I've been watching repeats of top gear. And I got to thinking about electric cars and the future of the petrol engines. I want to keep my van forever so I would probably convert it to electric at some point. I found a company that will convert it for 12k. https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/past-projects
I’m guessing that in Twenty years when nearly all new vehicles are electric, the cost of this stuff will be way way lower as there will be so much second hand stuff available, from smashed up vehicles in scrap yards etc. I wouldn’t be paying 12k now, that’s essentially the cost of another bus. Plus if you shell out that amount now, by the time you actually legally can’t drive these on the roads because of emissions laws, the batteries will be shafted and you’ll need to replace them all again anyway.
Electric cars are not the answer they have too many problems. Not enough lithium on the planet for the battery’s. Battery have a limited life around 7years and would cost to much to justify replacing so the cars are a right off. Lack of Charging points and most houses could not be fitted with one as have no parking unless you have leads across pavements. Not enough capacity in the electrical grid. Limited range especially in cold or bad weather. Problems for the roads and car due to the extra weight. They are useful in cities to improve air pollution but really you are just moving the problem to the power station. The only way is to look at do you need to do so many journeys in a car.
My mates test driving an electric Nissan van for work this weekend. He’s the first one of my mates in the trade to consider going electric. He reckons the numbers for him stack up but I can’t see it as by the time he trades it in about five years surely it’s resale value is zero as who’s gonna buy a commercial vehicle that’s only good for a couple more years? So the entire value of the vehicles got to be absorbed by the first owner. If I’m understanding this right?
Nice idea but at that price it makes no sense. You’d probably have a more positive environment impact if you spent that 12k planting trees (and drive less/ give up flying and become a vegetarian).
Also, every mobile phone I have holds a charge better when I first buy it than it does by the time I get an upgrade. If electric cars are like this it’s gonna be a nightmare by the time they get to five years old, longer and longer charging for less power and less miles.
What may also be a killer for electric cars is shipping costs for the battery cells. I can remember working on a project based on the IATA rules for air freight of lithium batteries. By the time we completed the project, you couldnt air freight the product at all. Now sea shipping companies are getting twitchy about carrying effectively millions of bombs in little 18650 cylinders.. With hydrocarbon fuelled cars you can ship them with a mostly empty tank. With electric cars they are all fuelled up from a bonfire point of view as they leave the factory. In a post Brexit Britain with no car factories left we may well have to be a lot less picky about forcing people to buy electric cars or new cars because we will need the money to pay for the Navy.. I keep getring the feeling that my local main dealer doesnt want me to get rid of my 15 year old Diesel car because new ones are so much shorter lived. Designed to be scrapped in 5 years, not just electric cars..
I guess the couple of things going in favour of an electric bay are one, range, how often you you drive your bay further than 150miles between camp sites, and if the batteries can be charged by either the site hook up or the on board solar then happy days. Two, speed, I guess with a decent brakes upgrade then the days of 55mph in the slow lane would be over.
Say you do 150 miles using 25 HP to run at 50mph. 3 hours at 22.4kW. Thats optimisitic. So you have used 67kWh of electricity. Electric vehicles can go fast because peak power for a few seconds does not cost a lot of watt hours. Motors can take the power like a drag racing engine for a short dash. In the end though the battery holds a small fraction of the energy of the same weight of petrol so you cannot maintain speed. On hookup you can draw 10A or 2.4kW of energy. That will take 28 hours of recharging. However that is assuming the campsite hookup doesnt blow the fuses. I can remember being on a campsite where the 2kW heaters in all the big white campers totalled the mains incoming fuses and from 0130 to 1330 the site had no mains.. Now look at solar. If you had 400 watts of panels on the roof and got maybe half that for 10 hours, no fridge no lights no stereo no heating. Thats 2kWh. So 33 days later you can go home. No electric powered wild camping...
Hmmmm. Yet again my amazing ideas are dashed by cold hard physics. No wonder my steam powered hang glider idea literally never took off.
The other problem, apart from is there enough Lithium on the planet, the answer to which, I have no idea, but it's not a infinite resource, is how will the leggy grid hold up? Some of our grid is quite ancient and the extra load, especially in non industrial areas, could be significant. Also, we'll need some extra generating capacity. A couple of large power station equivalents would be handy.
Can you imagine the household arguments if there’s only room on the drive to charge one car at a time.
What may also be a killer for electric cars is they are $hite. If I wanted to drive electric I'd change my name to Ernie and become a milkman.
Electric vehicles are a stop gap. Once the motor industry has milked people of what they consider enough money for electric vehicles they'll release the hydrogen ones. As soon as hydrogen is widely available, you'll be needing cylinder heads with hardened valve seats and a bit of trickery to boost your ignition coil up to 18 volts, and drive everywhere with zero emissions as long as you like on your regular style internal combustion engine.
Gotta admit this confuses me a bit. How can an engine that’s designed to burn a liquid burn a gas? If you inject a gas into the cylinder, what happens to it when the piston compresses it? Also surely the caloric value of hydrogen and petrol aren’t similar so what’s to stop the engine simply destroying its self. I know it’s done with lpg but I still don’t really understand it. I had this on a swimming pool boiler years ago. I went out to a breakdown and found burner components melted etc. At first I just couldn’t work it out, till the guy told me he worked at the airport and had decided to fill his oil tank with old jet A1 rather than heating kerosene. There’s talk at the minute of hydrogen being introduced into the mains gas supply at about a 20% ratio. Worcester has a boiler on test at the minute that’s running this mix but even they say to make existing boilers compatible would be extremely difficult. Surely a 40 year old engine can’t run it without major upgrades????
If we did ever use hydrogen as a road fuel, I would have thought we'd be more likely to use a fuel cell, rather than internal combustion, wouldn't we?
