OT: Electric cars; how green are they?

[Steve Firth]

There's the Peel P50.

[Ericp]

On the new Leaf ecobollox box they have stated that servicing costs will be 15% less. How this figure is arrived at would be of great interest since I cannot conceive what work could be needed to almost equal a normal car.

[Arfa Daily]

What about the Honda FCX Clarity ? That has an on-board primary power source.

[Colin Stamp]

medium, so a fuel cell and hydrogen tank is just a battery. It does get round the energy density and charging time problems though - whilst adding some problems of its own.

Cheers,

Colin.

[js.b1]

Electric cars require 1) composites 2) L-Ion technology 3) soon after Fuel Cell technology 4) forgetting anything about hydrogen re impracticality of distribution and storage 5) forgetting anything hybrid short of a simple backup "AA sled generator".

The idea of making electric cars out of steel is simply bizarre, as bad as the "remove engine from 1.5t car, add 1t of lead acid batteries and hope for a tail wind".

The only electric car that (almost) worked was the GM EV in NiMH form with improved motor, and unsurprisingly they actually pancaked as many as they could. Too many jobs still dependent on the car industry, in what is increasingly becoming a communist-model West. Obama tore up the Bond holders rights with the nationalisation of Government Motors, governments of the West is trying to do what entrepreneurs should be doing but do not want the financial risk because that have become lazy due to easy property/land money. That is as much the loony advisors of western governments who run between failure, government and academia.

[Colin Stamp]

Is Peltier conversion more efficient then? You'll still have to reject the heat somewhere.

Cheers,

Colin.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I've actually driven one, many years ago. Didn't it have a Villiers 197 two-stoke - so gawd knows what the emissions were.

[Arfa Daily]

Well, they seem to be storing and distributing it without too much problem or expense in California, where the price is apparently comparable to petrol ...

Arfa

[Tim Streater]

Save a load of dosh, though, eh? And all the garage klods can be reassigned.

[Nightjar]

You don't need to be efficient in this application with the sort of output available from a micro nuclear power unit.

Air is usually plentiful and does not need to be carried.

Colin Bignell

[Peter Scott]

At present you cannot charge an electric car from renewable or low-CO2 sources except perhaps at night, when a large percentage is nuclear. If you are charging from a fossil-generated plant, electric cars are a disaster. There are energy losses digging and transporting the fuel, generating the electricity, carrying it on the power network, storing it in batteries and then retrieving it from the batteries. Capturing the carbon, if that ever happens, would take a lot of energy too. It is far, far better to burn fossil fuel in the car. Then you only have losses in the engine (perhaps 70%) and the transmission. Obviously the fossil fuel has to be dug and transported.

Like the catalysers that we never needed, electric cars are american solutions to an american problem. Their inefficient engines and heavy cars polluted their cities, causing smog. Catalysers remove the hydrocarbons but increased fuel consumption. Electric cars removed the pollution from the cities but put even more somewhere else. The european car designers wanted to go for lean burn engines instead of catalysers but were sat on by the politburo. So we lose around 4 mpg.

Once we have 'clean' electricity then the time for electric cars will have arrived. I would certainly be happy to drive one. By then the cell technology will have improved so they last longer. Three years seems to be the expected lifetime at present. That's the lease period some makers are quoting.

Peter Scott

[js.b1]

Hydrogen fuel cells are a combination of "work & "do not work".

- Fuel cells work, but only to about 55-60mpg with conventional heavy steel bodies.

- Hydrogen does not work, it can only be compressed, complicating storage & distribution.

Hydrogen is transported as a compressed gas only, in multiple gas cylinders arranged horizontally on a trailer. That it is not easily transported in a liquefied form is a most likely insurmountable barrier to it becoming a national fuel. It is merely a stop gap for California "box ticking".

Hence California has less than a dozen hydrogen stations - it is a white elephant solution.

Ethanol based fuel cell would work fine, Brazil already has the fuel and just needs the fuel cells. We have a VHS Beta Dog Dead-Dog Dream world re electric cars at the moment. I hope people are leasing with end-agreed value so the lease company gets stiffed with the thing at the end, although I suspect they have already stiffed the buyers by either refusing or shunting the risk back on the car maker with a manufacturer-based-lease or repurchase scheme.

