Elec Car, BBC v Tesla

[Donwill]

Interesting little snippet I came across:

The truth will out :-) Don

[DA]

Which truth? That UK (and everyone else) lacks charging stations?    "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

------------------------------------- /\\_/\\ ((@v@)) NIGHT ():::() OWL  VV-VV

[Huge]

Even if there were charging stations every 50 yards, the technology is insufficiently mature. Or, in more, er, aggressive terms, it sucks.

[DA]

The only way any technology improves is through use. No use = sucky technology. But charging is only a part of it. Little noise, high torque, lower fuel (energy) cost, and little to no maintenance of the electrical vehicle are all playing role.

Basically, the entire article is about how stopping for charging slows you down. This concept sounds like a no-brainer to me. Of course you have to plan your route if your range is limited for one reason or another. As one commenter pointed out, you would not cross Pacific Ocean (8 255nm shortest trip) in an A320 (3,300 nm average range), you have to plan your route and stop for refueling twice.

We've been conditioned to expect that a car can take us 500 km away at any moment we wished. That hasn't always been the case and that's going away now. If for no other reason, you at least have to stop and think about paying for all the gas that you'll use on the trip. Thinking a little ahead and considering if your car has enough charge for the trip also seems like a reasonable thing to ask of the driver.

You don't really need charging stations every 50 yards. But for most trips one at home and one at the destination point (and a few along the route for just in case) would make the trip a lot easier. So, yeah, we do lack charging stations, most especially high power fast charging ones. And no one argues that a new, faster charging type of batteries is not needed. It's just that they won't be developed if there is no demand, and EVs create the demand.

------------------------------------- /\\_/\\ ((@v@)) NIGHT ():::() OWL VV-VV

[TheOldFellow]

I've decided to take the petrol lump out on my Mistubishi, it's nearly

11 anyway, and replace it with a 'leccy motor and a few rechargeable PP9s. Then I'm planning to put the petrol lump with a genny into a trailer with a big bit of 10mm T&E to convey the output to the main vehicle.

This way the car will be a lightweight local runabout with, oh, 30 or so miles range, but when I have to visit the aged parents down south (you know, the place, south of Kendal, where it says on the map: "Here be dragons") I can take the charger with me.

This 'leccy car stuff just needs some proper brains behind it!

R.

[tim....]

But at lease these "refuelling" stops add little time. Refuelling an electric car takes a long (or longer) than it did to use up the "fuel" that you gain from each stop increasing the journey time by 200%.

tim

[Tim Streater]

1000 in my case (dizzle C4). Very handy.

So what would you call a reasonable range, then, bearing in mind the need to have some reserve because of that detour, or the extra part of the trip cos you just remembered you need a widget from B&Q?

And what's with all the backslash-quote business in your post?

[Tim Watts]

I saw a test car and little charging station in London the other day, somewhere near Covent Garden in a side street.

The charging station was mains and seemed to carry a 16A Commando, but it

*could* have been 32A. Car was little - about the size of a SMART. Had kids to not get squashed, so no chance for a good look.

[Alan]

In message , Tim Streater wrote

Or the temperature has just fallen to -0C and the "fully charged" battery is only good for half the distance because you are using 1KW/h just to keep warm inside the car.

[Tim Watts]

>>>> The truth will out :-)

But to be fair to a new technology, steam vans and early IC cars sucked rocks through very tiny straws when they were invented.

I expect there were plenty of people who said stuff like: "I don't have to get up 2 hours before I need to travel to heat up my horse" and "where will I get a load of coal or cleanish water on my way to the next distant big town" (when there was a fine infrastructure of inns with stabling facilities).

That not to say I'm putting my bets on battery powered cars specifically - there are other choices, but I do see electric cars coming to maturity at some point, and the road to there can only be achieved by going through the evolutionary period first like most other things.

I used to think bio-diesel was a good idea until it appeared to be the case that it displaces too much food producing land.

I am a firm believer in nuclear power which tends to imply (mostly) that electric cars are a good thing to be developing. As to whether battery technology will get there (at least it is a well researched area thanks to the proliferation of portable electronics) or whether it will be hydrogen fuel cells or even remain with IC engines but powered by alcohol from algae farms all remains to be seen. But someone has to be trying new stuff, and like the first "personal computer" and "mobile phone", the prototypes will expensive and sucky.

