the 'real' cost for petrol is around 72 p/L. A 60L/£70 fill up will get my omega about 400 miles if I'm careful, or 250 miles if I drive like a idiot. That works out at  somewhere between 17p and 28p per mile cost to me, which would be 11p-18p per mile without the tax.

The Tessla blurb on Wikipedia states the batteries as in the region of 90-100KWh. In the UK leccie is around 12p per kWh (and there is virtually no tax on it). So assuming 100% charge efficiency (unlikely) it's going to cost £12 to fully charge a Tessla at home. For that I get a claimed 335 miles range, which makes it about 3.5p per mile. I'd guess the 335 mile range claim is about as accurate as other manufacturers MPG figures for petrol cars, and assumes I'm driving like Miss Daisy but lets run with it. If I drive my petrol car like miss daisy it'll cost me 17p per mile so the Tessla is almost 5 times cheaper to run.

Except. We need a network of leccie filling stations. The leccie fairies are basically already in place delivering electrons all around the country- AKA the National Grid - and that cost is included in the 12p per KW/h. What isn't included is the costs of setting up and running thousands of leccie filling stations, and the profits that such companies must make. Do you believe these companies are going to sell the leccie at cost, or is there going to be a mark-up?  Shall we say 15p/Kwh? And what charging efficiency shall we say? 95%? And how much govt tax? 65% like on petrol? Add in all those factors and you could be looking at £45 to fill up your 100KHh battery to do 335 miles - 7.5p per mile. And if the 335 mile range is optomistic then all of a sudden it's 'only' half the price of petrol.

Not in the slightest. I don't believe most things politicos have to say. What I do firmly believe is that digging stuff up and setting fire to it is not a model which can continue indefinitely.

Indefinatley - No. For the foreseeable future - the next 50+ years. Yep.

[LC0112G]

and the car you drop off is unusable for up to 8 hours whilst it recharges, and is cleaned of all the pi55 and puke stains the previous occupant left.

Well, even using the settled technology (which demonstrably isn't settled) tesla can already charge a car to 80% in 40mins and 100% in 75mins. Do you bother to research any of this, or just post the first number/"fact" that comes to mind? 

Tessla's home chargers are 20Kw/h, and the batteries are 100KWh. By my maths that's 5 hours if 100% charging efficiency. Realistically it's going to be at least 6 hours. Ok not 8 hours, but not 75 minuites either.

The times you quote are the SuperCharge figures - which we call "CrashCharging". If done regularly it will wreck the batteries much faster than the slow trickle charging.

In the scenarios we were discussing you either don't own the battery packs, or don't own the car. You effectively lease one or the other from someone and swap an empty one for a full one at some leccie station. Now you might be Ok with crash charging your own batteries - but the person that owns your leased car/batteries isn't going to like you reducing the life of their assets. They are either going to charge you a hell of a lot to allow crash charging, or not permit it full stop. If they don't allow it, then the car/battery pack is going to be unavailable for 5-6 hours.

80% of a full charge will get me how far? 80% of 335 miles is 270 miles - 4 hours at motorway speeds. Then I have to stop and either spend another 40minutes charging, or swap cars/battery packs again. There's either going to need to be dozens of batteries per car scattered all over the country, or millions of leccie charging points. You can fill a car, pay and be gone in 5 minutes at a petrol pump. A leccie pump in crash charge mode is going to take between 40 and 75 minutes? So each car is going to take 8 to 15 times longer to charge than a petrol car, and only go two thirds the distance? You're going to potentially need 20+ times the number of charging points as there are currently petrol pumps?   

[Rods2]

Two things that are going to change the electric car market are:

1. At the moment about 25% of the battery space and capacity density is taken up in each cell by electronics which are used to control the battery charge/discharge rate to stop them catching on fire. Lithium fires are intense, nasty and very difficult to put out, ask Williams. There are already prototype next-gen batteries that have reduced this 25% by about 90%.

2. Two companies have claimed to have produced fast charge batteries using different technologies where 90% charge can be achieved in about 10 minutes.

Personally, I think viable electric cars are one to two model generations away (5 to 10 years) from being a competitive replacement to IC cars. The politicians, motor manufacturers and fleet owners will drive this including new entrants like Apple etc. So IMO 2040 is a realistic date to outlaw current IC vehicles.

With ever more green driven air pollution targets, even though they will make very little difference to life spans for the majority, they will be driven by the tree huggers and move pollution from high-density population centres to coal, wood and gas fired power stations in lower population areas. The UK has an advantage here where there is a big ocean to the west which is also the predominant wind direction (which is why a city's Eastend was always the cheap bit in Victorian times), so the acid rain, sulphur dioxide and PM2.5 etc., etc. pollution from the tall smokestack power station chimneys will mostly land in mainland Europe. At the UK will no longer be under ECJ jurisdiction M'lud, where we aren't in the EU, this will not be our problem.

I'm not sure this is enough R&D development momentum, drive for the infrastructure investment in a hydrogen network or that the EROEI will be favourable enough once the electricity has been generated compared with charging batteries.