Electric cars need lightweight bodies. Yes a steel body is only

250-350kg, but that is just the body and not the sub-frames, glazing, wheels, brakes, suspension. The entire car needs to be engineered to be as light as possible - so requiring in turn lighter suspension, brakes, wheels & tyres. Otherwise you get 50-60mpg with a windscreen price that is simply not viable except for the "Apple Mac crowd". Perhaps they should brand one iCar... Steve Jobs could probably get away with old technology and a huge margin... like he normally does :-)

The fear of West & Japan & Asia is that once you make electric cars in volume, there is nothing to them. China or India could mass-produce composite bodies cheaply, then it is a battery, motor and s.f.a. else which means the entire west is left "playing golf" yet has to pay record-high housing-costs, medical-costs, social-costs, welfare-costs, pension-costs, elderly-costs, end-care-costs and without any economy left to do it with... oh, and record real inflation which compounds each of those costs liability going forward.

Electric cars are a political problem, and a financial problem re breaking existing economic life-cycle & credit-cycles. Dealer networks implode without servicing (car margin is 10%, car parts margin is

100%). After USA Uncle Sam & GM burnt the bond holders the bond buyers are none too happy at funding car makers, nor are pension funds, which leaves liability with gov't which has the only talent of creating bureacracy rather than working companies. Companies supplying car makers will eventually need to retool & invest to make rather different components, but where is the finance to come from? We spent "everything and tomorrow" on housing as that went up so much it earnt more than the people in it! The biggest miss-allocation of capital in history.

[Tim Streater]

Erm, who might they be, then?

[Tim Streater]

But its thermal capacity is low.

[js.b1]

Those buying Prius? :-)

I could be cynical and say a hybrid chelsea tractor to avoid congestion charge, but that is such a tiny number it is statistically irrelevant (unless stuck in front of you :-)

[Man at B&Q]

And your point is?

2) L-Ion technology

There are many batetry technologies, some yet to leave the lab.

"Electric cars require soon after Fuel Cell technology" doesn't make any sense

Tell that to the Germans.

?

MBQ

[js.b1]

As to fuel taxation, well the gov't is pushing internet companies to charge high bandwidth carriers vs "you carry my traffic for free and I will carry your traffic for free". This "charge by the bit" is of course a fundamental change they require, once that infrastructure is in place they have a means to slip "tax by the bit" into the system. Business gets a new revenue stream and soon after government have a new taxation stream. How government mandarins have sat ogling the tax opportunity to fund the truth that their social policy was an exercise in bankrupcy, they keep trying socialism but expect a different result each time - a not uncommon result of political insanity.

A fundamental problem with grid charged electric cars is the infrastructure. I recall roughly 2M homes have oil heating, if they moved to E7 overnight the grid would not be able to sustain it. Equally the same is true of electric cars. I suspect that is part of the plan for windmill technology - creating "local" supply to charge up cars, but I doubt you can get away with that capability without backup generating capacity (or suffer wider voltage change than at present, or even temporary short notice loss of power and smart metering). Even if you have the generating capacity, the grid and that includes LV is not ideal for electric cars - the transmission losses are high and capacity is based on substantial diversity. Could be a neat way of introducing TT and removing the cost burden of PME re "e-car == caravan in some mandarins view".

We have run the course of "technology change, higher productivity from fewer workers, but create more jobs than the birth rate" - this time we have peaked and even USA is persistently lagging job creation behind birth rate. We seem to be trying to maintain the lifestyle of an empire, whilst at the same time removing all the means for achieving it and placing it elsewhere in the world, leaving an ever greater adjustment to come (and being forced as lower living standards & higher debt on future generations).

[tim....]

Is there a summary

tim

[Tim Streater]

Nothing new in this. The co. I used to work for (see

has its own network across Europe, but then pays larger "Internet backbone" companies to carry traffic to the rest of the Internet. This they did in exchange for dosh.

[Tim Streater]

In the case of the Prius, yes, although I have two rellies that have them. But they readily agree that you don't get your money back compared to the extra cost of the car. Which translates to say that more of society's resources go into making them (at least at the moment) compared to an ordinary vehicle.

Not much, if anything, beats hydrocarbon fuels for energy density, that's the thing.