Cheers

Tim

[Tim Watts]

Well, the market does have some natural seggration already:

1) Mummy doing a 2-3 mile school run in the town - ideal for a tiny slow vehicle that can be topped up in 20 minutes at the supermarket or soak charged over the weekend from a pool of charging points.

2) The medium ranged commuter - 5-10 miles to a station, charge while parked all day.

3) The long distance regular driver.

The only problem I can see is that 1+2 want to pull a long distance journey once in a while - so that's two car territory, but as lots of families have

2 cars anyway, that still leaves a market.

[John Rumm]

What you need is a car that runs on Rechargable DDDDDDDDD Cells. As they get low you pull into the filling station where your set are ejected and begin recharge, and a fully charged set are installed. In 30 hours time, your ejected set can be rotated into the next car that pulls in.

[andrew]

The GM EV1 used many AA sized cells didn't it? It becomes an ownership issue. who's to say what the charge tretention is of the exchanged set, what if the older battery has a higher internal resistance.

Having said that with no tax and low insurance cost a EV shopping cart would suit my wife in the summer, trouble is capital cost is higher than a cheap petrol engined car for the 10 or so miles she does in a day.

AJH

[Peter Scott]

I heard what I thought was a bright idea the other day. The problem with solar energy sources like wind and light is that they vary a lot and so don't always produce when the energy is needed. PV leccy is produced during the day but needed at night and so on, and many posters have pointed out that we do not have means of storage at sensible cost. If there were lots of electric cars with batteries that charged reasonably quickly, they could act as a huge reservoir of electrical energy.

Lots of scenarios present themselves. As an example I might have a home PV array and a car. During the day the car charges when I'm not using it. During the night, I can use some of the energy to power my home or, if there is a surge in national demand, a modest amount of electricity is bought from each car connected to the system, and then sold back if needed later. Another example. I'm making more PV elec during the day than I need. The system buys it and sells it to cars charging at work for the trip home. The idea thrives on intelligence and variation of generation and use. I can't see that it's beyond our technology now.

Clearly we'll continue to need a base of steady generation but to me an idea like this looks promising.

I agree with Tim about algae. The efficiencies they are already achieving in trials, and the fact that food-growing land is not required, makes this a very promising bio-fuel.

Peter Scott

[tony sayer]

What we really need is to dump the idea of batteries, and work on a more efficient heat engine or fuel cell for the primary power.

Electrical transmission is fine as it stands but the electrical to chemical conversion and back again is not the real long term answer to this problem.

Its not anywhere there as yet but given sufficient time.

Some sort of inductive power transmission from vehicle to car might allow a better system involving batteries as the power to drive the car is from external means, and then the battery can go "off grid" for the bits of road that aren't so equipped.....

[Chris Wilson]

info_at_1-script_dot [e-mail] (DA) wrote in news:bfdcb$4db1b5a3$45499b77 $ [e-mail]:

I haven't I'm strictly a "miles" sort of chap, if god had meant me to use kilometers I'm have been born short, fat, greasy and smelling of garlic.

[The Natural Philosopher]

So, how often you do fill up the car BECAUSE its blowing a gale, or is brilliantly sunny, and never ever fill it up between?

Its complete nonsense that car battery storage could possibly compensate for renewable deficiencies.

And I reckon 1/3rd of the total worlds know lithium reserves would be needed to cover a couple of cold dull still UK weeks in decemeber.

At the end of which, one could go shopping until the wind blew again.

Its actually bollocks. Everything that looks remotely like making Renewable energy better look significantly more likely to mean we could build 100% nuclear powers stations, and top up the cars on cheap rate at night.

A far more reasonable proposition.

The overall efficiency of sunlight to fuel is still crap so its still needs land area in country sized chunk, or sea area in country sized chunks.

The short answer to renewable energy is that here isn't enough free energy in sunlight to actually satisfy anyone's needs, and if you try, you end up with structures of country sizes, that totally modify the environment more than CO2 does.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Sounds like our harry...

[djc]

Horrible little toy things. For people who don't really need a car. And why should my council tax be paying for these charging points, and I never got an answer from the council about who pays for the electricity. (There is a charging point down the end of the road, I have yet to see it used)

[ARWadsworth]

Anyone with the right key and a little knowledge can use a lampost to DIY a charging station.