this initiative will never work. Why? A G-Whizz costs upwards of £15000. For this to work there needs to be an electric car produced that can happily do 70mph and not need recharging after 40 miles.
Add to this the sheer laughable naivety of the government, thrusting these electric cars on us as a way of solving 'climate change' when they have no idea where the electricity to power the cars comes from - a coal or gas fired power station of course! And by the time the electricity reaches the plugs, going through all the substations and processing and that sort of stuff, it has produced more emissions overall than if you were using a petrol car instead!
Agreed 100%. It's utterly farcical, and to hear Lord Mandelson on the news proclaiming that it's going to be a revolution, makes you wonder whether to laugh or cry at the ineptitude of this government.
nope, from coal-fired power stations. If the windfarms we have here at the moment were put to work producing the electricity required for the electric cars, they'd still have to be heavily backed up by the coal-fired stations
How efficient is a power plant?
Exactly. More efficient than a mass production petrol engine will ever be. Not just the efficiency from fuel->energy, but the resulting heat is used for district heating and the resulting CO2 is used in greenhouses.
Where does a power plant emits it's exhaust fumes?
Exactly. Not at your door. Huge smog reduction.
How much easier it is to filter emissions from a single huge exhaust instead of thousands of small ones?
Exactly. Much easier. No more catalytic converter that needs to be warmed up before it sort of works.
But still, how much electric cars are for sale today? Th!nk, Gay-wizz and Tesla makes a massive list of 3 cars to choose from. 2 death traps and a sportscar...
Just because electricity dosen't burn and produce filthy smoke when you use it, doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to filling the air with crap, some people need to get that into their heads.
(If your electricity does burn and produce smoke when you use it, then perhaps you should get a repair man in ).
And you're right there Mookie, due to the price of oil rising, coal is coming back into use in the UK bigtime, they've been opening new opencast mines up all over the place.
I agree... where do you get electricity from? The plug. Where does that come from? Oh shit...
Anyway, electric cars would not work in today's world. They only have a range of around 120miles on a motorway, at best, based on something like a Tesla, but they take hours and hours to recharge and, besides, even taking something like a Toyota Prius, those will only do about 50mpg, even if you drive with feather feet. Small diesels, such as the Polo Bluemotion are the way forward, IMO. A genuine 60mpg+ (at least!) for careful drivers, and they suit today's world.
Technology is supposed to evolve and progress forward, not slow down and go backwards through the plugsocket.
Well said. I'm convinced that electric cars is the future. Forget about hydrogen.. it's too cumbersome and requires too much infrastructure. Electric is much easier.
The challenge is that charging takes too long. This is hard to avoid.. if you want to charge the whole battery in 30 seconds you'll need a power cable the thickness of your wrist.. not gonna happen. Therefore, the key would be that you simply go to a gas station and get the whole battery pack replaced every time you run out. Just as fast as filling gas. The gas station would trickle charge the empty batteries all the time, taking advantage of periods when there's excess electricity (at night, and when it's windy/sunny if they're using windmills/solar cells. Actually, one of the big challenges with using wind power is that it's so uneven.. the battery charging strategy could help even out the dips and peaks!)
Anyway.. enough rambling.. in short, electric = good in the long term, but if the government wants to spend money on it now, they should channel their funds into research instead of subsidizing people to buy 1st gen electric cars.
All of which will have Gaz woz 'ere grafitti'd on them with red paint.
And then you'll get the yobbos and chavs unplugging cars for fun and slashing the wires with one of their knives from their extensive collection, but hopefully getting electrocuted in the process.
Lol, they're already getting us to cut back on electricity usage (Energy saving lamps in new builds / outlawing regular incandescent lamps in the near future) due to the fact that the National Grid is nearing capacity. What the hell do they think is gonna happen when everyone is charging their sh*tmobile when they get to/back from work?! There will be more power cuts than in Venezuela! (No offence meant to the guys from Venezuela, there was just a lot of power cuts whilst I was there... :schwitz
Hydrogen is the way forward. It's no more difficult that the existing petroleum based infrastructure, and can probably use most of what's already here. There's no physical way possible you can reduce charging times to even 1/4 of what they are now without reducing actual charge.
And replacing battery packs? Please, I thought we were supposed to be saving the planet.
HA! HAhaha... Battery-Electric requires an infrastructure, too. Where are you going to charge up when you're 100 miles from home? A charging station, that's where. Installing the infrastructure for a Hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is much easier as all it requires is a retro-fit of current gasoline pumps (already being done in several areas of the planet).
On the surface, the best solution to the electric problem. Of course, you still have the issue of production several extra batteries, stations illegally re-using damaged batteries, stations using inferior batteries, etc etc. If I pump Hydrogen into my car it's hydrogen. If a station puts a battery into my car it could be low on charge, have no charge, be damaged, be a poor quality (not all batteries are equal, and you damn well know there's going to be more than one company producing them to different standards, just as all current batteries are), etc.
There's still a long long way to go before either of these can become a proper alternative to what we have now. I wish someone in the government would think before trying to shove this stuff on us prematurely. Patience is a virtue.
Only 3 cars available, clocking up a massive 179 sales between them last year due to them being totally unaffordable and generally shite....
Hydrogen is the only conceivable option. People need to get the 'electricity=instant green option' idea out of their heads. They may bleat about it being expensive, but it's no more expensive than installing so many millions of pounds worth of 'juice points' that, knowing this governments track record half of them will be faulty, with the other half being vandalised by the 'yoof'
It takes about 4 KWh to produce 1KWh worth of hydrogen. Do you see the problem?
On top of that, storing hydrogen is a major pain in the ass. It leaks through every material, it needs to be stored at a rediculously high pressure (around 10000 psi) and an hydrogen vehicle needs a battery anyway.
Refueling is faster than charging, but still takes quite long. It still takes about 30 minutes to fill up the equivalent amount of energy of a normal sized gas tank. And you don't want a refuelling station near a city, if something goes wrong, there will be no city left.
Hydrogen is the most abundant substance on earth, and how would a hydrogen vehicle need a separate battery that wouldn't be being charged from it's own circuit anyway?
I'd rather wait for 30 minutes than 8 hours, thankyou very much!
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