The steam is used to run a turbine, which is used to generate electricity, so it is actually an electric car. Personally, I would prefer it to be driven by steam.
Only if really badly designed.
Apart from those that were built with condensers you mean?
The "charge time" for a liquid fuelled car is much lower than for a battery car.
Which implies they will only be of use as "second" cars.
BTW did you all see Top Gear the other day? They had a battery Merc. Pretty quick it was, 1 motor per wheel, well up their league table. Though they did comment that Merc reckoned it would _nearly_ get twice around the Nurburgring.
Mitsubishi i-MiEV £28990, Up to 93 mile range, 81 mph top speed, £2.91 per full charge *
or 3.13p per mile, with a charge taking 7 hours to do another 93 miles in a coma inducing jelly mould japbox built from a melted down Datsun Cherry and a Mitsubishi Zero.
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So you couldn't drive very far even if you wanted to
You need a Dacia Sandero 1.5 dCi Ambience costing less than 1/3 of the i-MiEV at just £8595, 104mph, 12.1 seconds 0-60, Extra-urban cycle 74.3mpg with a 50 litre tank giving 817 mile range #
Or with diesel at say 1.40 per litre, 70 quid to do 817 miles or 8.5p per mile with the ability to refuel in about 4 minutes for another 817 miles of 'pure motoring bliss' Wick to Falmouth, or nearly 7 laps of the M25, or Dover to Vienna, or Portsmouth to Barcelona, or Dover to the Nurburgring and return including 16 laps of the Nordschleife, each on just one tank of fuel.
I was thinking about the Tesla on Top Gear. It claimed a 211 mile range, bu t driven hard, achieved much less. There's nothing worse than a car stuck o n the side of the road. With a petrol car you can get a can of petrol. I am suggesting a small petrol engine to enable an electric car to keep going. P.S. I help maintain large electric vehicles!
From Top Gear: "We calculated that on our track it would run out after 55 miles". The firs t point here is that the track is where we do our tests of sports cars and supercars, as has happened ever since Top Gear existed. This is where cars are driven fast and hard, and since Tesla calls its roadster "The Supercar. Redefined." it seemed pretty logical to us that the right test was a track test. The second point is that the figure of 55 miles came not from our he ads, but from Tesla's boffins in California. They looked at the data from t hat car and calculated that, driven hard on our track, it would have a rang e of 55 miles."
The head of the Serious Fraud Office lived in the Lake District and commuted to London for 3 days per week - all Xs paid as she was supposedly working form home on Mon's and Fri's
You didn't read that link very thoroughly. It goes on to say they were converted to free exhaust as the design was a failure.
"The first conversion was done at De Aar on number 3452 and consisted of the turbine and exhaust pipe being removed from the smokebox and replaced with a blastpipe and chimney, while the tender was stripped of its condensing equipment, but retained its original fresh water and condensate tanks and feed pumps, with the radiator framing and roof paneled over. The locomotive's general appearance therefore changed little, but while the conversion of
3452 was aesthetically superior when compared with subsequent conversions, it did not carry enough water.""
No it doesn't. It says they were c 'The system proved to be extremely efficient and reduced water consumption by as much as 90% by using the same water up to eight times over, giving the Class 25 locomotive a range of 800 kilometres (500 miles) between water refills. In addition, the hot recycled feedwater resulted in a significantly reduced coal consumption'
Again, locomotives that were converted only after they were moved from their original duties and there was no longer a need for condensing apparatus.
Is that entirely through choice, or is it influenced by the fact that you physically couldn't drive that far even if you wanted to, without having to hire a different car?
Let's not forget that the petrol-powered version of the Mitsu i was a miserable failure in the UK market. Available for five years from 2007 to
2012, how many have you ever seen on the roads...? At one third of the new list price of the electric version, and a book 55mpg combined, that's one f*ck of a lot of miles before cost-per-mile break-even.
Are you sure you mean commute? I suspect she travelled to London, stayed for 2 or 3 nights and then returned home. Commuting is normally accepted to mean travelled daily.
I can remember a senior BBC Engineer (1960s) who was promoted from London to a job in Manchester. He was so sure he's be promoted back to London that he didn't move house and travelled to manachester at tehn start of teh week and back at the end, but this crept to getting no Manchester at lunchtime on Monday and leaving on Friday at lunchtime, and then Tuesday morning and Thursday evening and it go worse. After serious complaints to Engineering management, he was told he'd lost all his promotion prospects so he'd better move house if he wanted to keep his job.
Again in the '60s, we had a Sound Supervisor at Television Centre who lived some way outside Peterborough. Drove to that station - train and tube the rest of the way. Not normally late either. But of course studio start times were not usually early, due to an overnight set and light.
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