The final point I will make where all new cars will be self-driving within 10 years so we all call and rent a vehicle as and when we need one, the change to electric cars will not be in our hands but in the large fleet owners. One thing that is going to characterise the 21st century is the change from owning things, like music, films, software and cars to leasing or renting them as and when we want to consume them.

[Doctor Gollum]

There are millions of petrol stations around... What's the difference?

[Varche]

So what is your solution to city and other place pollution which is killing people every day? Cant just keep filling the air with particulates from diesel and petrol vehicles surely.

You are still  notthinking out of the box. Once the bulk of folk are using electric cars the rest can be taxed to death whilst the electric users pay the same as today approx. Why not have charging points everywhere. Work, street parking. If you want it to be accountable then pin number activates it.

Why not a car design with exchange batteries. Heavy /harsh users subsidised by others. Happens now in all walks of life and no one complains.

I bet when the railways had those refuelling stops, overhead hose refills and troughs for servicing cutting edge steam locos they couldnt have foreseen diesel or electric trains making those service stations redundant.

[Rods2]

Young men of the future won't have to find a quiet car park or gateway to get their leg over, they'll be doing it on the move in their electric driver-less cars! 

The future is already here. A US couple are suing Uber, where the driver stopped their lift to pick up a hooker who gave him a bj as he completed their journey. Only in America!

[Viral_Jim]

But you were talking about charging on the road, not at home. In which case you use the supercharger network (145kw) or rapid chargers (50-75kwh). Who cares if it takes 5hrs to charge at home, that's why you plug it in at night...

I don't know what "crashcharging" is and google only shows 4 results as one word, 2 for gaming/Halo and 2 relating to RC quadcopters, as two words you get lots of results but nothing on first two pages so can't really comment. However, assuming you mean it shortens battery life, the only cars that have been reported at high mileages seem to show 6-10% battery degredation at 150-200k miles. So it doesn't seem like the phenomenon you describe is happening in the real world. I made no reference to

Moving the point of the consumption is only spurious if you assume both power sources do the same level of environmental damage, which they do not. I made no reference to financial cost when discussing the environmental impact of both fuel sources, only that in making the comparison you referred to the environmental impact of mining lithium for batteries (effectively the car's "petrol tank") compared to mining oil (the fuel). This is not the right comparison. The correct comparison is the environmental impact of a new petrol car vs BEV equivalent (factoring in recyclability) and then the environmental impact of electricity generation and transmission vs environmental impact of drilling, refining and then burning the fuel.

Most proponents of fossil technology are not in favour of making this comparison - can't think why 

80% of a full charge will get me how far? 80% of 335 miles is 270 miles - 4 hours at motorway speeds. Then I have to stop and either spend another 40minutes charging, or swap cars/battery packs again.

For 90-95% of users this scenario either could not be less relevant or is relevant only once or twice a year. Take an extreme example. I want to drive from home (DY11) to Naples Italy. 1st full charge takes me to folkestone eurotunnel (225miles) which I need to arrive at least 30 mins beforehand, but in reality you would leave it 45mins plus. So you are back at 100% in Calais. Worst case scenario you have to charge in calais so "lose" 40mins. Second charge gets you to Metz (275miles), and you charge fully, 75mins. Then Lucern (245 miles), charge again 75mins, Modena (260miles), 75 mins then into Rome (250 miles). Maximum "wasted time" 265mins.

Compared to an omega (say 390 miles to the tank), your 1055 miles will be done in 2 stops. So 20 mins if you fill up at calais (using nil time). So, say 20 mins total assuming you pee and monster a sandwich. So the electric car takes 245 mins longer, but at 27mpg, the omega costs you £247 each way, compared to £65 at tesla's rates (assuming your car doesnt qualify for free supercharger use). So you are saving £44.50 per hour you wait. I don't know about you, but that is rather more than my hourly rate! Also bear in mind the above scenario massively favours the car. If you sleep enroute (and I probably would), your car can charge over night. I honestly wouldn't feel save to drive 1100 miles with 2 x 10 min breaks, so it really is in favour of the car.

My point with the above is that so many people have over-inflated expectations of what a car needs to achieve to meet their needs. I realise using a tesla as an example is unrealistic for most, but they have already moved the market on a huge amount in a matter of 3-5yrs that this kind of range (250-300 miles) will come along in the next 5yrs or so and it will be sufficient for 90% of users.

You can fill a car, pay and be gone in 5 minutes at a petrol pump. A leccie pump in crash charge mode is going to take between 40 and 75 minutes? So each car is going to take 8 to 15 times longer to charge than a petrol car, and only go two thirds the distance? You're going to potentially need 20+ times the number of charging points as there are currently petrol pumps?

I genuinely can't follow this, it seems to assume no-one charges at home and that currently fuel pumps are fully utilised? Why would you drive to an electric filling station? It makes no sense? There is already a company that's winning tenders in germany to fit charge points into lamp posts. So you just park up, in a bay on the street, swipe a contactless card and then plug in. That's the kind of solution we will actually see. Trying to bend electric cars to a petrol model makes no sense.